[9]
GRYLLUS.
Well, then. It is admitted that you use animals as appetizers to sweeten your fare. 1 Why, therefore 2 Animal intelligence, on the contrary, allows no room for useless and pointless arts; and in the case of essential ones, we do not make one man with constant study cling to one department of knowledge and rivet him jealously to that; nor do we receive our arts as alien products or pay to be taught them. Our intelligence produces them on the spot unaided, as its own congenital and legitimate skills. I have heard that in Egypt 3 everyone is a physician; and in the case of beasts each one is not only his own specialist in medicine, but also in the providing of food, in warfare and hunting as well as in self-defence and music, in so far as any kind of animal has a natural gift for it. From whom have we swine learned, when we are sick, to resort to rivers to catch crabs? Who taught tortoises to devour marjoram after eating the snake? 4 And who instructed Cretan goats, 5 when they are pierced by an arrow, to look for dittany, after eating which the arrowhead falls out? For if you speak the truth and say that Nature is their teacher, you are elevating the intelligence of animals to the most sovereign and wisest of first principles. If you do not think that it should be called either reason or intelligence, it is high time for you to cast about for some fairer and even more honourable term to describe it, since certainly the faculty that it brings to bear in action is better and more remarkable. 6 It is no uninstructed or untrained faculty, but rather self-taught and self-sufficient - and not for lack of strength. It is just because of the health and completeness of its native virtue that it is indifferent to the contributions to its intelligence supplied by the lore of others. Such animals, at any rate, as man for amusement or easy living induces to accept instruction and training have understanding to grasp what they are taught even when it goes contrary to their physical endowment, so superior are their mental powers. I say nothing of puppies that are trained as hunters, or colts schooled to keep time in their gait, 7 or crows that are taught to talk, or dogs, to jump through revolving hoops. In the theatres horses and steers go through an exact routine in which they lie down or dance or hold a precarious pose or perform movements not at all easy even for men 8 ; and they remember what they have been taught, these exhibitions of docility which are not in the least useful for anything else. If you are doubtful that we can learn arts, then let me tell you that we can even teach them. When partridges 9 are making their escape, they accustom their fledglings to hide by falling on their backs and holding a lump of earth over themselves with their claws. You can observe storks on the roof, the adults showing the art of flying to the young as they make their trial flights. 10 Nightingales 11 set the example for their young to sing; while nestlings that are caught young and brought up by human care are poorer singers, as though they had left the care of their teacher too early. 12 and since I have entered into this new body of mine, I marvel at those arguments by which the sophists 13 brought me to consider all creatures except man irrational and senseless.Bruta animalia ratione uti. Plutarch. Harold Cherniss (Translator), William C. Helmbold (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1957.
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