In many ways, the Aeneid tells a tale of change and transformation, propelled by the inscrutable forces of fate towards a preordained telos (end) — the foundation of Rome. This is a world in which opposing forces ultimately cancel each other out or supplement each other to constitute a newly unified whole. The Trojan horse is central to this endeavour. It represents both Greek ingenuity and Greek deceit, the end of the story of one city and the beginning of another, and human, divine, and animal identities. Above all, however, Virgil includes it as part of a narrative in which Sinon’s false story matches the concealed human contents of the horse to form a compelling strategy by which the Greeks trick their way into the city. And yet, unlike his Greek counterparts, Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, cannot boast about having been one of the fighters hidden in the horse. His humanity emerges when he flees the horse’s deadly human cargo — and turns a story of destruction into a story of a new beginning.
Author Julia Kindt is a Professor of Ancient History at the University of Sydney (among other roles and distinctions), and in her Preface to The Trojan Horse and Other Stories she writes that this is meant to be an examination of animal-based stories from antiquity as “part of a larger endeavour to reveal some of the foundations on which Western humanism rests”, and with the “general reader” in mind. And as interesting as that sounded to me, this general reader didn’t get much out of this. Each chapter read like one of my university essays — an introduction that sums up what is to come, a body that contains many ideas and supporting references, followed by a summarising conclusion — and while the information wasn’t over my head, this felt too academically-formatted to satisfy my general-interest curiosity, and too basic to satisfy an academic audience. There were fewer classical animal stories than I expected, and despite the circling and summarising and drawing together of disparate threads, I never really understood the overall thesis here. I was often bored. I appreciate the effort and expertise that went into this, but it just wasn’t for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Humans, in their interactions with non-human creatures, continue to grapple with the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition: we are indeed animals, but animals that like to think of ourselves as different. The resulting paradoxes haunt us up to this day. They are fundamental to the human/ animal story as the medium perhaps best suited to explore the shifting ground of our humanity: between the wish to be different from all other creatures inhabiting this planet — and the ultimate realization that we are not.
This (the paradox of humans knowing we’re animals but feeling separate from the animal kingdom) is what I anticipated the thesis to be, but despite going back several times to Aristotle and his argument that logos (reason or intellect) is what elevates humans above brute animals, Kindt doesn’t really make her case based on the animal stories she shares; and it was the animal stories I was here for. Even the Trojan Horse itself is discussed as merely a symbol (or synecdoche) of the long and brutal war — but despite examining the horse culture of the Trojans, the role of Athena in its construction, or how Virgil repurposed Ovid’s brief reference to the Trojan Horse in order to prove the “deceitfulness” of the Greeks, even this titular story didn’t serve the thesis to my satisfaction; it circled and circled without drawing a picture. There were several bits that did intrigue me throughout, as in this aside found within the discussion of the famous tale of Androclus removing a thorn from a lion’s paw:
Greek and Roman literature holds plenty of examples in which animals are used to act as a mouthpiece and channels of communication for the oppressed. The ‘father’ of the fable, Aesop, was himself a slave and some of the tales attributed to him (and other ancient authors) used this genre as a form of social critique. In other words, the oppression of certain animals serves as a means to address the oppression of certain humans. In this way, the story anticipates a more recent acknowledgement: that the oppression of women, people of colour, and animals shares the same roots by being grounded in the same conception of the human.
On the other hand, there were whole chapters that held little interest for me — the fact that we have always thought of honeybees as monarchical (even if in antiquity they imagined a King bee ruling the drones); Socrates referring to himself as a gadfly at trial (and the link to modern day “goads” like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange) — and overall, I can’t say I learned much. Not for me.
