This book speaks to all those with an interest in the question of the human in its relation to the non-human. More specifically, it illustrates how the ancient world mobilized concepts of ‘the animal’ and ‘animality’ to conceive of the human in a variety of ways. To this end, it offers ten essayistic interventions into ways of ‘thinking the human’ that reach from antiquity to the present in the ultimate aim to challenge our understanding of who we really are.

This chapter explores meat-eating as an important way by which humans define themselves and explores it as part of a broader ‘anthropology’ of food and eating. It tells the story of a boastful consumption of a wild boar at a (fictional) Roman dinner party to show that in the ancient world (as in the modern), what you eat is who you are.

This chapter illustrates the power of the animal story to challenge anthropocentric positions and ideas of human exceptionalism. It centres upon the famous story of Androclus and the lion (as told by Gellius and other ancient and modern authors) to show that anthropomorphizing is not merely a tool of human appropriation of the animal; it can also bring out real sympathies and correspondences between human and non-human creatures. With its particular focus on the capacity to experience pain as a shared feature of humans and animals, the story driving this chapter anticipates modern attempts to bring questions of sentience and suffering into the picture and to reimagine justice as extending beyond the human.

This chapter revolves around the famous story of how the Greeks managed to get into the city of Troy concealed in a gigantic wooden horse – and thus won a long and drawn-out war. The chapter follows this story and dismantles the odd human/animal hybrid at its core in the ultimate aim to explore how notions of animality define the human at war. Moving away from the ‘othering’ at work in the previous chapter, this one illustrates an area of existence in which analogies between human and animal prevail. Fighting emerges as an area of life in which our animal side comes to the fore.

This chapter introduces the human as a question. It revolves around the figure of the Theban Sphinx and her interaction with Oedipus and traces her presence from the ancient world into the works of Sigmund Freud. The chapter invokes the Sphinx as a presence that both prompts and challenges the way we think the human. Oedipus’ troubled humanity stands at the intersection between his success in solving the Sphinx’s riddle and his apparent failure to understand how her words apply to his own existence. As such, the Sphinx’ intervention at Thebes exposes a deep-seated vulnerability at the core of the human condition – a vulnerability springing from the fact that while the riddle can be solved with the powers of reasoning, the human as a riddle remains enigmatic and beyond the application of logos.

This chapter offers an investigation of what Socrates may have meant when, in his infamous appearance before a jury at Athens in 399 BCE, he referred to himself as a myōps – typically translated as a gadfly. The chapter illustrates that the natural world does not just serve to naturalize (and thus normalize) collective political systems that are already firmly in place. As in the case of Socrates, it can also serve as a potent strategy to seek to naturalize (and thus normalize) the individual political stance outside of the collective. The chapter shows that, by carving out a space for dissent, Socrates defined a form of citizenship that resonates far beyond the ancient world. It, for example, helps to explain the ambivalence surrounding modern dissenting voices (such as those of Julian Assange, Michael Moore, and Edward Snowden). The chapter ultimately traces the buzzing of the Socratic gadfly into Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy and illustrates the important tole that this peculiar ancient creature plays in her critique of the perils of modernity.