Oppian's Piscine Dialectic

Abstract

The central premise of this study is that Oppian?s Halieutica is a poem that poses questions and offers a variety of perspectives on issues such as the place of humans in the natural world, the cognitive abilities of non-human animals, and the ethical relationship between humans and other animals, but avoids offering definitive answers. Over the course of five chapters, I explore the process of enquiry in the Halieutica and the poem?s engagement with the poetic tradition, ancient zoological discourse, and the intellectual discourse of the Imperial period. I argue that the Halieutica not only reflects but also offers fresh perspectives on established zoological material and philosophical questions. After an introduction to the Halieutica and its literary context, each chapter is dedicated to one of the poem?s central themes or questions and aims to uncover how the poem at times destabilises positions it presented earlier or offers alternative viewpoints.

Chapter 1 explores humanity?s place in and control over the natural world. I argue that the poem?s depiction of humans oscillates between depicting them as feeble creatures subject to the elements and all-powerful masters over the sea. The depiction of the human condition is, among others, informed by didactic accounts of anthropogony and cosmic succession as well as Stoic views on fate and determinism.

Chapter 2 examines to what extent the deaths of Oppian?s fish at the hands of fishermen serve as moral exemplars that are punished for their transgressions. I argue that the Halieutica often introduces complications to subvert this seemingly clear-cut pattern by refiguring established zoological lore and introducing ambivalent poetic intertexts. Rather, the Halieutica foregrounds the process of moral enquiry itself.

Chapter 3 focuses on the cognitive abilities of non-human animals in the Halieutica in light of the ancient debate about whether they possess reason (logos). Despite the lack of explicit references to this question or related philosophical jargon, Oppian?s interest in the intellectual capacities and failures of fish shows his engagement with this issue. In particular, I argue that the earlier parts of the Halieutica ascribe many of the same qualities to fish as to humans, but that its second half rather highlights the unsurmountable gap between the cognitive abilities of humans and other animals.

Chapter 4 examines Oppian?s engagement, at the end of book 1, with a more specific philosophical question, whether all animals necessarily love and care for their offspring. The poem first appears to endorse a Stoic view that parental affection is universal and unavoidable, only to gradually complicate the issue by introducing non-viviparous animals and finally animals that come into existence without sexual reproduction.

Chapter 5 focuses on the dolphin, the most prominent yet also the most exceptional animal in the Halieutica. Book 1 establishes that dolphins were originally human and that to this very day they retain human characteristics, and the remarkable affinity between dolphins and humans is highlighted throughout the poem. In this chapter, I take these claims seriously and explore how Oppian?s portrayal of dolphins as humans in non-human bodies sheds light on human nature from an outside perspective, arguing that dolphins serve as a mirror for humanity both at its best and at its worst.

I conclude this study with some thoughts on some of the overarching patterns in the Halieutica and how these may allow us to approach this in many ways disparate poem as a coherent whole. I also include an appendix that discusses the problems with the nomenclature for Oppian?s fishes employed in most Anglophone scholarship on the Halieutica and offers translations that correspond more closely with actual English names for the various fish in the Halieutica.?