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

2. Zw|~on in the Fifth Century B.C.
A. Literary Texts
Two authors of the fifth century B.C. use the term zw|~on and its derivative
zw|&dion in contexts that are directly associated with the visual arts: Empedocles and
Herodotus. In the works of these authors, the terms zw|~on and zw|&dion carry the
meanings of “image,” “subject of representation,” “representations of both animate and
inanimate subjects taken from real life,” and “decorative element.” The terms are used in
connection with a variety of media, namely, painting, sculpture, bronze work, and
textiles. The text of Herodotus in particular, carries instances of zw|~on standing for the
absence of a distinction between image and subject.
Empedocles
The earliest fifth-century text in which zw|~on appears is a fragment of
Empedocles. Preserved in an extract from Theophrastus’ treatise On Piety (IV-III B.C.)
that itself survives in Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals (A.D. III), the
fragment points to the meaning of zw|~on as an image of some kind, most likely, a picture:
Theophrastus uses examples from many ancestral customs of different
peoples to show that the ancient form of sacrifice was of crops; he says too that
even earlier grass was collected. He also explains libations, as follows. For most
people, ancient rites were sober: libations of water are sober, and so are the
libations of honey which came after them (for this was the first liquid crop we had
to hand, taken from the bees). Then there were libations of oil, and finally, last of
all, came libations of wine.
Evidence for this comes not only from the kubreis, which are really a kind
of transcription of the Corybantic rites from Crete, but also from Empedocles,
who comments on sacrifices in expounding his theory:
No Ares was to them a god, no Battle-noise,
No Zeus was king, no Kronos, no Poseidon:
Kypris was queen—
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