When I tell people I think about Greek myths for a living, they tend not to believe me. But I’ve never considered Greek myths to be at all odd or mysterious. After all, telling stories is a very normal human activity. Most recently I’ve been working to better understand how ancient communities attached stories to the places they lived in and this has resulted in MANTO, a huge mapping project, which anyone can look at here: https://www.manto-myth.org/manto
Julia looks at this question through ten ancient stories about animals ranging from the every day (bees and birds) to the fantastical (the Sphinx and the Cyclops). These are, of course, stories produced out of human creativity and curiosity, and out of them emerges some surprising insights about how we understand our place in the world.
If animals could talk to us, what would they say about us?
What makes us human? What, if anything, sets us apart from all other creatures? Ever since Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the answer to these questions has pointed to our own intrinsic animal nature. Yet the idea that, in one way or another, our humanity is entangled with the non-human has a much longer and more venerable history. In the West, it goes all the way back to classical antiquity. This grippingly written and provocative book boldly reveals how the ancient world mobilised concepts of 'the animal' and 'animality' to conceive of the human in a variety of illuminating ways.…