ABSTRACT
Our examination in the previous chapter of pre-fifth-century Greek observations on the nature of humankind not only supports the contention of recent classical scholarship that the Greeks had frequent recourse to assertions of “otherness” or “differentness” in their attempts to define the human’s place in the divine, human and animal worlds, but suggests as well that what might be termed “otherness models” can be isolated in these earliest, tentative attempts to identify humans’ place in creation. The model “god vis-à-vis man” that predominates in early epic observations on humankind gave way in time to a “man vis-à-vis animals” model traceable already in the fragments of certain pre-Socratic philosophers and ultimately enshrined in Sophistic teachings at the lower end of the time period examined in the previous chapter. The shift from a preoccupation with the relation of humans to the divine to their relation to their fellow-animals signaled as well a shift from a concentration on the nature of humanity’s dependence on the gods to one of their dependence on themselves, a movement clearly observable in the contrast between the Hesiodic world view and that of the Sophists. This shift provided an impetus for the thoroughgoing anthropocentrism that would become prominent in Greek thought in the classical period and that would eventually prove so injurious to non-human animals when it came to be adopted by Aristotle and the Stoics, and allowed the increasingly human-centered Greeks to view humankind not only as different from non-human animal creation, but as superior to it, a point of view fostered by Sophistic accounts of human cultural advancement. It is noteworthy that, both in literary expositions of the otherness model in which humanity is contrasted to gods and in that in which humanity is contrasted to non-human animals, we find repeated applications of the “man alone of animals” formula employed verbatim to bolster such claims of otherness.
