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LE BESTIAIRE D'ARISTOPHANE. By Cécile Corbel-Morana. Collection d'Etudes Anciennes Série grecque 144. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 2012. Pp. 350.
AN INITIAL GLANCE at the title of this book (a revised 2002 University of Paris X-Nanterre dissertation) might lead the reader to expect a detailed catalogue of Aristophanic fauna along the lines of Otto Keller's Die Antike Tierwelt (Leipzig 1909), D'Arcy Thompson's Greek Birds (Oxford 1936) and Greek Fishes (Oxford 1947), or I. C. Beavis's Insects and Other Invertebrates in Classical Antiquity (Exeter 1988). But Corbel-Morana's use of the term "bestiary" is instead intended to place her study in a medieval tradition whose interests were not so much in natural history as in morality, philosophy, and social and literary symbolism. Aristophanic animals are thus conceived as emblems, as a way of revealing and arguing for a particular view of the world and the place of human beings in it, on the one hand, and for a distinctive style of comic poetics, on the other. This argument is placed within both the long history of the depiction of animals in Greek literature and late fifth-century debates about what makes human beings...