Appendix II Theophrastus on Animals

The titles listed in Table AII.1 are found in the catalog of books reported in Theophrastus’s Life of Theophrastus.Footnote ² An educated guess is that this catalog goes back to the pinacographical activity of Hermippus of Smyrna (third century bc). In this scenario, Hermippus drafted his catalog (πίνακες) as an appendix to his Life of Theophrastus.Footnote ³

The information preserved in the catalog helps us correct the impression that Theophrastus was engaged in a study of plants to the exclusion of animals. His interest was in both kinds of perishable living beings, and his research output on the topic of animals was second only to that of Aristotle. It is not difficult to see why the subsequent tradition has transmitted his works on plants to the exclusion of his writings on animals. His writings on animals were largely concerned with difficult or remarkable cases. Of course, they are difficult or remarkable cases for a certain theory: the theory that can be extracted from the extant works on animals transmitted under the name of Aristotle. But this also explains why his writings on animals enjoyed limited success. They were taken to be secondary with respect to Aristotle’s works on animals, and they were even considered to be expendable with respect to the zoological theory that can be extracted from those works. I will not try to correct this impression. Instead, I would like to stress that there is no need to read in Theophrastus’s focus on difficult or remarkable cases an attempt to challenge, let alone reject, Aristotle’s theory. His motivation to deal with these cases must be found within this theory. To the extent that they can be reconstructed, his writings betray the ambition to make sense of these difficult cases in terms of the theory. This is so even when the question of the extent to which the theory can be applied to these cases is not explicitly answered.Footnote ⁴

Let us consider the only extant work on animals by Theophrastus, which is transmitted in the manuscript tradition with the rather misleading title On Fish.Footnote ⁵ This work is almost certainly identical to the fifth item on our list: On [Animals] That Live on Land, one book.Footnote ⁶ Theophrastus is concerned with animals that live in water but also spend time on dry land. These animals live a double life with respect to water and dry land. In Aristotle’s terminology, they dualize (ἐπαμφοτερίζειν).Footnote ⁷ Theophrastus adopts Aristotle’s explanation of how animals control their bodily temperature by taking in water or air to deal with a few remarkable cases. What makes these cases remarkable is that the animals appear to take in both water and air. The qualification “θαυμαστόν” (remarkable) qualifies a few of the cases discussed by Theophrastus.Footnote ⁸ The subsequent tradition lost interest in the underpinning zoological theory but preserved a gusto for the remarkable as such; by contrast, Theophrastus was driven by a theoretical agenda he shared with Aristotle.

An interest in remarkable cases can also be inferred from the following titles: On [Animals] That Appear in Swarms, On [Animals] That Change Color, and On Animals That Are Said to Be Malicious. The extant information regarding the first of these three lost essays (On [Animals] That Appear in Swarms) is especially interesting. Photius was still able to read this short text in Byzantium in the ninth century ad, so he left a record of its contents.Footnote ⁹ Based on Photius’s synopsis, Sharples suggested that Theophrastus carried out a study of spontaneous generation.Footnote ¹⁰ While this is quite possible, the focus of the work must have been broader. Animals that swarm include snails, frogs, snakes, and mice. These animals swarm after they have been generated sexually often due to exceptional atmospheric phenomenon such as heavy rains and sudden floods. Theophrastus’s interest in the phenomenon of spontaneous generation is at any rate documented by the title On Animals Generated Spontaneously. This work may have fulfilled a promise Theophrastus made in the context of his study of plants.Footnote ¹¹ Photius has also summarized the contents of the essays On Animals That Change Colors and On Animals That Are Said to Be Malicious.Footnote ¹² The first was concerned with the ability of the octopus, the chameleon, and the very mysterious tarandosFootnote ¹³ to change color in order to take on the colors of the adjacent plants, rocks, and localities.Footnote ¹⁴ The second deals with our projection of human motives onto animal behavior. Put differently, the focus of this work is on animals that are said to be malicious but in fact are not.

The remaining titles transmitted in the catalog imply that Theophrastus had an interest in animal behavior with a special focus on hibernation, habitat, and ecology. Robert Sharples has argued that the differences in voice discussed are those linked to local variation.Footnote ¹⁵ On this suggestion, the essay On the Diversity of Voice in Animals of the Same Kind also circulated under the title On Differences According to Locality.Footnote ¹⁶

The entry On Animals, seven books, need not refer to a separate work on animals. It may well be evidence that the seven short monographs, which were written as independent and self-contained essays by Theophrastus, were subsequently assembled into a single work.Footnote ¹⁷

The title Summary of Aristotle’s On Animals, six books, is noteworthy because it contains an explicit reference to Aristotle. Apparently, this title refers to an abridgment in six books of the works on animals authored by Aristotle. At the very least, we can infer from this title that Aristotle’s works on animals were clearly distinguished from what writers such as Theophrastus himself and Eudemus of Rhodes may have contributed to the study of animals. This is far from a trivial observation, especially if we bear in mind that, at least in his extant writings on plants, when Theophrastus refers to the study of animals, he never distinguishes what Aristotle has accomplished from what he may have contributed to this study. His references to the study of animals are self-consciously impersonal. I argued that this practice suggests the existence of a shared project within the Peripatos. Still this title suggests that the works that Aristotle contributed to the study of animals enjoyed a somewhat special status.Footnote ¹⁸

I do not see any reason to doubt that Theophrastus compiled an abridgment of Aristotle’s study of animals. We do not know the motivations that may have prompted Theophrastus to produce such a compilation. We should recall, however, that Aristophanes of Byzantium in the third century bc wrote a summary of Aristotle’s works on animals. His stated goal was to make everything Aristotle wrote on animals available to the reader in one place.Footnote ¹⁹ While we have no reason to think that there was any special relation between the extant summary by Aristophanes and the abridgment made by Theophrastus, we can speculate that, very early on, the corpus of works on animals was felt to be too large and too technical. As a result, a condensation and simplification of this corpus – maybe also motivated by didactic reasons – was deemed necessary.

We should not rule out that Aristophanes and Theophrastus approached Aristotle’s corpus of writings on animals from different angles. Recall that Aristophanes was a grammarian interested in Homeric textual criticism, Attic comedy, and a lexicography. His goal was to produce a reference work for scholars and poets interested in scientific data for their own literary activity.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, Theophrastus was Aristotle’s colleague and his most important collaborator. We can safely assume that his summary reflected the scientific concerns that motivated Aristotle’s study of animals in the first place.

Finally, we cannot rule out that other titles in the catalog may have dealt with animals. It has been suggested, for instance, that the lost On [Kinds of] Hair may fit well with the project of GA 5 – that is, explaining accidental features of animals in terms of material causes.Footnote ²¹