The Lagoon Read online

  The man who can teach is superior to a man who cannot because he understands. This is a very natural view for someone who spent his life doing just that. He can also invent things and, Aristotle continues, inventors are admirable. But – and you can see where this is going – some inventors are more admirable than others. Inventors that produce useful things are inferior to those who produce inventions ‘directed to entertainment’. This sounds perverse, but he simply means that the production of pure knowledge is better than the production of useful knowledge. Here, as throughout this argument, he extends invidious distinctions in the forms of understanding to the men who have them. And so he falls into the frank snobbery – extinct now, but extant within our lifetimes – of the pure scientist towards the engineer and the engineer towards the gardener. It is an attitude that sits ill with our own egalitarian instincts, but I would ask the irritated reader to recall that Aristotle is launching a new kind of philosophy: one that is neither concerned with the search for absolute values nor predicated on a perfect world beyond the senses. His philosophy will embrace dirt, blood, flesh, growth, copulation, reproduction, death and decay – the daily experience of the farmer and the fishmonger. He has to persuade his listeners, the elite of a highly stratified society, that the knowledge that comes from contemplating such things is of a high order and that those who pursue it are too.

  XVII

  ARISTOTLE’S SCIENTIFIC METHOD is all of a piece with his epistemology. We have to begin, he says, with the phainomena –whence comes our ‘phenomena’, but perhaps the best translation is ‘appearances’, for he means by this not only what he sees with his own eyes, but also what other people have seen, and their opinions about it. He favours reports from ‘wise’ and ‘reputable’ people. He’s conscious that one man can’t see everything; sometimes you just have to trust what other people tell you (the Greeks inherited huge astronomical catalogues from Babylon and Egypt).

  Whatever its source, such data generally consist of many observations of a broad class of objects, say, animals – zōia. Once assembled, it has to be ordered into smaller classes: birds, fish, animals with horns, animals without blood and so on. Aristotle’s appetite for data is insatiable and his zeal for ordering it tireless. He hoovers up observations about animals, plants, rocks, winds, geographies, cities, constitutions, personalities, plays, poems – the list is partial – processes them, and returns them ordered now one way, now another way, in book after book. For all that, he thinks that this initial inductive phase of research isn’t really science, but just the empirical rock upon which scientific reasoning stands.

  Aristotle assembles his animal data in Historia animalium. A random passage gives a sense of the style:

  Some animals are live bearing, some egg laying, some larva bearing. Live-bearing animals include humans, horses, seals and any other animals with fur; and, among the water-animals, cetaceans – such as dolphins – and the so-called ‘selachians’. Some [blooded water animals], e.g. dolphins and whales, do not have gills but do have blowholes. Dolphins’ blowholes are located on the back, whales’ on the brow. Animals with visible gills include selachians such as smooth dogfish and rays.

  The world that Aristotle knew was bound by the Straits of Gibraltar to the west, the Oxus to the east, the Libyan desert to the south and the Eurasian plains to the north. Within it lived more than 500 different kinds of animal, or at least that is about how many he names. Everything about them interests him. He speaks of the reproduction of lice, the mating habits of herons, the sexual incontinence of girls, the stomachs of snails, the sensitivity of sponges, the flippers of seals, the sounds of cicadas, the destructiveness of starfish, the dumbness of the deaf, the flatulence of elephants and the structure of the human heart; his book contains 130,000 words and around 9,000 empirical claims.

  The animal world is a vast subject and Aristotle started from scratch. Some medical writings aside, there is no evidence that anyone wrote a zoological treatise before he did. So where did he get all these facts from? The answer appears to be: from just about anywhere that he could.

  Some of them came from books. Aristotle is coy about his sources, but it’s possible to identify a few of them from glancing allusions. Given the stated scientific nature of his enterprise, a few of the works that he does name are rather odd. Homer crops up occasionally; and he quotes a verse by Aeschylus on the plumage of hoopoes – but that’s the Reader at work. The surprise is what is missing. Not that much anatomy seems to come from the Hippocratic treatises, and yet Aristotle’s father was a doctor. Here one suspects him of failing to give his predecessors credit. Plato is never cited as a source of factual information – no loss there – though his speculations pervade Aristotle’s theory. The physiologoi contribute few facts; they, too, are mostly sparring partners in theory. We learn, Aristotle once said, ‘by pressing on those in front, and not waiting for those behind’.

  There is a suspicion that some of Aristotle’s data on mammalian anatomy came from hieroscopic texts – books about prophecy by entrails. He pays an unreasonable amount of attention to the gall bladder, an otherwise insignificant organ that loomed large in the undergrowth of prophetic belief. He’s an expert on the astragalus, a minor foot bone used as a die by gamblers and prophets. If Aristotle did indeed get some of his data from sources like this, then he kept the anatomy but ditched the prophecies. Plato did the reverse.

  A prophetic manual also probably supplied quite a bit of ethology. ‘This is where diviners get their terminology of “alignment” and “non-alignment”: animals at war are “non-aligned” while those at peace count as “aligned”.’ He goes on to describe how eagles fight vultures (and snakes, and nuthatches and herons); how hunting wasps and geckos fight spiders; how snakes fight weasels; how wrens fight owls and so on for pages in a war of nature that is almost Darwinian in its violence. There’s a lot of low-quality data here. That wrens, larks, woodpeckers and nuthatches feed on the eggs of other birds would come as a surprise to ornithologists. And if, in Aristotle’s day, the ass was at war with the lizard because ‘the lizard sleeps in his manger and gets up his nostrils and so stops him eating’, then modern asses can rest easy for modern lizards appear to have given up this nasty habit.

  Should he have included such material? Perhaps not. Aristotle’s sense of empirical reality is as firm as any modern scientist’s, and soothsayers’ manuals seem unlikely sources of facts. But before we censure him we should pause and consider the difficulties that he faced. Popular culture was steeped in myth; the medical schools knew little human anatomy; country folk were a rich mine of misinformation about the animals that they daily saw. As he constructed the empirical foundation of his science he must have gleaned, and silently suppressed, vast amounts of dubious data.

  There is, in his books, only a hint of the thickets of fable and myth that he hacked through. He rejects, or at the very least doubts, tales – the word he uses is mythoi – about cranes that carry stones for ballast and that, when vomited, can transmute ordinary matter into gold; lionesses that eject their wombs when giving birth; Ligyans (from Western Greece) who have only seven pairs of ribs; and heads that continue to talk after having been severed from their bodies. In the third century AD, Aelian would fill books with this sort of stuff.

  The way in which Aristotle deals with the last of these questions – the talking heads – is instructive. Many people, he says, believe that a struck-off head can talk, and they cite Homer in support. Also, he says, there is an apparently credible description of just such a case. In Caria (Anatolia) a priest belonging to the cult of Zeus Hoplosmios was decapitated. The grounded head named its murderer as one Cerides. A Cerides was accordingly found and put on trial. Aristotle does not comment on the fate of the man, nor even on the possible miscarriage of justice, but he dismisses the story on the grounds that: (i) when barbarians chop people’s heads off the heads don’t speak; (ii) when animals get their heads chopped off, their heads don’t make any sounds, and given that,
why should human heads be able to do so?; (iii) speech requires breath from the lungs via the windpipe, which it can hardly supply to a severed head. All of this is admirably sane. We should never take such sanity for granted.

  XVIII

  SEVERED HEADS MAY not vocalize, but fishes certainly do. In a section devoted to animal sounds Aristotle says that the kokkis and the lyra (both gurnards) make a kind of grunting sound, while the khalkeus (John Dory) makes a kind of piping sound. He then goes on to explain that since fish don’t have lungs, these sounds aren’t a ‘voice’ of the sort that birds or mammals have; rather the sound is caused by the movement of some internal parts that ‘have air or wind inside them’.*

  KHALKEUS – JOHN DORY – ZEUS FABER

  Historia animalium is filled with fishy facts, some of them rather recondite. Athenaeus of Naucratis, who wrote a guide to civilized dinner-table conversation circa AD 300, a surprising amount of which apparently revolved around fish, waxed sarcastic:

  But frankly, I’m amazed at Aristotle. Just when did he learn it all? And from whom? Some Proteus or Nereus who’d come up from the depths? What fish do, how they sleep, how they spend their time – that’s the sort of stuff he’s written about. All so he can amaze the idiots, as the comic poet said!

  There was nothing to marvel at: Aristotle’s Nereus was simply some fisherman. Aristotle himself doesn’t scorn popular wisdom. He often says that we should begin investigations by considering what most people think, for they are often right. The problem is that people are prone to telling tall tales. Some fishermen say that fish fertilize their eggs by eating sperm. That can’t be right, says Aristotle, since it doesn’t fit with their anatomy (any sperm they ate would just get digested); they’re just describing some courtship behaviour. He doesn’t say what fish do this, but my friend David Koutsogiannopoulos, who knows everything about Greek fishes, tells me it must be a wrasse, probably Symphodus ocellatus, and sent me a picture to prove it.

  Fishermen’s tales. Here are three that I heard from one who wanted to amaze me. First, that the monk seal that lives at the entrance to the Lagoon tracks the local fishermen and then plunders the fish from their nets. Second, that the seagulls of Vrachonisida Kalloni, a local islet, feed their chicks with olives instead of fish. Third, that the crows of Apothika drop walnuts in front of passing cars in the hope that they, the nuts, will be crushed beneath their wheels. Should the car miss, the crows retrieve their nuts and try again.

  Amazed I duly was and said so. But, as Aristotle says, the problem is that fishermen don’t really observe nature carefully, since they don’t seek knowledge for its own sake. Popular lore may be a good place to start, but investigation of the natural world requires expertise, not only a general kind of expertise of the sort that enables us to evaluate rational arguments, but also expertise specific to a given subject. Experts, he says, will spot things easily missed by other people – for example, the shrivelled spermducts of out-of-season dogfish. And, reports of tool-use in New Caledonian crows notwithstanding, I’d like to hear from a behavioural ecologist with a season in the field behind her before I believe that the crows of Apothika really are that smart. Aristotle’s scepticism is the first stirring of scientific authority – the authority that has grown rampant in our day. He would surely marvel to see how in our day there is no topic, however arcane, that doesn’t have its own caste of experts, authorized by PhDs and university posts, and primed with statistics, ready to trump popular opinion. He would relish it.

  XIX

  ARISTOTLE’S COYNESS ABOUT his sources extends to his own research. He never says, ‘I have seen this – that’s why it’s true,’ so it’s hard to know which of his myriad facts on, say, reproductive behaviour come from personal observation. Yet, reading between the lines, it’s clear that he did much empirical research. This, for example, has the stamp of personal authority:

  The appearance of the chameleon’s body is, in general, like that of a lizard, though its ribs descend and converge towards the underbelly like that of a fish: its spine also sticks upwards like a fish’s. Its face is very like a ‘pig-ape’s’, but its tail is very long, descends to a point and is usually coiled up like a leather strap. It stands higher off the ground than a lizard but its legs are bent like a lizard’s. Each foot is divided into two parts whose relative position (thesis) resembles the opposition (antithesis) of thumbs in humans to the rest of the hand. Each part [foot] immediately divides into toe-like structures: the inside of the front feet is divided into three; the outside into two while the inside of the back feet is divided into two and the outside three. The feet have claws, as on a bird of prey. The whole body is rough, like a crocodile’s. The eyes, very large and round, are covered in skin like the rest of the body and located in a cavity: in the centre is a small hole through which it sees and which is never covered by skin. Instead, the chameleon twists its eyes round, changes its line of sight in any direction and views whatever it wishes. Its change in colour occurs when puffed up, when its colour is actually black, not unlike a crocodile, or green like a lizard with black spots like a leopard. The same change occurs throughout the body including the eyes and tail. In movement the chameleon is dreadfully sluggish, like a tortoise. And when it is dying it turns green, keeping this colour after death. The oesophagus and windpipe are located as in a lizard, with no flesh anywhere except near the head and jaws and around the very base of the tail. Blood is located only round the heart, the eyes, the spot just above the heart, and, fanning out from them, the veins: the amount of blood in these is minuscule. The brain is linked to the eyes but located a little above them. In the eyes, after the external skin is drawn aside, something like a thin glinting copper ring is visible. Extending through most of its body, more than in other animals, are many strong membranes. Even after it has been cut open completely, the chameleon continues to breathe for a long time and a tiny motion remains around the heart. Though it is in the area of the ribs that the greatest contraction is visible, this occurs also in other parts of the body. There is no sign of a spleen. It hibernates, like a lizard.

  It seems that he dissected, indeed vivisected, the chameleon, that beautiful and amiable creature that still lives in the olive groves of Samos.

  XX

  IN HIS ZOOLOGICAL WORKS Aristotle mentions the following mammals: ailouros (cat), alōpēx (fox), arktos (bear), aspalax (Mediterranean mole), arouraios mys (field mouse), bous/tauros (oxen), dasypous/lagos (hare), ekhinos (hedgehog), elaphos/prox (deer), eleios (dormouse), enydris (otter), galē (beech marten), ginnos (ginny), hinnos (hinny), hippos (horse), hys (pig), hystrix (porcupine), iktis (weasel), kapros (boar), kastōr (beaver), kyōn (dog), leōn (Asian lion), lykos (wolf), lynx (lynx), mys (mouse), mygalē (water shrew), nykteris (bat), oïs/krios/probaton (sheep), onos (ass), oreus (mule), phōkē (seal), thōs (jackal), tragos/aïx/khimera (goat).

  All of these species are, or were, native to Greece and Asia Minor, so it is natural that he should do so. More surprisingly, the number of species that he mentions, but that are native to the Nile delta, the Libyan desert and the plains of Central Asia, is not much smaller: alōpēx (here the Egyptian fruit bat), boubalis (hartebeest), bonassos (European bison), dorkas (gazelle), elephas (elephant), hyaina/trokhos/glanos (striped hyena), hippelaphos (nilgai), hippos-potamios (hippopotamus), ichneumōn (mongoose), kēbos (monkey), kynokephalos (baboon), onos agrios/hēmionos (wild ass or onager), onos Indikos (Indian rhinoceros), oryx (oryx), panthēr/pardalis (leopard), pardion/hippardion (giraffe?), pithēkos (barbary ape), kamēlos Arabia (dromedary), kamēlos Baktrianē (Bactrian camel) – to which we can add creatures such as the ibis (sacred ibis), strouthos Libykos (ostrich), krokodeilos potamios (crocodile) and various African snakes. ‘Always something new from Libya’, says Aristotle – and, to judge by this list, the East too.

  Where does Aristotle’s exotic zoology come from? He was hardly ever out of sight of the Aegean Sea, so he could not have collected it himself. The Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder gav
e an answer. As so often with Pliny’s assertions, it has a fantastical air. He said that Alexander the Great supplied it.

  King Alexander the Great, inflamed with a desire for discovering the natures of animals, entrusted this task to Aristotle, a man outstanding in every department of knowledge. Several thousand men in the whole region of Asia and Greece were put under his command – all those who made their living from hunting, bird catching and fishing as well as those who had in their care animal collections, herds of cattle, beehives, fish-ponds, aviaries. The idea was that nothing anywhere in the world might be overlooked by him. It was as a result of his thorough questioning of these men that he composed some fifty famous and distinguished volumes about animals.

  In 343, while still in Lesbos, Aristotle was summoned to the Macedonian court. He had reason enough to go. Macedon was, after all, home, and it was no longer the backwater that he had left behind nearly a quarter of a century previously. Amyntas was long dead; Philip II had succeeded to the Macedonian throne, had raised an army and was flexing his military muscles. In Athens, Demosthenes warned the citizenry, in ever more apocalyptic tones, of the danger brewing on their doorstep. They ignored him – to their cost.

  Philip wanted a tutor for his son: someone to rub the rough edges off the boy and give him the philosophical education befitting a prince. Did Aristotle make the boy into the man he would become? Or did he try to temper his natural powers? We long to know, but do not. For Aristotle’s teenage pupil was not just any spoilt princeling, but Alexander himself, future King of the oikoumenē, the Known World.