Shameless by Franco Cristiana

Author:Franco, Cristiana
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520273405
Publisher: University of California Press

Conclusion

The account has come full circle, and this foray into the Greek imagination, begun with Pandora, has returned in the end to woman and her “doggish” character—hopefully, with some increased understanding of the problem that initiated this research and, more generally, of the figure of the dog in ancient culture. All that remains is to retrace our path briefly and give a short, comprehensive view of the themes touched upon along the way.

The problem first posed can be summarized as follows: how did the dog, “man’s best friend” in our contemporary culture—indeed, known as Fido (Trusty, Faithful)—in ancient Greece instead get implicated in so many elaborations of a negative sort, becoming a symbol for a hateful inclination to transgress and, above all, used to portray the deceitful and untrustworthy nature of woman? The first necessary step for tackling the argument was to review the state of the question and in particular, to discuss the current explanations of the use of the word kyōn as a pejorative term (chapter 1). The essential difficulty that these explanations face is this: if one supposes as a general rule that an animal name gets enlisted as a term of abuse when the animal so named is held in contempt, it is not at all clear how the name of the dog, an animal highly prized and active in the daily life of Greeks as a crucial collaborator and companion, could have turned into an insult. Nor is it clear exactly what kyōn meant as an insult, when an examination of its uses shows that it assumed quite different meanings at different times.

We have therefore tried to frame the problem by reversing the terms of the question: it’s a matter not of asking how dog became an insult despite the animal’s good reputation and its intimate closeness to man but of understanding whether perhaps kyōn afforded insults precisely because of the dog’s nearness to the human community. This reversal of perspective came about through, among other things, an analysis of comparative evidence and, above all, the realization that the seemingly paradoxical situation of the Greek dog was in reality a sort of anthropological universal: in very many societies where the dog is considered an intelligent animal, communicative, an effective helper and trusted collaborator, where dogs are allowed to be present in the culture’s ordered spaces and even inside human houses, the word dog is injurious and recurs in expressions of a derogatory nature.

The first step was to consult ancient sources to corroborate whether and in what specific ways the dog in Greece was considered close to humans. To this end, we have adopted the categories “metonymic”/“metaphorical” and “subject”/“object,” proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe the position of different animal categories in the cultural taxonomy of modern France. We found (see chapter 2) that in ancient representations, from the most archaic periods down to the Roman Empire, dogs seem fully incorporated in society, not only because they participated as table companions in human rituals of eating

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