The Lagoon Page 39
The passage comes from On Generation & Corruption. The argumentative types are the Platonists. Their obsessions – intangible Forms, numerology and geometry – caused them to deny the evidence of their eyes. They were blind to the structure of the world, this world. The passage is a prelude to the Invitation to Biology. For, when Aristotle said that we must attend to even the humblest creatures since there are gods there too, he was not only urging some students to pick up their cuttlefish, he was arguing, as he would until the end, with Plato’s shade. He was doing what every scientist who opens a new domain of inquiry must do: defend it before his peers. Of the whole, vast natural world, the Academy deemed only the stars worthy of study. But, and this is Aristotle’s point, we do not live among the stars; we live here, on Earth.
Nor do we live just anywhere on Earth. If D’Arcy Thompson was right, as I believe he was, then this is what Lesbos and the lagoon at Pyrrha gave to Aristotle: a place, calm and lovely, where he could be among natural things. Lesbos was for him what Chimborazo was for Humboldt, the Malay archipelago for Wallace, the Amazon for Bates and a Berkshire wood for Hamilton. It was what the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, the bleak pampas of Patagonia, the black volcanic rocks of the Galapagos and a field in Kent were for Darwin. Biologists often have such places. They need them, for ideas do not come from nothing, they come from nature herself.
CXIV
WHEN ARISTOTLE SPEAKS of Kalloni, it is always the euripos Pyrrhaiēn – the strait of the Lagoon – of which he speaks. It is through the euripos that the fishes funnel on their annual migrations. It is there that the scallops wax and wane and there that the bottom boils with starfish. I wanted to see it for myself.
The euripos is formed by a submerged reef that juts out from the northwest shore. Seagulls, fossicking among its hidden rocks, appear to be walking on water. Aegean currents are feeble, but the reef constricts the entrance to a gullet so that, at tide’s change, the whole body of water attempts to traverse it in glissading cascades.
An oyster diver said he’d take us. We made a date for the waning moon, calculated for the slack, loaded the boat at Apothika and suited up en route. As we approached the dive site, a tuna leapt high and clear, blue against blue against blue. A negative buoyancy entry put us above a rocky bottom at seven metres. Pink and brown sponges squatted between eelgrass beds. Silver and black sea bream finned against the current. David K., who has an enthusiasm for sea slugs, disappeared to look for them. He later reported the aeolids Cratena peregrina (purple cerata, orange rhinophores) and Caloria elegans (black-tipped cerata against a white body) and the dorid Discodorus atromaculata (a Belgian chocolate, squashed and leaking marzipan).
Towards the drop-off, shoals of orange-pink Anthias and electric-blue juvenile Chromis fluttered between stands of gorgonians. These fragile zoophytes are usually found below thirty metres, but here, as on the undersea cliffs of Sulawesi, they live in the shallows. Their branches – some golden, others white – ramified in a curious reticular geometry. Clusters of translucent Clavelina ascidians draped from them like crystals on a chandelier. From beneath a ledge, a dusky grouper flashed away.
At ten metres sponges, hovering between form and formlessness, crowded upon each other. One looked like a weird desert succulent, another like a mutant hand, another resembled an engorged ear stuck unaccountably to a rock. Coralline algae draped from boulders in stalactites. An octopus prinked by.
The tidal currents were evidently responsible for these riches. Twice a day their nutrient and plankton-rich waters sweep through the euripos fuelling an intensity of life that I have not seen elsewhere in the Aegean. And then, disorientingly, fifteen metres down, I came across a coral wall. It was as though I had unwittingly swum through Suez to the coral gardens of the Red Sea. Looking closer, I saw that my coral reef was in fact an enormous boulder that had been colonized by a solitary coral, Parazoanthus axinellae, but so densely that the illusion of a tropical reef was complete. Their golden cups, ringed with tentacles, radiated like a thousand small suns.
PARAZOANTHUS AXINELLAE. STRAIT OF KOLPOS KALLONI, LESBOS, AUGUST 2012
‘It has been said’, wrote Borges, ‘that all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists.’ Philosophers may wince at the opposition, but I suspect it to be literally true. Plato invites us to the world of abstractions, Aristotle to the world of tangible things. You begin with particulars, a box of seashells, say; gather them together and rearrange them endlessly in order to apprehend their logic and order. This apprehension, Aristotle says, is the gift of reason and the beginning of science. It is also where true beauty lies. This was inarticulately obvious to me when I was ten.
As we age we become trapped by our habits of mind, by what we already know, as surely as fish are in the sea. Science, the glittering medium in which we swim, dictates what we see. That is how it should be and inescapably is, for no one sees the world unmediated by theory and expectation. Yet how we long to see it afresh. ‘For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul [oblivious] to the things that are most evident of all’ – Metaphysics 993b10. Aristotle, armed with the method that he discovered, that precarious combination of theory tempered by experience that is the essence of science, turned to a part of the world that no one had ever looked at before, described it, explained it and, as Thompson said, won for it a place in Philosophy. We can envy him for have doing so. Swept along in the seething currents of scientific progress we struggle to emulate him. But Aristotle shows us what we must do.
And why. When I found the kēryx it was lodged between two boulders. Its foot, as mottled as a leopard’s pelt, spilled from beneath its shell. Its tentacles were zebra striped. Never before had I seen one alive. The thick shell was covered with a filigree of bryozoans and a patchwork of coralline algae; its apex was grey and worn. It must have been very old. The great snail’s proboscis was stuck into a black sea urchin whose guts it was slowly rasping away. The sea urchin’s spines waved a last, futile defence, but its systems were failing fast. This is the world that Aristotle gave us: the vividly perceptible world of living things, whole and at home; the world that he enjoins us to love and understand. Aristotle wrote thousands of sentences, but one, the first of his Metaphysics, defines him: ‘All men, by nature, desire to know.’ Not all forms of knowledge, however, are equal – the best is the pure and disinterested search for the causes of the things. And, he has no doubt, searching for them is the best way to spend a life. It is a claim for the beauty and worth of science.
GLAUX – LITTLE OWL – ATHENE NOCTUA ACROPOLIS, ATHENS, 2013
GLOSSARIES
I. TECHNICAL GLOSSARY
aithēr ether
anō above
antithesis opposite position (anatomy)
analogon analogue
aphrodisiazomenai highly sexed (women)
aphros foam
apodeixis demonstration
aristeros left
arkhē origin/principle
atomon eidos indivisible form
automata spontaneous/self-moving things
balanos glans
basileia queen
basileus king
bios lifestyle
delphys uterine body
Dēmiourgos Creator
dexios right
diaphora/diaphorai difference/pl. (in some feature)
dynamis potentiality, potency, power
eikōs mythos/eikotes mythoi likely or plausible story
ekhinos omasum/hedgehog/sea urchin/wide-mouthed jar
eidos/eidē form/pl.
emprosthen before
entelekheia actuality
epagōgē induction
epamphoterizein to dualize
epistēmē knowledge
euripos strait
geēron earth
genos/genē kind/pl.
gēras old age
gēs entera guts of the earth
gonē semen
hippomanein they are ‘stallion-mad�
��/nymphomaniacs
historia tēs physeōs study of nature
historiai peri tōn zōiōn Historia animalium [Enquiries into Animals]
holon whole
hylē matter
hystera uterus/female reproductive organs
katamēnia menses
katō below
kekryphalos reticulum
keratia uterine horns
khelidonias swallow wind
khōrion amniotic sac
kinēsis/kinēseis movement/pl.
kotylēdones cotyledons/caruncles
limnothalassa lagoon, lit. lake sea
logos definition, essence
lysis relapse/mutation
mathematikē mathematical science
megalē koilia rumen
metabolē transformation
mētra cervix
mixis compound
myes muscles
mythos story
mytis cephalopod ‘heart’ (i.e. its digestive gland)
neuron/neura sinew/pl.
nous reason
oikoumenē known world
onta things
opisthen behind
organon instrument/tool/organ
ornithiai anemoi bird winds
ousia/ousiai substance, entity/pl.
pepeiramenoi having tried or tested something
peri physeōs on nature
phainomena appearances
phantasia mental representation
phantasma/phantasmata mental image/pl.
physis nature
physikē epistēmē natural science
physikos one who understands nature
physiologos/physiologoi one who studies nature/pl.
pneuma pneuma
polis city state
politikē epistēmē political science
protōn stoicheion first element
psychē soul
sarx flesh (i.e. muscles)
sōma body
sperma seed
stoma mouth
stomakhos oesophagus
symmetria proportion
symphyton pneuma connate breath
syngennis kindred
synthesis mixture, agglomeration of parts
ta aphrodisia sexual intercourse
technika skilled activities
telos end
theologikē theology
theos god
thesis position (anatomy)
to agathon the good
to hou heneka that for the sake of which
trophē nutrition/way of life
tōn zōiōn livelihood
II. ANIMAL KINDS MENTIONED
Considering this mass of valuable information, one must particularly regret that the author [Aristotle] did not suspect that the nomenclature of his time might become opaque, and that he therefore took no precautions to ensure that the species he discusses are recognizable. This is the general defect of the ancient naturalists; one is almost obliged to guess the identities behind the names they used; the often changing tradition induces error; thus it is by arduous deduction, and bringing together features scattered among authors, that one gets a positive result for some species; but we are condemned to remain ignorant of the majority of them.
Georges Cuvier and Achille Valenciennes,
Histoire naturelle des poissons (1828–49)
The task of identifying Aristotle’s animals started around 1256 when Albert Magnus began to assemble his De animalibus based, in part, on Historia animalium. Zoologically minded classicists and classically minded zoologists have been at it ever since. They have had mixed success. Aristotle’s descriptions of his animals are often so thin as to defy identification. However, other classical texts using the same or similar names provide clues, as do the vernacular names used by modern Aegean and Adriatic fishermen and hunters. Biogeography helps too. Or one can simply go to the Lagoon to see what’s there. One scholar who did so plausibly identified Aristotle’s kōbios as any of three species of goby and his phykis as the blenny, Parablennius sanguinolentus.*
Although generations of scholars have laboured to identify Aristotle’s animals, there is no recent, comprehensive list of them. For this reason I tabulate the 230-odd Aristotelian animal kinds mentioned in this book, along with my best guess as to what they are. Scholars have varied in their willingness to pin Aristotelian kinds down to Linnaean species. Some are enthusiastic while others think that it can hardly be done at all. I have taken the middle road. After all, when Aristotle says hippos, he must mean Equus caballus, that is, a horse – at least when he doesn’t mean the hippos crab or the hippos woodpecker. When, however, he says kephalos we are less sure. He certainly means a grey mullet since that’s what they’re still called in Greece today, but he could mean any or all of Mullus cephalus (flathead grey mullet), Chelon labrosus (thicklip grey mullet), Oedalechilus labeo (boxlip mullet), Liza saliens (leaping mullet), Liza aurata (golden grey mullet) or Liza ramada (thinlip grey mullet), all of which are found in Greek waters and are notoriously hard to tell apart.* Moreover, Aristotle mentions at least four different fishes that are plausibly grey mullets, so it’s likely that he, and fishermen, distinguished at least some of the six modern nominal species. But which of Aristotle’s grey mullets correspond to ours must probably always remain a mystery.
There is also a trap for the unwary. Linnaeus and other early taxonomists often gave their European species classical names on the basis of ancient descriptions. Sometimes they were right to do so. Linnaeus’ Chamaeleo chamaeleon chamaeleon – the European chameleon – is certainly Aristotle’s chamaileōn since it’s the only lizard that answers to his detailed description.* Sometimes, however, they were on much less certain ground. Linnaeus thought that Aristotle’s rhinobatos was the guitarshark so he called the guitarshark Rhinobatos rhinobatos; and since both the fish and what Aristotle says about it are interesting, it’s nice to think that that is what it actually is, but we can’t be sure since he doesn’t say much.
My list is based on several editions of Historia animalium and The Parts of Animals* as well as monographs on ancient animals.* I have tried to make ambiguity plain. In general, large mammals can be identified to modern species; birds to genus or not at all (Historia animalium contains a swathe of strange, possibly Egyptian or Babylonian, bird names); fish to species, genus or family depending on their prominence, uniqueness and depth of description; insects mostly to family or order; marine invertebrates anywhere from species to phylum. For a few of Aristotle’s creatures, however, we can say little more than that they are probably animals and that they live in the sea.
English name Aristotle’s name Linnaean name
ANIMALS ZŌIA METAZOA
BLOODED ANIMALS ENHAIMA VERTEBRATA
man (humans) anthrōpos Homo sapiens
LIVE-BEARING ZŌOTOKA MAMMALIA
TETRAPODS TETRAPODA (MOST)
ass, Asian wild (onager) onos agrios Equus hemionus
ass, Asian wild (onager)? hēmionos* Equus hemionus?
ass, domestic (donkey) onos Equus africanus asinus
baboon, hamadryas kynokephalos Papio hamadryas
bear, Eurasian brown arktos Ursus arctos arctos
beaver, Eurasian kastōr Castor fiber
bison, European bonassos Bison bonasus
camel, Arabian (dromedary) kamēlos Arabia Camelus dromedarius
camel, Bactrian kamēlos Baktrianē Camelus bactrianus
cat ailouros Felis silvestrus cattus
cattle bous Bos primigenius
cattle, wild tauros Bos primigenius (auroch)
deer, red? elaphos Cervus elephas?
deer, roe prox Capreolus capreolus
dog kyōn Canis lupus familiaris
dog, Molossian kyōn en tēi Molottiāi Canis lupus familiaris (mastiff)
dog, Laconian kyōn Lakōnikos Canis lupus familiaris (hound)
dog, Indian kyōn Indikos Canis lupus familiaris (Indian pariah dog?)
dormouse eleios Gliridae
elephant, Asian* elephas Elaphas maximus
fox alōpēx Vulpes vulpes
gazelle, dorcas dorkas Gazella dorcas
unknown bovid pardion Bovidae
giraffe? hippardion Giraffa camelopardis?
goat, ram tragos Capra aegagrus
goat, ram khimaira Capra aegagrus
goat, ewe Aïx Capra aegagrus
hare, European dasypous Lepus europaeus
hare, European lagōs Lepus europaeus
hartebeest boubalis Alcelaphus buselaphus
hedgehog, northern ekhinos Erinaceus roumanicus
hippopotamus hippos potamios Hippopotamus amphibius
horse hippos Equus caballus
hyena, striped* hyaina Hyaena hyaena
hyena, striped glanos Hyaena hyaena
hyena, striped trokhos Hyaena hyaena
jackal, golden? thōs* Canis aureus?
jerboa dipous* Dipodidae
leopard pardalos Panthera pardus
lion, Asian leōn Panthera leo persica
lynx, Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx
macaque, Barbary pithēkos Macaca sylvanus
macaque, Rhesus?* kēbos Macaca mulatta?
mole, Mediterranean* aspalax Talpa caeca
mongoose, Egyptian ikhneumōn Herpestes ichneumon
mouse mys Mus sp.
mouse, field arouraios mys Apodemus sp.
mouse, spiny ekhinos Acomys sp.
mule oreus Equus africanus asinus (m) × Equus caballus (f)
mule hēmionos Equus africanus asinus (m) × Equus caballus (f)
mule (hinny) ginnos Equus caballus (m) × Equus africanus asinus (f)
nilgai hippelaphos Boselaphus tragocamelus
oryx oryx Oryx sp.
otter enhydris Lutra lutra
pig hys Sus scrofa domesticus
porcupine, crested hystrix Hystrix cristata
rhinoceros, Indian* onos Indikos Rhinoceros unicornis
seal, monk phōkē Monachus monachus