ABSTRACT
Compared with the bold and elaborately developed case for man’s unique intellectual gifts that pervaded ancient philosophical and scientific discourse and continues to enjoy a vigorous afterlife in twenty-first-century debate on humananimal interactions and obligations, Greek and Roman authors demonstrate a somewhat more cautious and ambivalent attitude regarding man’s physiology, perhaps suggested to them by eye-witness observation and common sense, although, as we observed in our preliminary examination of classic discussions of a number of human anatomical features in Xenophon, the Sophists and Plato’s Pythagoras, claims that human beings are anatomically blessed above other animals are by no means difficult to isolate in classical sources.1 In some cases, however, ancient authors ultimately resort to claims of man’s superior intellect to compensate for, eclipse and argue away any concessions of anatomical advantage in non-human species that could not conveniently be ignored. While classical literature is well supplied with acknowledgments that man cannot compete against the claws, beaks, fangs and fur that protect other species, and that non-human animals, unlike man, are capable from birth of taking full advantage of such accoutrements without need of instruction,2 we encounter as well the idea that man has been given some gifts that compensate for other anatomical shortcomings and that indeed, because of their superb utility, make man after all physiologically superior to other animals. Aristotle (Parts of Animals 687a23-687b2) countered the argument that non-human animals have the advantage over human beings in their natural armaments and their defensive body coverings by arguing that man alone can change his weaponry as needed, making him in fact far more versatile and effective in self-defense than are other animal species.3
