Readers of the Living. Interpretive Mastery and Natural Thinking in Plutarch, Celsus, Origen, and Porphyry

This article examines the intersection between imperial writings on animals and post-Hellenistic debates about exegesis. It is the first study to argue that interpreters drawing on Aristotelian theories of voice and Hellenistic ideas of natural sympathy treated the meaningful but non-verbal animal as a test case of nature’s availability to reading, and as an opportunity to reflect on how exegetes transfer their skills between literature and the natural world. Four texts illustrate, through different genres and techniques, how their authors used animal behaviour both to shape and address questions of philosophical hermeneutics. Part 1 considers selected works by Plutarch that link literary competence with natural reasoning (On the Cleverness of Animals) and propose a form of isomorphism between nature and literature (Gryllus). Part 2 turns to a non-zoological text, Origen’s Contra Celsum, showing how it brings animal creation into a broader discussion of scriptural authority and interpretation. Part 3 reads Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animates as an interpretive manifesto that treats human–animal relations as an entry point into Porphyry’s wider exploration of cosmic interconnectedness and the possibility of reading the world as, and through, literature.