Poetry, Knowledge and Anthropomorphism in Oppian’s Halieutica

Despite its popularity from antiquity through the Renaissance, Oppian’s Halieutica has found itself largely neglected by modern classical scholarship, dismissed as a stale, versified assemblage of dry technical learning (Fajen 1999). However, as recent scholarship has begun to explore (Bartley 2003; Kneebone 2008, 2017; Williams 2018), such critiques overlook the 2nd century didactic’s qualities as a poem as well as its unique place within Greco-Roman literary and intellectual history. Following this interest in Halieutica at the intersection of both poetic and knowledge traditions, this paper more closely investigates the relationship between Oppian’s poetry and his subject material: animals and the natural world.

Among Greek and Latin didactic poetry, Oppian’s Halieutica stands apart in its centering of fish and other sea life as poetic subjects and the depth to which it explores their physiology and ethology. Compared to the litany of dangers in Nicander’s Theriaca, the stern moralizing of Grattius’ Cynegetica or the heavily allegorical farm animals of Vergil’s Georgics, Oppian takes exceptional interest in the inner workings of aquatic ‘communities’ (ἔθνεα, φῦλα, πόληες): their “fishy lives, hatreds, friendships and counsels,” (1.6-7, καὶ βίον ἰχθυόεντα καὶ ἔχθεα καὶ φιλότητας | καὶ βουλάς). Adapting devices and adornments typical of heroic epic, tragedy and other genres, the Halieutica presents an intensely anthropomorphic vision of the animal world, one matched only by its successor, Ps.-Oppian’s Cynegetica. Extended similes, typically rare in didactic poetry, connect the struggles and successes of sea creatures to those of both terrestrial animals and humans, the usual subjects of such similes (e.g. 1.463-9, 2.326-30, 4.335-42). Even more strikingly, the poem gives voice to otherwise mute animals as creatures like eels and dolphins suddenly break into dramatic monologues (e.g. 2.301-7, 5.560-6). Though at first alien and unknowable to the human observer (1.80-1), through such devices Oppian’s sea becomes a world as dynamic and complex as that of any epic or drama.

This empathetic curiosity which underpins the Halieutica’s poetic stylings reflects not just a reversal or redirection of poetic conventions, but also broader developments in zoological thought among Severan literature. Much like Oppian, imperial prose authors such as Plutarch and Aelian took great interest in eclectic (poikilia) displays of zoological learning (Smith 2014). In addition to substantial overlap in the information they share (Benedetti 2005), like Oppian, such writers readily identified qualities in animals normally reserved for humans. For example, Aelian’s De Natura Animalium expounds on animals’ remarkably human-like virtues (NA 0.1.8-11), while Plutarch’s dialogues, De Sollertia Animalium and Gryllus, overtly challenge traditional Aristotelian and Stoic denials of animals’ access to speech and reason (logos). These interests and sensibilities inform not only the specific scenes or trivia deployed by the Halieutiuca, but its overall aesthetics and design as well. Oppian’s poetry resists traditional assumptions about animal intelligence and, in turn, readapts poetic conventions into one of classical literature’s deepest and most empathetic explorations of non-human beings.