5. Sixty different species of flower: P. C. Candargy, La Végétation de l’île de Lesbos (Lille: Bigot frères, 1899), 1–39.
6. Lesbos … is also an island of migrants: The human migrants who arrive on Lesbos today are detained and deported. In the summer of 2009, the new Greek government temporarily closed a notorious detention center on the island built to imprison the hundreds of Afghan or Somalian migrants—men, women, and children—who cross the dangerous nine-mile sea channel between Turkey and Lesbos every month on their route west to Europe fleeing persecution or war zones. What he saw was “worse than Dante’s hell,” a Greek minister told journalists. Niki Kitsantonis, “Migrants Reaching Greece Despite Efforts to Block Them,” New York Times, November 18, 2009.
7. Aristotle had lived a charmed life in Athens: R. E. Wycherley, “Peripatos: The Athenian Philosophical Scene—II,” Greece and Rome, 2nd series, vol. 9, no. 1 (1962): 2–21.
8. “In Athens things that are proper for a citizen”: Anton-Hermann Chroust, Aristotle: New Light on His Life, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 1:158.
9. Philip of Macedonia laid siege to the important coastal city: See J. R. Ellis, Philip II and Macedonian Imperialism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 95–100.
10. “an evil-doer and curious person”: Plato’s Apology from Plato, Five Great Dialogues of Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, translated by Benjamin Jowett (Claremont, Calif.: Coyote Canyon Press, 2009), 20–21.
11. his extensive library: On early libraries, see Jeno Platthy, Sources on the Earliest Greek Libraries with the Testimonia (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968).
12. making his way to the Macedonian court in Pella: Although there is no proof that Aristotle stopped at Pella on his way east, it seems likely to several Aristotle scholars that, given his ambassadorial role in the court at Atarneus and Philip’s investment in Aristotle’s relationship with Hermias, he would have needed to meet with Philip directly to discuss his future. See in particular Chroust, Aristotle, 159.
13. “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world”: Herman Melville (1851), Moby-Dick, ch. 1, “Loomings.” On Greek travel by sea and by road, see Lionel Casson, Travel in the Ancient World (London: Book Club Associates, 2005), ch. 4.
14. Aristotle flourished in Hermias’ court: Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948; first published 1934), 114.
15. Philosophy starts in wonder and wonderment: Aristotle, The History of Animals, 982b12ff.
16. the island of Lesbos: See also Mason, “Romance in a Limestone Landscape,” 263–66. Even the ancient descriptions of the towns of Lesbos are dazzling. The earliest description of Mytilene, the largest city on Lesbos, where Aristotle lived most of the time during his stay there, conveys something of the white, watery light that must have made everything shimmer. Longus, who lived on the island in the second century AD, opens his pastoral tale Daphnis and Chloe with a description of Mytilene, the romantic city of his childhood: “There is in Lesbos a large and beautiful city called Mytilene. It is intersected by canals, where the sea flows inland, and decorated with bridges of polished stone. You will think, when you see it, that it is not so much a city as an island.” Elsewhere he describes a sacred cave that has nymphs carved into the rock face and water gushing out and flowing away in a stream.
17. Alcaeus wrote of the “bloom of soft autumn”: Alcaeus 397, 367, 347(a), 345, cited in Peter Green, Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 60.
18. Sappho described an orchard: Sappho frr 136, 105(a), 117A, 156, translated by David A. Campbell, cited in Peter Green, Lesbos and the Cities of Asia Minor (Austin: Dougherty Foundation, 1984), 21–22.
19. For two years the beautiful sea lagoon at Pyrra: For the full story of the significance of the fish of Lesbos and how they have shaped understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy, see D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Aristotle as a Biologist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913); H.D.P. Lee, “Place-Names and the Date of Aristotle’s Biological Works,” Classical Quarterly 42 (1948): 61–67; and Frank Solmsen, “The Fishes of Lesbos and Their Alleged Significance for the Development of Aristotle,” Hermes 106 (1978): 467–84.
20. His zoological questions multiplied here: Thompson, On Aristotle as a Biologist, 50.
21. the fishermen had built walkways and piers: Anna Marguerite McCann, “The Harbour and Fishery Remains at Cosa, Italy,” Journal of Field Archaeology 6, no. 4 (1979): 391–411.
22. In the introduction to Parts of Animals: Jaeger, Aristotle, 337.
23. “If any person thinks the examination”: Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I.5, 645a27–30, translated by William Ogle.
24. Aristotle would lie for several hours on a small platform: See Jason A. Tipton, “Aristotle’s Observations of the Foraging Interactions of the Red Mullet and Sea Bream,” Archives of Natural History 35, no. 1 (2008): 164–71, and Tipton, “Aristotle’s Study of the Animal World: The Case of the Kobios and the Phucis,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49, no. 3 (2006): 369–83. The great authority on Greek fish is D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, A Glossary of Greek Fishes (London: Oxford University Press, 1947).
25. the two fish eat different things, too: “Other fishes feed habitually on mud or sea-weed or sea-moss or on stalk-weed or growing plants; like the phucis, and the goby; and by the way, the only meat that the phucis will touch is that of prawns”: Aristotle, The History of Animals, 591b10, translated by William Ogle.
26. So why are two fish so similar: D. Balme, “The Place of Biology in Aristotle’s Philosophy,” in Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox, eds., Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 301.
27. Nature itself was perfect: See John C. Greene (1992), “From Aristotle to Darwin: Reflections on Ernst Mayr’s Interpretation in The Growth of Biological Thought,” Journal of the History of Biology 25, no. 2 (1992): 257–84.
28. Once the pile of collated facts about animals: See G.E.R. Lloyd, “The Evolution of Evolution: Greco-Roman Antiquity and the Origin of Species,” in his Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2006), 10–11.
29. “Oviparous fish as a rule spawn only once a year”: Aristotle, The History of Animals, 567b12.
30. Theophrastus was studying the plants of the lagoon: Decades later in Athens, Theophrastus would write up those plant notes into a book that would be one of the most important works on plants from the ancient world: Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants.
31. He called them “dualisers” or “borderliners”: The Greek word is epamphoterizein, which David Balme in Aristotle, History of Animals, Books 7–10, edited and translated by D. M. Balme (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1991) translates as “tend to both sides” but which Geoffrey Lloyd translates, following A. L. Peck, as “dualise” in G.E.R. Lloyd, “Fuzzy Natures,” in his Aristotelian Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72.
32. They appeared to straddle the two kingdoms: See Lloyd, “Evolution of Evolution,” 12.
33. the language he used in his notes wavered a little: See G.E.R. Lloyd’s wonderful essay of 1996, “Fuzzy Natures,” 68–83.
34. “The boundary and the middle, between the non-living and the animals”: Aristotle, The History of Animals, 588b5f.
35. “as regards certain things in the sea”: Ibid., 588b12f.
36. “how to classify them is unclear”: Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 681a28.
37. A single sponge diver took his place: This account is based on a detailed description of ancient Greek sponge-diving practice in Oppian, Halieutica 5, 612–74, written between AD 170 and 180. I am assuming that sponge-diving practices had changed little between Aristotle and Oppian. Aristotle mentions the use of a sort of air-supply diving bell in his Problemata: “In order that these fishers of
sponges may be supplied with a facility of respiration, a kettle is let down to them, not filled with water, but with air, which constantly assists the submerged man; it is forcibly kept upright in its descent, in order that it may be sent down at an equal level all around, to prevent the air from escaping and the water from entering,” translated by E. S. Forster, cited in Frank J. Frost, “Scyllias: Diving in Antiquity,” Greece and Rome 15, no. 2 (1968): 180–85, 183.
38. No one asked the sponge divers questions as Aristotle did: See Eleni Voultsiadou and Dimitris Vafidis, “Marine Invertebrate Diversity in Aristotle’s Biology,” Contributions to Zoology 76 (2007): 103–20; on diving, see Frost, “Scyllias: Diving in Antiquity,” 180–85.
39. The local people had myths to explain everything: See Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Palaeontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010; first published 2000). Mayor proposes that some of these more bizarre speculations may have come about because of speculations on fossils.
40. “Coming to be and passing away”: Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, Book 11, ch. 10.
41. “For becoming starts from non-being”: Aristotle, The History of Animals, 741b22–4; cited in Marjorie Grene, A Portrait of Aristotle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 64.
42. the bold propositions of his predecessors: Lloyd, “Evolution of Evolution,” 4–5.
43. “Empedocles was wrong”: Cited in ibid., 6.
44. Aristotle was extraordinary and radical: See Jonathan Barnes, Greek Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
45. In Aristotle’s world, all species were fixed: Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press, 1982), 89.
46. Aristotle was the first to see gradation in nature: See ibid., 305–7, and Lloyd, Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science.
47. knowledge could be based only on what was fixed: See Grene, Portrait of Aristotle, 65, 136–37.
48. Aristotle’s philosophical landscape differed profoundly from ours: See Lloyd, “Evolution of Evolution,” 1–15.
49. After Aristotle died: I am indebted here to G.E.R. Lloyd’s insightful conclusions about evolutionary speculation in ancient Greece and Rome in ibid., 12–15.
3. THE WORSHIPFUL CURIOSITY OF JAHIZ
1. the port city of Basra: See Guy Le Strange, Baghdad During the Abbasid Caliphate: From Contemporary Arabic and Persian Sources (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900). “Mirbad” means literally “kneeling place for camels.” In writing this chapter, I depended on the scholarship and knowledge of Professor James Montgomery, professor of classical Arabic at the University of Cambridge, who generously allowed me access to his forthcoming monograph on Jahiz’s Hayawan.
2. by the ninth century it was the busiest part of the city: See A. J. Naji and Y. N. Ali, “The Suqs of Basrah: Commercial Organization and Activity in a Medieval Islamic City,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 24, no. 3 (1981): 298–309. On Basra and the Mirbad, see Charles Pellat, Le Milieu basrien and la formation de Gahiz (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1953); Régis Blachère, Histoire de la littérature arabe des origines à la fin du XVe siècle (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1964), 3:527; and Hourari Touati, Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
3. Jahiz, who may have been of part African descent: See Charles Pellat, introduction to Charles Pellat, ed., The Life and Works of Jahiz, translated by D. M. Hawke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 2.
4. listening and talking to the Bedouins in the Mirbad: “Iraq is the eye of the world,” Jahiz wrote, quoting an eighth-century scholar who built a house right in the Mirbad, “Basra is the eye of Iraq and the Mirbad is the eye of Basra”: ibid., 192.
5. Jahiz … came close to a theory of evolution and natural selection: The first scholar to make this claim was the distinguished encyclopedist of science history George Sarton in 1927. In the first of the three volumes of his An Introduction to the History of Science (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1927) he claimed that Jahiz’s work contained “the germs of many later theories (evolution, adaptation, animal psychology)” (597). In 1966, the Jahiz scholar and translator Charles Pellat in an entry on “Hayawan” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam claimed, “[In the Kitab al-Hayawan, Jahiz] sketches a theory of evolution which is not without interest” (3:312); in 1983, Dr. Mehmet Bayrakdar in “Al-Jahiz and the Rise of Biological Evolution,” Islamic Quarterly, Third Quarter, made a series of significantly larger claims, specifically that Jahiz “described the Struggle for Existence, Transformation of Species into each other and Environmental Factors” (310), that “he profoundly affected the development of zoology and biology” (312), and that “Jahiz and other evolutionist Muslim thinkers influenced Darwin and his predecessors” (313). Bayrakdar’s claims were challenged in 2002 by Frank E. Egerton in “A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 6: Arabic Language Science—Origins and Zoological Writings,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 142–46. In 2000, Ahmed Aarab, Philippe Provençal, and Mohamed Idaomar made a more subtle series of claims about the presence of ideas about biodiversity, food chains, animal adaptation, migration, and hibernation in Jahiz’s work in “Eco-Ethological Data According to Jahiz Through His Work ‘Kitab al-Hayawan,’ ” Arabica 47 (2000): 278–86.
6. some even allege that Darwin stole Jahiz’s work: One blog writer claims that her history teacher told her that she had once traveled to the British Museum Library in search of Jahiz’s Living Beings and found the book was missing. Consulting the records, she discovered that the last person to sign out the book had been Darwin and that he had never returned it. The writer concludes that Origin of Species is “quite possibly one of the most profound plagiarisms of history.” See http://uiforum.uaeforum.org/showthread.php?6582-Early-Islamic-scholars-on-evolution.
7. A man with pale skin, a flushed face, and bloodshot eyes: This story was widely circulated in the ninth century and recorded in the tenth century by Al-Nadim, a chronicler of his times and particularly of the Arabian publishing world. Bayard Dodge, ed., The Fihrist of Al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, 2 vols. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970), 2:583–84.
8. the remainder of Aristotle’s works were lost: See Sidney H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
9. the desire to rediscover and translate lost knowledge: Classical scholars Dimitri Gutas and George Saliba disagree about the motivating forces behind the translation movement. Gutas emphasizes the caliphs as directors of the movement, whereas Saliba sees translation as being triggered by social change brought about by competition for patronage among the court officials and administrators.
10. “And behold,” he reported in awe: Dodge, Fihrist of Al-Nadim, 2:585–86; the editor, Bayard Dodge, speculates about this story and the location of the temple: “The building was very likely … near Ephesus or Miletus. By the tenth century, the great temple of Apollo Didymaeus at Branchidae near Miletus and the famous library at Pergamum were almost certainly in ruins. It is likely therefore that this library was a second-century building at Ephesus with the famous temple of Diana near by.”
11. what became known as the House of Wisdom: The concrete realities of the House of Wisdom are frustratingly elusive; for a popular account, see Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), and also books by the classical scholars Gutas and Saliba.
12. competing to commission translations: For an analysis of the numerous ways in which scholars have described the translation movement and for an astute defense of the plurality of these encounters, see James E. Montgomery, “Islamic Crosspollinations,” in Anna Akasoy, James E. Montgomery, and Peter E. Pormann, eds., Islamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East (Cambridge: E.J.W. Gib
b Memorial Trust, 2007), and Roshdi Rashed, “Greek into Arabic,” in James E. Montgomery, ed., Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy: From the Many to the One (Leuven: Peeters, 2006).
13. The invention of paper further revolutionized: Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 49.
14. Cheap paper meant that books could be produced more easily: Ibid., 47–56.
15. Jahiz was an adib, a writer of the adab: The literary historian Tarif Khalidi describes the adab as “a system for the study of nature and society … that eschews narrow specialization in favour of a discursive, multifaceted approach, willing to investigate all natural and social phenomena in a tolerant and sceptical spirit”: Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104.
16. booksellers in the Mirbad: On the booksellers’ suqs of the Mirbad, see Naji and Ali, “Suqs of Basrah,” 303.
17. Jahiz would rent whole shops for the night: Dodge, Fihrist of Al-Nadim, 2:255.
18. the zoological gardens of the Abbasid caliphate: See Qasim Al-Samarrai, “The Abbasid Gardens in Baghdad and Samarra,” Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation 2002, 1–10, www.muslimheritage.com/uploads/ACF9F4.pdf.
19. now partially translated into Arabic: On the translation of Aristotle’s works into Arabic and Syriac and on the translation movement more generally, see F. E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam (New York: New York University Press; London: University of London Press, 1968), and D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998).
20. Sometime around 846–47 he hatched the idea: For the arguments about the date of its composition, see Sa’id H. Mansur, “The World View of al-Jahiz,” in Kitab al-Hayawan (Alexandria: Dar al-Maare, 1977), 92–96.
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