Cruelty and Sentimentality: Greek Attitudes to Animals 600-300 BC

One of the significant problems in studying ancient Greece is that surviving literary and artistic evidence strongly emphasises elite values and activities, leaving the commonplace relatively untreated. The purpose of this work is to attempt recovery of ordinary, everyday human-animal relationships, to enhance our understanding of animals fundamental social and practical roles in ancient Greece. Thus the focus is not the depiction of animals as art, or narratives about them, but literary evidence, artefacts, and animal remains as historical records, revealing a Greek social history of human-animal relationships.