Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals

Claudius Aelianus (author), Gregory McNamee (editor)

An entertaining, fanciful, and sometimes suspect Roman-era encyclopedia of off-color animal behaviors

The legends and innovations of the Roman Empire have been instilled in us since childhood. We know the great stories of legal and political governance, all-knowing gods and goddesses, military power and conquest, and developments in science and engineering. But we have known little, until now, about their knowledge of the animal kingdom—which was, by far, the most advanced in world history, thanks to the encyclopedic observations of Claudius Aelianus. Sometimes insightful, accurate, and scientific, and at other times fanciful, humorous, and bizarre, this collection of second-century insights offers the ultimate historically based entertainment for animal and nature lovers alike.

Accolades

Winner of Independent Publisher's Gold Award (classics & philosophy)

Praise

“A fascinating caricature of our tendency to imbue the minds of others, be they animal or human, with the characteristics, qualities, and motives of our own.”
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— Brain Pickings

“'If Aelian’s science is sometimes sketchy, the facts often fanciful, and the history sometimes suspect,' McNamee writes, 'it is clear enough that he had a grand time assembling the material.' And so does McNamee. As he points out, 'The Nature of Animals' is 'mostly randomly ordered,' but its often comic trifles make pleasant bedside reading.”

— Washington Post

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Claudius Aelianus

Claudius Aelianus, known to us as Aelian, was born sometime between A.D. 165 and 170 in the hill town of Praeneste, in what is now Palestrina, about twenty-five miles from Rome, Italy. He was fond of making almanac-like collections, only fragments of which survive, devoted to odd topics such as manifestations of the divine, the workings of the supernatural, and observations on the animal kindgom.

Gregory McNamee

Gregory McNamee is a writer, editor, photographer, and publisher. He is the author or title-page editor of thirty-five books and more than 4,000 articles, essays, reviews, interviews, editorials, poems, and short stories. He is a consultant, contributor, and contributing editor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and its blog, a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews, and a contributing editor to the Bloomsbury Review. He is a research associate at the Southwest Center and a lecturer in the Eller...