Abstract
Classical scholarship has recently witnessed an upsurge of books, articles, and conferences exploring ancient human/animal relations. Scholars now investigate animals in Greek and Roman thought and literature as well as in different texts and real-life contexts. At first sight, this research seems far removed from the kind of questions earlier classical scholarship brought to the ancient evidence. While older scholarship seems to reflect a naïve concern with the realia of ancient animals, current research explores man’s multiple entanglements with the non-human and bestial. This article sets out to show that, right from the beginning, the scholarly interest in ancient animals was inevitably bound up with an interest in man. To this end, I explore the place of humans in Otto Keller’s monumental two-volume work Die antike Tierwelt (1909–13). I illustrate how central animals are to the kind of humanism propagated by Keller and explore the place of this humanism in Keller’s reception of the classical past. I show that the universality of animals allows Keller to discuss humanity in equally universal terms, and conclude that this universal focus associates his study more closely with the principles and practices of historical anthropology than with the emerging cultural history of his day.
