The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

thing is possible then,” said I, “and it is not an unnatural requirement that we are
looking for in our guardian.” “It seems not.” (Resp. 375d-375e) [147]
Plato’s interlocutors appear to be well acquainted with the behavior of the dog as a
guardian: gentle toward familiar faces and aggressive toward strangers. 250 They know
that such a contrasting behavior was dictated by circumstance, yet they believe that it was
not unrelated to the natural disposition of the animal. The discussion therefore sheds
light on the way observation of and ideas about the dog assisted in the interpretation of its
behavior within fourth-century Greek society. What the discussion does not reveal,
however, is whether the contrast in this behavior cast the dog in a negative light.
We get a sense that it did from an earlier text, a fragment of Sophocles that
preserves the following exclamation: “You fawn on men as you bite them and are a
treacherous dog” (885 Radt) [186]. The speaker addresses a dog directly, pointing out
the combination of two acts in its behavior that occur simultaneously and are conflicting:
fawning and biting. 251 The regard of this combination as inappropriate is emphasized by
the characterization of the dog as treacherous. The term implies that deception,
untrustworthiness, and danger were all aspects of this dog’s inappropriate behavior, but it
does not indicate whether such behavior was considered typical of all dogs. What
strengthens the last possibility is the well-known behavior of Cerberus, the loyal
250 This type of canine behavior features also in the Odyssey (16.4-16.10), where Eumaeus’s watchdogs
fawn on Telemachos, whom they already know, but (14.29-14.30) they are aggressive towards Odysseus,
whom they have never seen before.
251 Modern studies on the behavior of dogs guarding livestock also mark the ambiguity of their behavior.
As R. Coppinger and R. Schneider, “Evolution of Working Dogs,” in J. Serpell, ed., The Domestic Dog: Its
Evolution, Behavior and Interactions with People (Cambridge, 1995) state: “guarding dogs protect by
disrupting predators by means of behavior that is ambiguous or contextually inappropriate: barking, tail
wagging, social greeting, play behavior, and, occasionally, aggression.” D. McFarland, ed., The Oxford
Companion to Animal Behavior (Oxford and New York, 1982) 15-16, speaks of ambivalent behavior in
animals as “typical of a conflict situation in which an animal has simultaneous tendencies to perform two
incompatible activities,” and also “of threat situations in which there is generally a conflict between attack
and escape.”
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