Will Lewis, Independent Scholar
The second book of Herodotus’ Histories presents a deeply engaged zoological discussion on the behavior of fish in the Nile Delta (2.93). In this lengthy ichthyological survey, Herodotus opens with a handful of lexically unusual choices. He designates the swimming pattern of fish as in herds, or ἀγελαῖοι, a term limited to describing cows in extant literature contemporary and prior to his time (Il.11.729, Od.10.410, S.Aj. 175). Moreover, he posits that an οἶστρος, or gadfly, influences the fish to reproduce, a term with bovine associations employed in a comparable sense only in tragedy (E.HF 862, IT .1456; S.Tr.1254, Ant.1002). Herodotus creates a clever witticism with uncommon uses of these two terms and subtly subverts the reader’s expectations by having the οἶστρος still bite the ἀγελαῖος in the unexpected context of fish, not cows.
In this paper, I argue that the pun, together with the unusual behavior of the fish, shows Herodotus’ interest in the relationship between φύσις and νόμος and the interconnectivity between humans and their environment. Herodotus often uses environmental and zoological investigations in his ethnography to describe the nature and customs of people. For example, he says the extraordinary characteristics of the Nile have a direct influence on the extraordinary νόμος of the people of Egypt (2.35); the unusual zoological discoveries in Libya, such as giant snakes and dog-headed people, underscore the peculiarity of the edges of the known world (4.191-192); and the inability of cows in Scythia to grow horns illustrates the harshness of Scythia’s environment and, therefore, the toughness of the Scythian people (4.28-29). At 2.93, Herodotus contextualizes the behaviors of the fish in the Nile Delta by first describing the customs of the local people who eat nothing but them (οἳ δέ τινες αὐτῶν ζῶσι ἀπὸ τῶν ἰχθύων μοῦνον). The ensuing discussion of the backwards habits of the fish, and the unusual language used to describe them, can be seen as a reflection of the δίαιτα of the people who incorporate these fish into their diet.
Drawing on Bosak-Schroeder’s argument that Herodotus makes intentional social and behavioral distinctions between ethnographic groups who depend on agriculture and those who do not (nomads and hunter-gatherers), I postulate that Herodotus’ portrayal of fish as cows connects the Fish-Eaters of the Nile Delta to a more pastoralist lifestyle, despite their living in Egypt, which Herodotus depicts as primarily agrarian. Moreover, I argue that this passage, by connecting the abundance of fish in the Egyptian marshes after the Nile floods to the ease of farming for agrarian Egyptians (2.18), underscores the significance of the Nile River as the primary source of sustenance for the Egyptian people and the main cultural stimulus behind the broad range of Egyptian νόμοι (2.35). Finally, Herodotus uses the backwards customs of fish in Egypt to engage with contemporary intellectual trends, such as environmental determinism and the divine regulation of prolific (πολύγονα) vs. non-prolific animals (ὀλιγόγονα), evident in the works of Hippocratics, Democritus, and Empedocles (Thomas).