Animal Agency and Plutarch’s Elephants

Abstract Drawing its inspiration from the burgeoning field of multidisciplinary enquiry known as animal studies, this paper looks at elephants in Plutarch for the first time from a zoocentric point of view, i.e. as deliberate, subjective and embodied agents acting in ways that suggest a degree of autonomy and that contributed to the shaping of human history. The main argument falls into three parts. First, it is shown that Plutarch’s use of the war elephant in the historical narratives of the Parallel Lives is more subtle than mere factual documentation or rhetorical embellishment. Rather, war elephants feature in incidents where the animal is shown to be a protagonist with intelligence, emotions and purpose. Then, the focus is on selected cases from the Lives and the Moralia where elephants are used as semiotic actors, shedding light on the human world while still showing that they can be appreciated for their distinctive qualities as actualised in the natural environment over and above their literary and symbolic function. In the third section, the paper discusses Plutarch’s collection of elephant lore in the treatise On the Intelligence of Animals (968B-F), and how it highlights the species’ outstanding qualities in their interactions with humans and indicates their active contribution to human society and social ethics. Plutarch shows notable “attentiveness” to elephant specificity in persistently endowing elephants with skills, capacities and agencies that may or may not be explicitly signalled in the texts, but still await detection and close analysis so as to unearth hidden zoohistories and uncover this uncharted strand of his thinking on animals and its rich afterlife in the medieval period.