Animals as Individuals in Anyte of Tegea

Abstract:This article explores a tension in the animal epigrams of Anyte of Tegea, the inventor of the animal and pastoral epigram. It argues that, on the one hand, the genre of funerary epigram encourages Anyte to think about animals as individuals, with their own particular personalities, biographies, and interests, as well about the particularity of their relationships with the human companions who speak the epigrams. On the other hand, Anyte's repeated use of the conventions of funerary rhetoric and Homeric and Hesiodic intertextuality, while commemorating the lives of the animal individuals depicted in her epigrams, also abstract from the individuality and animality of the animals that Anyte commemorates. The question of depicting animals as individuals—rather than as tokens of species or as merely functions or commodities in human society—is an increasingly important issue in Animals Studies. This article begins by surveying recent philosophical and ethical positions presented by theorists in Animals Studies and ultimately locates the origin of the question of representing animals as individuals in Derrida's late work The Animal That Therefore I Am. It then proceeds to use this question to pose new, close readings of a selection of Anyte's animal epigrams, asking how she represents animals as individuals, and concludes by claiming that the animal individuals of Anyte's poetry are truly liminal beings: neither pets, nor labor or wild animals, nor thoroughly anthropomorphized persons. It is this complexity in the status of the animals in Anyte's epigrams that makes the poems (and the animals) so compelling and such good examples of the tensions not only in her own poetry but also in discussions about the representation of animals in literature today.