Figurative uses of animal names in Latin and their ... - mura di tutti

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object to another, it is essential for at least one property to
be the common possession of each. For instance, a metal
is unstable. Mercury is ever on the wing. The similarity,
as seen in the continual motion of both, causes an easy
transfer of the god's name to the metal.
The points of contact between the animals and the mili-
tary instruments to which the animal names are applied
will be found for the most part in two things : first, in the
shape, generally of a part of the body, as the horn, mandi-
bles, jaws, shell; secondly, in actions, as kicking, biting,
burrowing.®'^
ARIES, Gk. Kpuk Ram ;
Instrument.
transf., A Battering
As military machines, like all mechanisms, must go
through a long process of evolution, it is evident without
demonstration that the principle of the battering instrument
was recognized and employed before the term /eptos
{aries) was applied to it.^® The question before us, then,
is to decide whether the device lived a rather anonymous
sort of existence under the general term /irjxO'V^ until one
end was finally shaped to resemble a ram's head ; or whether
the similarity in the method of attack inspired the use of
the term k/)w's, this in turn, combined perhaps with the use
of Kea\'^ for the end of the beam, suggesting the fashion-
ing of the ram's head.
An explanation of the transfer in meaning of aries would
seem like ' carrying coals to Newcastle,' were it not for the
fact that late Roman writers specifically attribute the fig-
urative use to the shape of the end of the beam.
In one passage Ammianus implies this : cum
iam . . . aries
In the following pages some citations descriptive of animal life will
be made, in order to give a Greek or Roman background for the change,
or to show how similar were the words applied to the animals and the
machines. Some such passages will be of a date later than the transfer,
though even these may reflect the views of authors far earlier, especially
in the case of the Natural History of Pliny and the Lexicon of Suidas.
"Thuc. ii, 76, 4, speaks of a battering device under the title /ajSoX^ij.
Apparently the first use of the term Kpibs for the instrument is in Xen.
Cyr. vii, 4, i.