Plutarch: Are Water or Land Animals the Most Crafty?

Plutarch · Down to Earth Series · 49 pages

From Plutarch's Morals, translated from the Greek by several hands, corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin with an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1878, Vol. V, pages 157–217, published there under the title “Which are the most crafty, water-animals or those creatures that breed upon the land?” This piece is in John Philips's translation. The frontispiece, Old Warhorse, is by Riana. The speakers are Autobulus, Soclarus, Optatus, Phaedimus, Aristotimus and Heracleo.

The dialogue opens with Autobulus recalling Leonidas's judgment that Tyrtæus was a good poet for whetting the minds of young men, and confessing his fear that the encomium of hunting delivered the day before may have inflamed the young men present beyond moderation — he had been over-addicted to the sport himself when young. From that opening the discussion moves to the question the title poses, by way of a prior one: whether brutes have a soul. A long train of thoughts at the front sets out the steps. The animals are granted sense and imagination; they learn to desire some things and avoid others; if they have sense they have understanding, and what in men would be called understanding. Men punish dogs and horses for their faults as though to produce repentance; beasts feel pleasure, joy, anger and fear. The question of virtue is raised, and the love of offspring offered in evidence. A key move follows: that animals may have reason without having it perfectly or in a high degree, since sight and swiftness exist in different degrees and so may reason and mental force. The consequences are drawn for conduct — that mankind is chargeable with great injustice in its dealing with beasts, that there is a necessary and convenient use of the brute creation, and that beyond this we ought not to go. The second half turns to the comparison itself, arguing that land animals do excel, and marshalling the evidence in a long series of instances: bulls, lions and elephants, the ichneumon, swallows and spiders, bees, crows, geese and cranes, the contrivances of ants, the sagacity of elephant and fox, the affection of dogs for their masters, a mule at Athens, and the elephant that carried King Porus.

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