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

Cleon of embezzling money while campaigning on the island. 271 The allusion to this
event is also apparent in the pun that involves the name of the general Laches and that of
the dog Labes, which, as mentioned earlier, means “Grabber.” 272 It is clear, therefore,
that Aristophanes uses the stealing of food by Labes as an allusion to the stealing of
money by a real politician. But the scene with Labes, when seen in isolation, is
particularly instructive, for it shows that canine behavior was observed in real life. When
Xanthias describes Labes’ behavior to Bdelycleon, for example, he maintains that the dog
dashed through into the kitchen (para|&caj). 273 This is a type of behavior that indicates
agility and swiftness, both of which are features essential to cunning intelligence known
as mh~tij and shown earlier to be a canine quality. 274
Taken together, the incidents of dogs’ stealing and eating food that are described
in the Knights and the Wasps are two identical versions of the same intention: to highlight
and, at the same time, ridicule the stealing of public money by political figures. The use
of canine behavior as a metaphor for describing human behavior suggests that
271 For this event being taken from real life, and for the prosecution of Laches by Cleon, which is
mentioned earlier in the play (Vesp. 240-244), see S. D. Olson, “Politics and Poetry in Aristophanes’
Wasps,” TAPA 126 (1996) 138-139; D. M. McDowell, Aristophanes and Athens. An Introduction to the
Plays (Oxford, 1995) 167.
272 For the ways in which various characters in the comedies of Aristophanes are named, and the use to
which these names are put within the wider context of each play, see S. D. Olson, “Names and Naming in
Aristophanic Comedy,” CQ 42 (1992) 304-319.
273 Labes’ behavior brings to mind the story of the dog dashing through the Erechtheion, a story quoted by
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Dinarchus 3) who, in turn, attributes it to Philochorus, a fourth-century
B.C. scholar-historian and a contemporary of Dinarchus, the last of the canon of ten Attic orators.
According to J. G. Frazer, Pausanias’s Description of Greece (London, 1898; second ed., 1913) 338, the
story of Philochorus runs as follows: “On the Acropolis the following portent took place. A bitch entered
the temple of the Polias, and having gone down into the Pandrosium, ascended the altar of Zeus of the
Courtyard which stands under the olive-tree, and there lay down. Now it is an old established custom with
the Athenians that no dog shall ascend the Acropolis.”
274 Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence 30, do not refer to explicit examples of animals who are
agile and swift, but consider the qualities of agility, suppleness, swiftness, and mobility as fundamental to
both huntsmen and fishermen, who in order to be successful need to exhibit mh~tij that surpasses that of
their prey. Such attitude, they state, accords well with “the one unalterable rule for animals and men alike,
be they hunting or fishing: the only way to get better of a polumh~tij one (‘one with a lot of mh~tij’) is to
exhibit even more mh~tij.”
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