The Lagoon Page 6
It is one of the most remarkable conjunctions in history: one of history’s greatest thinkers has, for a few years, the whip hand over one of her greatest military leaders – and then unleashes him on the world. (Pierre-Simon Laplace merely examined Napoleon for admission to the École Militaire.) Writing four centuries later, Plutarch sets the scene:
For their study and leisure Philip gave them the Nymphaion at Mieza: even today people point out to you the stone seats and shaded walks of Aristotle. It is likely that Alexander did not study just ethics and politics here but also those secret and more profound teachings (those so-called private lectures and special mysteries were not published or shared with the masses).
Those same shady walks and stone seats can still be seen.
In 336 Philip was murdered. Alexander became king. He began by reducing Thebes, second among Greece’s cities, to rubble. In a letter Aristotle counsels him to be a leader to the Greeks and to look after them as if they were ‘friends or relatives’, but Alexander sold Thebes’ citizens into slavery. He later crucified all of Gaza’s men. That was a bit more Aristotelian: in the same letter he tells Alexander to be a despot to barbarians and to ‘treat them as if they were beasts or plants’. As the young general rampaged across the known world, he carried with him a copy of the Iliad in Aristotle’s edition. In 335 Aristotle, his work done, returned to Athens, now under Macedonian hegemony, where he established the Lyceum. It is also where, if Pliny is to be believed, he dissected Alexander’s zoological largesse.
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PLINY’S STORY IS charming. Alexander, no mere kohl-eyed sensualist or megalomaniacal conqueror, loves plants and animals too, and, recalling his old tutor’s interests, affectionately lays the biological booty of an empire at his feet. Writing a century or two later, Athenaeus says that Alexander gave Aristotle 800 talents for his research, and so turns the King into a Macedonian National Science Foundation. There is a whiff of romance about these tales. Eight hundred talents was several times Macedon’s annual GDP; and in his biological works Aristotle says nothing about subsidies, a zoo nor even Alexander himself.
It is also clear that Aristotle got some of his exotic zoology from travel books. Ctesias of Cnidus, a fifth-century Greek physician to the Persian court, wrote several books about Persia and India that Aristotle felt he could neither ignore nor trust.
None of these kinds [genē] of animals [live-bearing tetrapods, i.e. mammals] has a double row of teeth. Well, there is one, if Ctesias is to be believed. He claims that a beast that the Indians call the martikhōras has a triple row of teeth, resembles a lion in size, is just as shaggy and has the same sort of feet. It has a face and ears like a man’s, blue eyes, vermilion colouring and a tail like a scorpion’s. It has a sting in the tail, shoots spines like arrows, and has a voice halfway between a shepherd’s flute and a trumpet. It runs as fast as a deer, is savage and a man-eater.
Behind the thicket of fable that is Ctesias’ martikhōras lurks a tiger (the Persian is martijaqāra, literally ‘man-eater’). Elsewhere, ‘What Ctesias has written about the elephant’s sperm [that it is as hard as amber] is false.’ ‘And in India, so Ctesias claims, there are no wild or tame pigs, but the bloodless and scaly animals are all large.’ This is a reference to Ctesias’ ‘Indian worm’ that lives in trees and devours domestic animals and is obviously a large python.
The wretched Ctesias is also the source of one of the classic problems in Aristotelian zoology. Aristotle refers to two kinds of animals that have a single horn. One, the onos Indikos (literally ‘Indian ass’), has a single hoof (i.e. is a Perissodactyl, specifically, a horse), the other, the oryx, has a cloven hoof (i.e. is an Artiodactyl, probably an antelope). He’s cautious about the onos Indikos and rightly so. Since at least the nineteenth century, scholars have supposed that it is a garbled description of the Indian rhinoceros, and that the oryx is the Arabian oryx glimpsed side on and far away. But of course that’s far too late: sceptical though he was, Aristotle could not stop unicorns creeping into his books.
If Aristotle always suspects Ctesias of making things up, he’s much more inclined to believe Herodotus (fl. 450 BC), borrowing from him often and with confidence. After all, Herodotus himself claimed he preferred to believe things that he’d seen for himself. Historia animalium is full of unattributed Herodotean facts: that the menopausal priestesses of Caria (Anatolia) grow beards; that camels fight horses; that in all of Europe lions are only found between the rivers Acheloos and Nestos (Macedonia); that in autumn cranes migrate from Scythia (Central Asia) to the marshlands south of Egypt where the Nile has its source; that Egyptian animals are larger than their Greek congeners, and so on. Sometimes, when the facts strike Aristotle as dubious, he will preface them with ‘there are said to be’, as in ‘there are said to be certain flying serpents in Ethiopia’. Flying serpents may strike us as fantastical, but Herodotus claims to have seen their skeletons in Arabia, reports their vicious mating rituals and adds that each year they invade Egypt only to be beaten back by flocks of sacred ibises. Given this, Aristotle’s tentative comment is admirably restrained. He simply ignores Herodotus’ talk of gold-digging ants and griffins and refutes, without naming him, his belief that each hind leg of a camel has four knees. Indeed the only time that Aristotle names the historian – and you can hear the exasperation – is when he catches him saying something truly absurd: ‘Herodotus is wrong when he says that the Ethiopians ejaculate black sperm.’
Since Ctesias and Herodotus account for only a small part of what Aristotle knew about Asia’s and Africa’s fauna, he must have raided the reports of other travellers as well. But the most puzzling aspect of his exotic zoology is how he manages to combine exact knowledge with profound ignorance. For example, Aristotle often refers to the elephant. Now he could have learnt something of the elephant’s general appearance and habits – that it is big, has a trunk, tusks – from someone like Ctesias. But how did he know that the elephant does not have a gall bladder, that its liver is about four times the size of an ox’s, that its spleen is rather less, and that its internal testicles are lodged near its kidneys?
Anatomical data like this are hardly the stuff of fourth-century travelogues. They are the sorts of surprising facts that have kept the tale of Alexander’s largesse alive. Perhaps, then, Alexander captured one of Darius III’s war elephants when he defeated the Persians in 331 at Gaugamela and dispatched it to Athens, a journey of about two thousand kilometres, where Aristotle dissected it in the shade of the Lyceum’s Peripatos. L. Sprague de Camp, a minor science-fiction writer, wrote a curious novel, An Elephant for Aristotle (1958), based on just this premise and some scholars have not thought it absurd either. But even if we postulate this – prodigiously peripatetic – pachyderm, we may still wonder why, if Aristotle saw, and cut up, an elephant, does he say that its hind limbs are much shorter than its forelimbs?*
The rest of Aristotle’s exotic zoology is equally erratic. Summarizing Aristotle on the Asian lion, William Ogle, one of the philosopher’s most sympathetic translators and an expert zoologist himself, tartly observes: ‘It is plain that Aristotle was not himself acquainted with the lion; for nearly all his statements about its structures are erroneous.’ He’s thinking, in particular, of Aristotle’s claim that the lion has only one bone in its neck (it hasn’t; like all mammals it has seven cervical vertebrae). The error is all the more peculiar since Aristotle could have seen lions without venturing far; in his day the Asiatic lion still skulked in Macedon’s remoter valleys.* He gives a good description of the European bison, but then says that it fires caustic dung at its pursuers.* In the same way, his description of the ostrich is convincing except that he mistakes its (admittedly impressive) claws for hooves. He does better with the camel for he knows that it has a ruminant’s multi-chambered stomach, that it has cloven feet and, surprisingly, that the cleft of the hind feet is deeper than that of the front. And he gives a very good description of the hyena’s genitals.
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> IN THE GENERATION OF ANIMALS, Aristotle says that one Herodorus claimed that the hyaina has both male and female sexual organs, and that they take turns mounting each other in alternate years; that it is, in short, a hermaphrodite. Herodorus came from Heraclea, a Black Sea port, about which he wrote a History and where he fathered Bryson the Sophist, who tried to square the circle. His hyaina must be the striped hyena, Hyaena hyaena, for it is the only member of the family found there or anywhere else in the Hellenic world. Aristotle says that Herodorus is talking nonsense. The hyena isn’t a hermaphrodite – but it does have an odd-looking undercarriage.
In Historia animalium Aristotle tells us more. When following his account, one must know that hyenas of both sexes have large glands that form a pouch around the anus; they explain the description he gives. I interpolate the modern terms:
The hyena is wolf-like in colour but is more shaggy and has a mane along the whole of its spine. The claim that it has both male and female genitals is false. That of the male [the penis] is like a dog’s or wolf’s. That which resembles a female’s [anal gland] is underneath the tail and, though its structure is similar to that of a female, it has no passage. What lies below it is the passage for residual matter [anus]. The female does indeed have what resembles what is claimed to be the female’s genital organ [anal gland], but, like the male, it has it below the tail and no passage. After it comes the passage for residual matter [anus], and below it is the real genital organ [vagina]. The female hyena has a uterus, just like other female animals of that type. It’s rare that one gets hold of a female hyena. A huntsman told me out of eleven hyenas that he had caught only one female.
A diagram shows the cause of the confusion: the invaginations formed by anal glands could easily be mistaken for vaginas. Aristotle, however, gets it right. But he doesn’t say that he’s seen all this; he says that ‘it has been observed’. Someone else evidently looked between a hyena’s legs to see what he could find.
HYAINA – STRIPED HYENA – HYAENA HYAENA LEFT: MALE GENITALIA. RIGHT: FEMALE GENITALIA AS – ANAL SAC; R – RECTUM; S – SCROTUM; P – PENIS; V – VAGINA
Indeed, it does not seem likely that Aristotle saw any of the exotica that he describes. His accounts of their anatomy and habits simply lack the comprehensiveness, detail and accuracy that we would expect if he had – and that he gives when reporting on the anatomy of, say, a cuttlefish. The tale of Alexander’s largesse is almost certainly a late invention designed to soften the conqueror’s image – or boost the philosopher’s. Instead, Aristotle seems to begin with travellers’ tales – the various early Histories – which he vets as best he can, discarding the implausible, attaching cautionary phrases to the possible and keeping the probable. He then interweaves this material with fragmentary, but more scientifically sophisticated, reports sent by someone else. There is an unknown collaborator at work: someone who travelled, who knew anatomy and who sent Aristotle information about what he saw.
There are several candidates for the Unknown Collaborator. The most plausible of them is Aristotle’s great-nephew, Callisthenes of Olynthos. The two men were not only kin, for Callisthenes was a student at Plato’s Academy in Athens when Aristotle taught there. It is also likely that, when Aristotle left the Academy in 346/7 to go to Hermias’ court at Assos, Callisthenes followed. When Hermias was tortured and executed by the Persians, he wrote, as Aristotle did, a hymn in the Tyrant’s praise. Further tradition has it that Callisthenes followed Aristotle to Lesbos, and then, a few years later, to Macedon. Although a few years older than Alexander they may have been students together at Mieza. What is certain is that by the time Alexander came to power, Callisthenes had already made his reputation as an historian, having written the Hellenica, a ten-book history of Greece; and that, when Alexander crossed the Hellespont in 334 to conquer the East, Callisthenes went with him to record the campaign.
And to send reports to Athens of the army’s progress. Alexander, still untested, just one petty monarch among many, wanted to make sure that the Athenians knew of his triumphs. But Callisthenes was no mere propagandist. He was also a natural philosopher capable of explaining the cause of the Nile’s annual flood as the result of moisture-laden clouds hitting the Ethiopian massif. This was doubtless inspired by Alexander’s swift traverse through Egypt in 332–1; Alexander may even have sent him south, towards the Sudan, to search for the great river’s sources. Callisthenes also recorded Babylonian astronomical lore and proposed a theory of the causes of earthquakes. A fragment says that he sent information to Aristotle, though what about we do not know.
Callisthenes followed Alexander’s battle train for seven years. He was present at the sack of Tyre and of Gaza, the entry into Oasis Siwa, the battles of the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela and the epic pursuit of Darius across the deserts of Central Asia. He traversed Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Persia, Media, Hyrcania and Parthia. He skirted the Caspian Sea, the Kir Desert and the Sistan Marshes, climbed the Rock of Aornus and crossed the Hindu Kush. All of this is rich zoological territory, so we may wonder why Aristotle, drawing on all that Callisthenes saw, does not tell us more about the East than he does. That question is, however, easily answered: Aristotle never saw his nephew again. Somewhere in Bactria, modern-day Afghanistan, Alexander had the historian arrested and executed. The ancient sources disagree about why Callisthenes was killed and how, but concur that his death was a nasty one.
Alexander died in 323. Many said that he had been poisoned by Antipater, his Viceroy at Pella and Aristotle’s friend. In his writings, which are entirely devoid of political and personal passions, Aristotle says nothing about his nephew’s fate, but Theophrastus, the plant collector, mourned Callisthenes and wrote a dialogue in his name.
THE
ANATOMIES
ESTHIOMENON EKHINOS – EDIBLE SEA URCHIN – PARACENTROTUS LIVIDUS
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ARISTOTLE REFERS TO the internal anatomy of about 110 different kinds of animals. For about thirty-five of them his information is so extensive or accurate that he must have dissected them himself. The quality of his work, at its best, can be judged by what he says about the anatomy of the cuttlefish. With one in hand his account is easily followed.
We place our cuttlefish – flaccid, pale, glutinous – on the table. We begin, as he does, with the external parts: the mouth, its two sharp jaws, the eight arms, two tentacles, mantle sac and the fins. We then have to get inside the thing. Aristotle doesn’t tell us how. He may have just grasped the tentacles in one hand, and the mantle in the other, and ripped it apart – that’s what a Greek housewife would do. We should not credit him with the skill, patience and fine instruments of a modern anatomist, but he was surely more careful than that. Elsewhere he describes cutting away the skin of a mole’s face in order to reveal the stunted eyes beneath.
That being so, we slit the mantle lengthwise from tentacles to tail. A ventral incision reveals the reproductive organs; a dorsal one reveals the cuttlebone and, beneath that, a large, red, structure that he calls the mytis and the digestive system. We won’t follow his anatomy in all its details, but merely note two remarkable things that he does.
First, that between the eyes with their iridescent argentae and black-slitted pupils, there is a cartilage. Shave it carefully away to reveal two small, soft, yellowish bulges: they’re the cuttlefish’s brain. It is very easy to miss or immolate, but he finds it. Once seen, the texture of neural tissue is unmistakable.
Second, we follow the alimentary tract. We start at the mouth, follow the oesophagus through the brain and through the mytis to the stomach that Aristotle aptly compares to a bird’s crop. Then there’s another sack, the spiral caecum, that he says looks like a trumpet snail’s shell. The intestine emerges from the caecum but, where in most animals it runs posteriorly, here it doesn’t. Instead it loops forward so that the rectum exits by the funnel. He’s noticed one of the strangest features of cephalopod anatomy: that they defecate on their heads.
A
ristotle gets some things wrong. He thinks that the mytis –a large, central organ – is the cuttlefish equivalent of a heart. It isn’t: it’s the cuttlefish equivalent of a liver. In the seventeenth century, Swammerdam found the true hearts – all three of them. He also notices ‘feathery growths’ in the mantle cavity but fails to identify them as gills even though they look very much like a fish’s. He’s oblivious to muscles and nerves.
Mistakes are to be expected. But something important is missing; not from the cuttlefish but from the book. Historia animalium lacks what any modern zoology text has: diagrams. Anatomy can’t really be learnt, or taught, without them. It is only by abstraction and visualization that the logical structure of animal form becomes clear. As any anatomist knows, you don’t really see until you draw. And, just as you’re wondering how Aristotle got by without them, you come across this:
For details of the arrangement of these parts, the diagrams of the Anatomies should be consulted.
There was a whole book of them. Eight, in fact, or so Diogenes Laertius says. Philosophers regret the loss of Aristotle’s Protrepticus, an early summary of his philosophy. But the former, at least, can be reconstructed from people who quoted it. I mourn The Anatomies for they are lost complete.
What did a fourth-century BC anatomical diagram look like? Perhaps a bit like the fish paintings on Apulian pottery. But surely sketchier – Aristotle wasn’t a professional artist – and he had a pedagogic point to make. An outline then, in swift, black brushstrokes, with alphabetical labels (A, B, Γ, Δ) for the various parts – he sometimes refers explicitly to them. We can try to reconstruct his diagrams but, in truth, can only guess. Nondescript ancient texts have been discovered on papyri wrapped around, or stuffed inside, Egyptian mummies. An Aristotelian diagram of the human heart might, then, yet exist in the eviscerated thoracic cavity of a Hellenistic corpse, but a papyrologist friend has told me that the chances of finding such a thing are comparable to those of finding a living dinosaur in the Congo. Even so, if I thought that a copy of The Anatomies lay buried in Egypt’s sands, I should dig until I found it, until I could see what he saw, how he saw it.