ABSTRACT
The impulse of early Greek anthropological thought to categorize and differentiate, often to the disadvantage of one or another of the groups under scrutiny, has been described by scholars both as a tendency on the part of the Greeks to view the created world in terms of analogy and polarity and as a characteristically Greek fascination with “otherness” and “the Other.”3 This mode of thought was by no means limited to the isolation of differences between human and nonhuman animals. Human-to-human comparisons often betrayed racial, gender or social biases. In her work The Science of Man in Ancient Greece, Maria Michela Sassi argues that the Greeks identified the Greek adult male citizen as the “center” against which “otherness” was measured. Some classes of males, women, barbarians and slaves, as well as non-human animals, were thus seen as the “Other.” She maintains that, as anthropological thought developed among the Greeks, they shifted their attention from distinctions between human and beast to those
between male and female and Greek and barbarian.4 Evidence suggests, however, that Greek efforts to differentiate human and non-human animals only intensified with the growth of science and philosophy.
