Sex, Women, and Ambiguous Animals

Abstract

ing a more general from a more specific description, as when Levi-Strauss makes bone 'the reverse of food' or a thorn-bush 'nature hostile to man' (cf. D. Sperber in J. Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since, 1979, p. 22); 'inedibility' is not the only notion that 'bone' can evoke. In the present case the problem is intensified by the vagueness of the concepts of 'anomaly' and 'boundary-breaking'. For Greece the only explicit preAristotelian evidence seems to be the riddle quoted in the Republic (479c), which refers to the bat as a 'bird and not a bird'. Lloyd makes this item of evidence work hard, and the reader might not notice how isolated it is. (We do not know that the term Csa>tpo?pitw itself was commonly applied to animals in common speech: its first attested sense, 'play a double game', may be the original one.) Even the bat has other attributes which perhaps better explain its place in popular belief. We need to assemble the whole magical menagerie of a particular period and then look at it as a group. The magico-medical powers of the bat in Pliny, for instance (and Pliny seems to be the earliest source) resemble those of the screech-owl, another nightflier of disconcerting voice (cf. the index, vol. vii, to Sillig's edition of Pliny, HN, s.vv. bubo, vespertilio). And where no popular source stresses or even intimates the ambiguous oddity of a particular animal, we can only attend to what is actually said. What seems to emerge from D'Arcy Thompson's discussion of the polypuses (in A Glossary of Greek Fishes, 1947, pp. 206 f., 232, 260 f.) is that fishermen over the centuries have suffered from their