Free Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino Page A

Obviously because it is the biggest animal (and Pliny’s treatment of living creatures continues according to an order of importance which largely coincides with that of physical size); but also and particularly because spiritually this is the animal ‘closest to man’! ‘Maximum est elephas proximumque humanis sensibus’, is how Book 8 opens. In fact the elephant — as is explained immediately afterwards — recognises the language of its native land, obeys orders, memorises what he learns, can experience the passion of love and the ambition for glory, practises virtues which are ‘rare even amongst men’, such as probity, prudence, fairness, and even pays religious homage to the stars, the sun and the moon. Pliny does not waste a single word (except that superlative
maximum)
on describing this animal, but simply quotes the quaint legends he has found in books: the rites and customs of elephants are presented as though they were those of a people of a different culture to our own but were still worthy of respect and understanding.
    In the
Natural History
man is lost in the middle of the multiform universe, a prisoner of his own imperfection, but on the one hand he has the solace of knowing that God too is limited in his powers (‘Inperfectae vero in homine naturae praecipua solacia, ne deum quidem posse omnia’, 2.27), and on the other he has as his immediate neighbour the elephant, which can be a spiritual model for him. Caught between these twoimposing but benign eminences, man certainly appears to be diminished but not crushed.
    The survey of land animals moves on — as in a child’s visit to the zoo — from the elephant to the lions, panthers, tigers, camels, giraffes, rhinoceroses and crocodiles. Following a decreasing order of size, we then come to the hyenas, chameleons, porcupines, animals with lairs, and so on down to snails and lizards; pets are grouped together at the end of the book.
    The main source here is Aristotle’s
Historia Animalium (History of Animate Beings)
, but Pliny gathers from more credulous or more imaginative authors the legends which Aristotle either rejected or cited merely to refute them. This is the case both for the account of more familiar animals and for the mention and description of fantastic creatures: the list of the latter is mixed up with that of the former. Thus while still discussing elephants, a digression informs us about their natural enemy, dragons; and talking of wolves, Pliny records the legends about werewolves, though he does criticise Greek credulity. This sort of zoology contains the amphisbaena, the basilisk, the catoblepas, the crocotas, corocottas, leucocrotas, leontophons, and mantichores which will migrate from these pages to populate medieval bestiaries
    The natural history of man continues into that of animals for the whole of Book 8, and this is not only because the ideas quoted deal largely with the rearing of pets and the hunting of wild animals, as well as the practical utility which man derives from both kinds; but because the journey Pliny takes us on is also a journey into the human imagination. Animals, real or imaginary, have a privileged place in the realm of fantasy: the minute such an animal is named it is invested with the power of a phantasm, it becomes an allegory, a symbol, an emblem.
    That is why I recommend the reader to browse and not to dwell just on the most philosophical Books, 2 and 7, but also on Book 8, since it is the most representative of an idea of nature which is articulated consistently throughout all 37 books of the work: nature as something external to humanity, but which is also indistinguishable from what is innermost in man’s mind, his dictionary of dreams and catalogue of fantasies, without which we can have neither reason nor thought.
    [1982]

Nezami’s Seven Princesses
    Belonging to a polygamous rather than a monogamous culture certainly makes things very different. At least in narrative structure (the only