Humans and (other) animals in the Roman world: anthrozoological perspectives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36151/DALPS.079Keywords:
Anthrozoology, human-animal relations, domestication, animal agency, animal identity, animal responsibility, animal turnAbstract
Humanities and social sciences have long ignored the importance of relationships with other species. An anthrozoological approach to ancient sources allows us to gather information about real human-animal relationships in the Roman era and, at times, even to recover an animal perspective on them, offering a useful counterbalance to the intellectualism of philosophical theorizing and to the abstractness of symbolic representations. This approach provides a multifaceted and more detailed picture of the human-animal relationships in different contexts, thus exposing the opacity of the general definition of ‘animal’. After a brief review of spaces and occasions for interspecies relations, this article offers an overview of ancient ideas of domesticity and a reflection on the different animal identities and responsibilities that seem to emerge from ancient sources.
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