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Dogs in Ancient Greece with Dr. Alyce Cannon (Part 2) - Ep 06
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In this episode of ethnocynology David sits down with Dr Alyce Cannon for part two of their episode on dogs in ancient Greece.
In the previous episode, Dr. Cannon brought up some fascinating topics about dogs in the classical world, specifically Athens, after catching up on life for a bit.
At the end of the episode, he left it up to the audience to submit some questions for Dr. Cannon for part two.
In this episode, David asks Dr. Cannon about dogs and ancient Greek warfare, life at home, and whether or not dogs were kept as pets.
They then dive into the questions post by the audience in the previous episodes YouTube comments, one specifically regarding dogs, helping the disabled in the ancient world.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ethnocynology/06
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Transcript
Introduction and Dr. Cannon's Background
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:13
Speaker
ah Welcome to episode six of Ethnocyanology. I'm here again with Dr. Elise Cannon, our friend from I don't want to be cliche with Down Under. So last time we talked about her PhD dissertation and her work in Greece. And this time I was going to ask her some more questions and some that you guys had too, because this is a fascinating topic I could talk about for hours. So how are you doing, by the way? I'm good. Thanks for having me on again. It's fun. I never do stuff like this. so You don't get to talk about dogs all day with people. I do, but I'm not really, I haven't really done podcasts before. So I'm always a bit self-conscious about my accent and how I come across if I'm being a bit too spectrumy or not. So you're fine. I think for Americans, an Australian accent is always like.
00:01:03
Speaker
pleasing or funny. It's never bad. I think so and yours is i wouldn't say yours is like funny. It's just a normal Australian accent. I mean, i can I can really put it on if you like.
00:01:14
Speaker
yeah But I'm white. Okay. Well, you can answer the first question in that X.
Identifying Ancient Greek Dog Breeds
00:01:21
Speaker
I'm just kidding. I get asked a lot, when do breeds come about? And I usually say the Neolithic because that's when you have time to breed, you know, there's intensification and division of labor and probably have dog breeders. But I imagine in your period of expertise, there's a lot of different breeds and stuff going on. Can you speak anything to that? Or is that a thing?
00:01:41
Speaker
Crikey. Yeah. It definitely is. No, I'm not going to do it. I can't. It even hurts my throat a little bit. Fair enough. Yeah. Fair enough, mate. Fair enough.
00:01:55
Speaker
but It's hard to tell with ancient Greece because the the textual and the iconographic evidence, they have similarities but also a lot of differences. so Our ancient sources tend to, when they're talking about dogs in Greece, they tend to talk about them from the region that they're from. So they'll have like Laconian or Spartan, Cretan, Melothian, Melosian. So they're all different regions and settlements in Greece. And then when you look to the iconographic, it's just kind of like a general
00:02:39
Speaker
hunting, sight hound kind of dog. chair So, but they would, according to those different regions, be called different things. So we know that for hunting the Laconian, like, so that sort of Spartan Peloponnesian area, that was the best for hunting and coursing, like going after hare and deer and things. Whereas the Molossus is a much bigger dog that we don't have a lot of visual evidence for.
00:03:08
Speaker
But there's textual evidence saying that that was good for sort of taking down larger game, but not as good with the coursing, the going after the hairs and the rabbits sort of thing. So when you're trying to identify on a vase or a statue, what kind of dog it might be, it's just kind of all you can say really is it's probably a hunting type dog. Sure.
00:03:35
Speaker
But then when you have the little dogs that I talked about in my last podcast with you, they look so different to the big dogs that they're much there. They're drawn with a much more defined like longer coats and things and they're with women and children.
00:03:52
Speaker
as much as they are with male figures on Barr's painting. So you can kind of, you can pick those ones a mile away. times But also there's a lot of debate about whether or not those little dogs, they're only melatines. They could be a cacone, which is like a, a still a breed that's in Greece today and in Turkey as well. So it's very hard to tell. There's some good avenues for research, I think.
Genetic Research on Ancient Dog Breeds
00:04:19
Speaker
at the University of Exeter, they're starting to do like DNA and genetic testing on dog bones, and um well, I want to do the dog bones, but there's other people working on horses and cattle to kind of figure out some more like morphological qualities and also some phenotypes as well to see what they were eating, what kind of coats they might have had, and that'll give us like a better evidence-based for identifying animals on and dogs especially on vases and things and trying to tease out if it might be a different breed. Okay. It's a tricky one. I bet, yeah. What does the pottery indicate? Because I know there's dogs in there, but
00:05:03
Speaker
I was talking with Flint Dibble on a couple of podcasts ago and he was saying that, you know, it's just the artist's discretion on those things. So how do we know exactly what the dogs or if they were that small or they were just made small to fit the perspective of the vase or whatever? Exactly. Does art impact your idea on that at all?
00:05:22
Speaker
It does, especially if we're fortunate enough to have a vase that specifies the type. So there's this an etching of a vase that is like so much of classical archaeology now lost to us. So it could be from you know things that happened in museums in World War Two.
00:05:47
Speaker
Some vases kind of get lost or go into the private market and they're really hard to keep track of after that. Getting much better now, but obviously, you know, 70, 80 years ago, a very different scenario. But this particular etching, it has this little fluffy dog and it says melatine on it. And the guy is walking it like with a lead, basically. So and that's dated to about 500 B.C. So when you have stuff like that, you're like, OK.
00:06:17
Speaker
We can be reasonably certain. It could also just be referring to the island of Milletay or, you know, it could be alluding to a particularly sweet scene because, you know, Miller has connotations of honey and sweetness. So there's all different ways that you could read it, but it's more likely that it's referring to the type of dog that's there. But you you don't really get it with hunting type dogs and you never get it with the larger dogs that you'd associate with guarding. So it's it's hard work. You kind of have to go through every single vase out there. I mean, when I did my initial research for this, I think I came across Slag.
00:07:02
Speaker
fifteen or sixteen hundred vases, just Athenian made vases that had dolls on them. Yeah, and trying to kind of go through all of those, which I did. And it just it took so long figuring out the different scenes. And it's near impossible to pick out if something is a what we would call a breed or a type today. And yeah, Flint is right. It is down to artists discretion. Anyone that's ever seen, you know, some ancient Greek renderings of cats or some other creatures. You're like, I don't know if I've ever seen one before. Maybe someone's describing it to them. yeah Maybe they don't like them. I don't know. So it's hard to, you look at it and you're like, that's weird.
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah. but And also with vase painting, there's a lot of stuff about status, right? So people or human figures, especially they might be represented in different scale to one another for to indicate status. So there's just so many different ways that you can read a vase. Um, that's kind of why we need that sort of goods, like zoo, archeological base, um, those data sets in there. so that we might be able to compare different regions with the dog bone samples that we have, especially in burials and stuff, and see if maybe we can tease out just like Vanessa a bit more. Right.
Research Resources for Ancient Greek Dogs
00:08:28
Speaker
And something I ran into in my research for like dog domestication and like dogs in various indigenous cultures, like there's no database, for me at least, in prehistoric archaeology of images with dogs or rock art with dogs or what books mentioned. You just got to go to the index and the glossary and stuff.
00:08:49
Speaker
for you was there a pretty easy way to search for like dogs in pottery or in texts or was it kind of just mining information the same way like most and archaeologists would have to thankfully with classics so i imagine it's pretty well documented absolutely and there are so many excellent resources out there for anyone you know whether or not you're fluent in you know, reading ancient Greek or Latin or not, if you know. And that's this is a quick Google, by the way, you just Google ancient Greek word for dog, ancient like the Latin word for dog. And then there are all of these amazing databases. and There's one called Perseus that a lot of people look at that has literally every single or basically every single ancient text that's been digitized. And and you can do keyword searches.
00:09:44
Speaker
And you pop in, you know, Keon in Greek and it'll come up with every single time that has been mentioned and it's also um declined for you. So it'll find all the different ways that that particular base word comes up. And then from there, you can look for similar or like words that come from the original noun, all of that sort of stuff. And Then it's tricky because then you've kind of got to go through all of these texts to figure out what the hell is going on, but if the dog's just being mentioned passingly or if it's part of a ah bigger part of that narrative. And then with vase painting, there's an amazing resource called the Beasley archive pottery database. And that's just kind of like the standard for anyone who wants to have a look at ancient Greek vases.
00:10:37
Speaker
Let's run out of the University of Oxford, all free available online. And you can go in by like fabric, so where it was like the style where it was made. If you want black figure, red figure or white ground, you can do vase shapes. And there's also really awesome keywords.
00:10:55
Speaker
So you can put in dog or dogs, youths, children, hunting, and it'll come up with every single documented extant vase that we have with those particular scene markers on them because it's a database. Yeah, it's amazing. And they were kind of like the baseline. things that I would use. There's also you know ancient Greek and Latin dictionaries and stuff that are another part of that, but those are just some really user-friendly sites that anyone can look at. And yeah you can look for anything, like if you want to find a cat on a vase or a rabbits or anything. It's very, very cool.
00:11:35
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah. Looking stuff like control F in any like, you know, research thing is the, probably the best invention of all time. Cause you can go and find stuff, but then you gotta to find the library resources and you gotta to find out what book it's in and then order it, special order it to library. And then yeah, at least in my case. So I imagine it's quite a bit of that too. So I'm glad to know like it was, you know, it works the same way in classics.
Challenges in Ancient Greek Textual Research
00:12:03
Speaker
Yes, there's still so many things we don't have. You know, there's archives and right. You know, very old book collections and stuff that there's only so much that that I love Internet Archive so much, especially the ones that have like scans of proper old books and things. It's great. um I don't know how people did this kind of research 100 years ago. Big props to them because I couldn't do it. That's for sure. I wonder that a lot. Yeah. Yeah, me too. You had to go to the library, pull out an actual book, and just look for the word dog in every instance you could, at least in the glossary. Yeah, there's amazing stories about, you know, some of the people that were really important for ancient Greek art history. One man's called Johann Joachim Winkelmann, and he kind of set up the how we identify ancient statues and stuff. And in terms of like arcade, classical, Hellenistic and Greco-Roman.
00:13:02
Speaker
He had never seen any of these statues in person by the time he'd come up with this theory of periodization, and I find that incredible just by going through just going search yeah looking at the ancient you know texts of Plutarch and Pausanias and being like, okay, this is probably how it looked, so I'm going to identify this particular style from this yeah text. it's like we would get in so much trouble for doing that today. They'd be like, how do you know that? Right. That's really funny. Yeah. Okay. We'll be right back after this commercial break and then talk more with Dr. Elise Cannon about pet breeds and war dogs in ancient Greece. We're back. and The next question I wanted to ask you for sure that's been on my mind is like, I guess I already kind of asked about breeds, but do you know what the,
00:13:56
Speaker
you know, the daily life for a dog was back in ancient Greece. And anyway, could you, I'm sure it differs based on their job or did families have pets, I guess. Yeah, i look I think it's pretty clear that they did, whether or not they conceptualized them as pet in the same way that we do today with all the connotations of the word is a different question. But definitely had dogs around would have interacted with dogs in all different aspects of their day to day life, even if it's dogs
00:14:29
Speaker
that they didn't own but were strays. If you've played your Assassin's Creed Odyssey, they do a pretty good job showing that there are just random dogs and cats and chickens and stuff running around, even in the major cities and definitely in the countryside places. They would have been there, that's just how it is.
00:14:49
Speaker
But you definitely see in ah more affluent households, especially in the time of that, as I said in the last podcast, more wealth coming into Athens. You do start seeing more evidence of dogs specifically in households. And a lot of that is just, can you afford to feed it? Can you afford to look after it? Do you have the time and the resources basically? But otherwise, anyone who's been around Athens in the last 20 years would have seen heaps of street dogs. They're not there anymore. But there's still a lot of street cats and the Athenian people today are so beautiful. They leave out little
00:15:28
Speaker
you know, they make sure everyone's fed and vaccinated and stuff. So I like to think that that's just kind of a basic human caring instinct when it comes to, you know, cats and dogs. Sure. And hopefully it extended back then too. Yeah, I think so. Cool. And then I know we touched on it last time and like, you know, dogs on the front lines and things like that, but can you like, and just I don't want to say tis out, but like any like as much as you want to gush on it. Dogs in like ancient warfare, because that's a question I get all the time and I know nothing about really. There's a dog that's a German Shepherd in the opening scene of Gladiator for some reason.
00:16:09
Speaker
I know. i know this one like My favorite movie of all time, right? All time favorite. it gives It's my comfort movie. I don't care how many errors there are in it. I listen to the soundtrack. Russell Crowe owns my favorite name here in Australia. like okay it's he's It's a part of our, weirdly, a part of our national identity. I think mainly because Rusty's in it.
00:16:32
Speaker
ah But yes, so many things wrong with that movie, especially the dog, not to mention the Germanic language. I think they speak in modern German and that's just not... Sorry for the tismning.
00:16:44
Speaker
no yeah But it's kind of a good segue, actually, because movies like that and articles, blogs, um there's amazing you know like military history magazines, all of that stuff that come out. But it just kind of becomes part of this like general idea that we have that dogs would have just been involved regardless of whether or not we've got it right in terms of how they, what kind of breed or aesthetic they would have had. And that goes all the way back to the ancient Greek times as well. There's so many, when I was researching for my chapter on war dogs, there are just so many general blogs and articles and stuff just being like, yeah,
00:17:30
Speaker
Greeks used dogs in warfare and it's like ancient Greece was a very diverse place full of different settlements and different like cultural and social identities. So just because you've got evidence of it happening on maybe like the Ionian side or in one of the colonies like near the Near East colonies, that doesn't mean that that's across the board, right? So what that tells us is that there's all different types of ways that what we define as Greece, but like Hellenic cultures would use or not use dogs in battle. There's a great article in, I mean, you've played Rome Total War, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Everyone knows the Warhounds unit. Yeah.
00:18:15
Speaker
And I love Total War because they always have awesome blogs like dedicated to why they've pitched the certain aesthetic or style for their particular units. And they did one on Warhounds. Very nerdy. I respect that. I'm sorry. Reading the reading the notes from the people. You told me to tease them out. So I've done it. We've got a rhythm with the tease them.
00:18:36
Speaker
suspect But it's more because of my fascination with how general ideas are created and then just kind of perpetuated as facts. And the job of the historian is then to look at those systemic or general ideas, be like, OK, but is there any like truth to that?
Myths vs. Facts: Dogs in Ancient Warfare
00:18:58
Speaker
Or how can we help nuance people's ideas about this particular time? Because obviously, there's an interest in dogs being used in war. So how do we give people as much information as they can that doesn't you know completely dispel the idea that dogs were used in war, but helps to kind of bring out that there were so many differences across this time?
00:19:24
Speaker
And so that was a whole chapter and it did my head in. I won't lie because I was going through these blogs and, you know, you type in ancient Greek dogs in war and it it comes up with like, oh, there was this dog Sota, there was this other dog who ran into this battle, they used them on the front lines. And the nerd in me, or the actual, the the historian with my method in me is like, what sauce do you have for that though? Where is that from? So then I have to go into my databases and kind of type in that dog's name, alleged name, or like look for this particular battle.
00:20:08
Speaker
And if there's no record of these battles happening or if they're in completely different, some people are so specific. They're like, yeah, in 524 BC, this battle happened. And it's like, no, it didn't. There's like no record of this battle whatsoever. It's actually 200 years later that there might be evidence of this battle. like it's and sure So that's my job. But when it comes to the dogs, there is actually quite a lot of evidence, but it is from all sorts of different places. And it kind of forces us to challenge the way that we think about dogs in war, whether or not they are those like frontline charging in vibes, or if they're kind of exhilarating.
00:20:52
Speaker
combatants, like auxiliaries in battle, like messengers, guards. Are they going with soldiers to do some hunting to like continue to feed the armies? Yeah, they guarding like caps and stuff. Because when you think about a dog in warfare, it's like running in, you're like,
00:21:12
Speaker
what's it going to do, like the dog in Gladiator, he like runs in, he like bites a few people miraculously. The bloodbath of that battle, he doesn't die. Like that's quite astonishing to me. Only bites Germans. Like it's just, you know, he's a very good boy, but.
00:21:29
Speaker
Very unlikely he wasn't even remotely injured or like ghost in Game of Thrones. Like he's just, right he's just there. Like he's better than most of the soldiers. Like we have a very specific mythology around how we imagine dogs in war. And there are some cool stories. When I was thinking about going through the comments that people were asking about dogs in war, I was like, okay, yeah, I need to remember some of the cools. They're just maybe not as provable as we would like. Sure. But I did find one that is... Let's hear it. So it's an archaic epigram. So it's on someone's funeral. Okay. It's on their gravestone basically. So it's like a funerary inscription, but it's written in a particular way. It's a very stylistic way of doing someone's ah kind of eulogy on their gravestone. Yeah.
00:22:23
Speaker
And so it says, so this is from Magnesia on the Menander.
Evidence of Dogs in Battle
00:22:28
Speaker
So it is a Greek or Hellenic area that says, the man was named Hippimon, the horse Podargos, the dog Lethargos, and the attendant Barbez. He was the Salian from Crete of the Magnesian race, son of Himon. He died fighting at the front lines and was collected by Aries.
00:22:49
Speaker
So basically, this epigram is saying like the man, the horse, the dog and the attendant were all collected by Aries and that they all fell in battle and died. And so Hyvon, the father, has put up this gravestone. I thought it meant like a guy named Aries, like, retrieve the bodies. No, like the guy. Literally, Aries is sweeping you up. You fought well, but it's time to go down with Hades now.
00:23:18
Speaker
in the In the Greek, it says you know they died um ah promahis so like they died in fighting at the front. So that's a nice indication that you've got these individuals all in battle together. But there's been a lot of debate about that. Some people don't like that epigram. They think that it's you know, might be embellished by a historian or whatever. It doesn't matter. It's really cool. But that's also backed up by I found evidence from Herodotus, everyone's favorite long winded storyteller. And he only writes stuff that's like very different from he writes like marvels about the amazing things worth documenting. Gotcha.
00:24:10
Speaker
he I think I've yeah i got the source here. He was talking about a battle between these two colonies of different Greek islands like yeah like North Macedonia, that that side, so quite north.
00:24:25
Speaker
And um he calls the battle Monomachia, which is a a single combat. So instead of going all sides fighting, they pick like they do in Troy, right? Achilles versus like a giant dude, like one on one, like mono, mono or whatever it's called. Oh, Agrius. I think was this is Agrius. That's the one. Oh, good. How could his Brian Cox in Troy? Sorry. like Wait, who's Brian Cox?
00:24:51
Speaker
the dad from Succession. Oh, okay. Yes. He's Agamemnon, like the best. So that's like a one-on-one thing, but Herodotus describes it. Sorry. um Sorry, he's the uncle in Braveheart too. That's what I know I'm from. Yes, he is the uncle in Braveheart. Beautiful Scottish man.
00:25:09
Speaker
ah So, yeah, Herodotus is talking about this like Achilles-Boagria style, but instead of one-on-one man, it is slightly different. It's man against man, horse against horse, and dog against dog.
00:25:26
Speaker
Seems kind of flowery. Yeah. Right? Because I'm like, how are the horses fighting? But I figured it's the men would be on horseback. They're charging into each other. Most likely. But also like the Greeks had a particular like cavalry unit called the hippies hippies. I can never pronounce it correctly. So my thinking is that it's a fight between a cavalry man, an infantry man and dog. But I like it. Do those Herodotus also, you know, gold digging ants. People love to bring that one up. Like that. That's an example of him just making stuff up. But I think it's cool. There's examples there. Dogs actually sort of potentially participating in battle, but there's also way more evidence of them, like petrm like around like fortresses before sieges and stuff, which makes sense. Like, yeah, the dogs are barking. Something's around. right And messages and stuff, like people sending messages in between camps and stuff. There's really cool stories about how they would like train them and stuff to know the sense of different trainers at each camp so that they could bring them along. They're not silly, but yeah yeah you know, it's not this like primitive oh dog, what use for dog sort of thing. Like they had very, very sophisticated ways of using them.
00:26:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's very true. The Greeks and the Romans were pretty advanced. Yeah. um Okay. And then I, when I was at the British Museum, I saw like statues of Molossian hounds everywhere. Yeah. And I had heard like Alexander the Great had one, but there's a lot of stories about Alexander the Great that just are just, you know, fable. Yeah. Apparently he named a city after Peritas, the dog.
00:27:18
Speaker
Let's talk about that. What is that? I didn't know that. Yeah, his favorite dog was Paratas. And I think that, yeah, on one of his expansionary campaigns, he, the dog, died and he named something after it. Do you want to post on our Instagram? Yeah, I think so. I don't need to talk about that. I didn't know that. I know your name is Bucephalia, like after his horse. Yeah, we love Bucephalus. We do love the sweet black horse from the movie.
00:27:47
Speaker
Okay. Uh, so is there any evidence of velocity and hounds being used? I know like you probably already kind of touched that with the warfare, but yeah, at least as guard dogs. Definitely have another chapter on those. piece Okay. Um, and I've actually just pitched a couple of postdoc applications around them because I'm so interested in these giant dogs because they're another example of when you go online, look at blogs,
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah, these dogs, like they were everywhere. They're related to the carne corso and, you know, mass gifts and stuff today. And it's like, well, we don't know that. um Yeah, like there's physical similarities for sure. But there's no genetic testing being done because that requires you to find molossus bones. So, you know, it's one of those damned if you do damned if you don't sort of things. like we need We need the evidence base. like We can't just say, oh, it looks like this. It's like, well, they're not related. app They just have maybe a similar size and stockiness and stuff. but the So the Molossus is from Epirus, so northern northern Greece as well. Far northern Greece. i'm still Still around today. And
00:29:03
Speaker
That was a big like agricultural farming area, but also had lots of like mountain ranges and stuff, so it was really good for um kind of hurting goats and cattle and stuff, and but also really prone to bears and wolves and mountain lions and things like that.
00:29:24
Speaker
so having a giant dog that could look after larger larger animals as well and take on larger animals was very useful. But there's just not there's not a lot of visual evidence for them. there's i I know the statue. Did you say you saw it at the British Museum?
00:29:46
Speaker
Pretty sure. Yeah. It's a beautiful, beautiful statue. It's also known as the Jennings dog because a guy named Jennings like bought it and then went bankrupt trying to buy it or something like this rich British Lord or whatever terrible with money buys the statue because he thinks that it's um a Greek original. It's a Roman copy of a Greek original whole thing. there yeah wow The dog was known also as the dog of Alcibiades.
00:30:15
Speaker
So very, that's a guy with the Peloponnesian war. Yes. Anyone who knows the like classical Greek history knows that. I mean, I think he's a really he's like the most fun character to interact with in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, because he just likes to. and sleep around and get drunk. But in the history books, he's very, very, very shrewd. and he just He's also very self-interested, very, very, very rich. But he was a favorite of Socrates. So like he's not a okay not a dumb dumb, right?
00:30:48
Speaker
And the story goes that our societies had spent like 7,000 dracme on the finest, the losses dog, and that money could buy. And people were just like, wow, but that's also because he was known for being very luxurious. And at a time when people were starting to question his allegiance to Athens, He apparently allegedly was walking around the city and was like, and just like cut off the dog's tail in front of everyone. Well, basically it was like, you know, let's give him something to talk about.
00:31:25
Speaker
And basically he said to the people like, yeah, you're going to be more outraged about that. Like I'll give you some like actual like bloodlust. Here you go. Just to kind of deflect from the fact that, yeah, he was about to betray Athens though. Like people were right. He just wanted to distract them. And so that dog's kind of associated with like wealth status, the best of all, like guard dogs, basically makes sense.
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah, so they're definitely a thing. It's just hard to tell not as much evidence for them in the visual archive as there are for hunting dogs. So fair enough. OK, I saw a lot of like. It was in Rome at the Vatican, but the. Like all of those, I don't know if they're freezes or whatever they are, like statues of like scenes. Yes, there's like carved freezes, lots of hunting dog scenes and all of those were like Greek copies, I think, too. and Yes.
00:32:24
Speaker
So royal hunts were I guess like a big thing for them? i think Yeah, well like status hunts for sure. And then, you know, in cities like Athens when hunting is, you know, especially less about subsistence and more about male bonding, like performing your elite identity, then it's a different style of hunting. So yeah, it's big.
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah, big thing to do, the old hunt. I have no chapter on hunting dogs in my thesis to the dismay of one of my examiners. There's been quite a few good books about it. I think there's a book from 2001 by Judith Barringer called The Hunt in Ancient Greece, and it gets into hunting kind of changes in the classical period to more of a status symbol than an actual practice and how that was
Dogs in Healing Practices and Disability Concepts
00:33:14
Speaker
also linked to yeah obviously men being elite but also um men engaging in homoerotic relationship sure and how that imagery fits in to that so i thought that was always pretty cool a lot of that back then i guess too yeah especially yeah they were just having a good time
00:33:34
Speaker
Just let it all out. how but You do you. Yeah, exactly. And then I think one of the only other questions from the YouTube comments was something about disability, like dogs. Yeah, disabilities. Yeah, I saw that. I don't know if I could even answer that.
00:33:51
Speaker
I thought about it because yeah, props to the person for searching my academia page ah because disability is one of my other interests. It's also, I work in the disability sector here in Australia. I see. To subsidise my research because you know, archaeology and classics doesn't pay when you're first starting out. Nope. But I really liked the question about Cause I'd never thought about it if dogs were involved as disability aids or yeah seeing eye dogs like we have today and
00:34:28
Speaker
While i wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised because yeah people experienced blindness in the ancient world, especially you know some of our most famous like kings and rulers ah were called the Cyclops because they were missing an eye. So maybe there were avenues for dogs to kind of help out in those areas. But there's just, from my cursory little search, not a lot of evidence.
00:34:56
Speaker
But it did get me thinking about the disability is also a really tough term true for the ancient world because while physical and cognitive and mental health is just part of the human experience over time, the words that we use to define them but obviously differ differ over time and have their own ideological and like emotional subtext in there. So there's no real ancient Greek word for disability as we understand it today. There are terms that describe being blind or being deaf or having a speech impairment. and There's also one Greek word that literally is called adunatos, which is
00:35:41
Speaker
to be unable, but that can refer to all sorts of things, not necessarily just to share someone's impairment. And funnily enough, with that aspect of physical impairment, there's also the thing about Greek, ancient Greek religion, and is that it's deeply linked with healing.
00:36:07
Speaker
So it's a very, very holistic way of looking, experiencing your body as something that's also deeply connected to the environment, to the gods, to everything. And so they've got these healing sanctuaries and there's one in Epidavros called the Asclepion, the god Asclepius, you know, the the original man of medicine. I think that's the dude that's on the staff with the snakes. Oh, okay. I know what you're talking about.
00:36:35
Speaker
I know you guys have it in the States, but we don't have it in Australia. So I'm like, yep, that dude. um And he's considered, you know, like the divine ancestor of Hippocrates. So like the Hippocratic oaths and stuff like that. And those sanctuaries, they had dogs at those sanctuaries, either to guard, but there's also these awesome inscriptions from this sanctuary in Epidavros that talks about The people that went there, the conditions they presented with what their treatment was and what the aftermath was. They're very, very quick sentences, but two of them mention two different boys who present with um blindness, or this could just be an eye infection or something. And the dogs lick their eyes, sleep next to them, and the boys end up leaving completely healed.
00:37:29
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah. So there's some sort of affliction with the eyes, but the dogs are involved in some sort of like magical healing way. Um, like, you know, dogs, saliva does have like antibiotic properties for scabs and stuff. Would I let a dog lick my eyes? Absolutely not. I don't want to get pink eye, but there does seem to be that.
00:37:54
Speaker
you know, sort of connection between dogs and healing in that sense. So there was a lot to think about and it definitely piqued my interest. And now I'm like, Oh, I wonder if I can find some ancient seeing eye dogs. That would be a great thing to get the whole dissertation itself, I guess too. Like, yeah, probably. And I don't know if I'm emotionally, mentally prepared to ever do that again. No, you don't need to doctor. It's I mean, reach for the stars, but... One PhD is enough. People that do more than one, like, glutton for punishment. Right. And I wanted to ask you this on the main big interview podcast I'll do, and I'll get you on there eventually, but for the people listening now, what do dogs mean
Dogs as Historical Actors
00:38:38
Speaker
to you? Did I ask you that last time? I don't think you did. Maybe you did. My memory's really bad.
00:38:44
Speaker
as is mine I know it sounds really cliche, but dogs mean everything to me. Anyone that's gone on to history doggos would know that I'll literally find any excuse to insert a dog into any aspects of human history, or we'll look at things and be like, oh, I wonder if there are dogs there. Like, can we find that? And chances are we do, because dogs are, yeah, everywhere. And they should be seen as the valuable historical actors that they are.
00:39:14
Speaker
I appreciate you calling them actors because i got when I was applying for PhD programs and things, and I was talking about dogs having agency in the prehistoric record, people were like, how would they have agency? And I was like, because they fucking do. I know. It's such a minefield. I went through similar things because they're you know you see certain certain words and immediately that triggers. I also teach historiography at university. So when I think of agency, I'm like, oh no, I'm going to have to really deep dive into the theory of agency. It's going to take me back all the way to the enlightenment. And then I'm going to have to talk about, you know, Descartes just being a weirdo, thinking, you know, animals have no, no agency. And then you're like, cool. Do I even want to bother? Like, but my instinct as well is.
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, they do. Like, yeah, you train dogs, but they still against a dog. They're going to do what they want to do. They can affect archaeological assemblages the same way a person can, I think. Absolutely. chew on the bones, move the bones, you know, be part of the record, yeah. it's Absolutely. Even if they're being, I have a whole thing on dogs being sacrificed, like even if they're a chapter on bodies as like objects, even if they're not, even if they're dead, their death still has impact for
00:40:38
Speaker
the humans that are engaging directly with that death and with that sacrifice. Otherwise, why do it? Yeah. Like, what's the point? If it has nothing, no agency, nothing, then why is it you could just sacrifice a rock? Right? Like, yeah no, it's there's something deeply um and intrinsic to the dog, to any sacrificial animal. Like, otherwise, there'd be no point to it whatsoever.
00:41:03
Speaker
Very good point. All right. Well, I need to wrap this up. um I guess that was my final question for you, but yeah, anything else you want to add that people, you know, might want to know?
00:41:15
Speaker
Not at this stage. I'm just happy for questions. I really loved going on the YouTube and having a gaze at what people wanted to know about because I could talk about this stuff like all day and I've got yeah like a roller deck of tism out facts that we could go through. Yeah. But unless I know what people want, then, you know, it's just going to be me talking at you, which I'm sure. ah Yeah, no, I'd love when you're talking to me about this stuff.
00:41:44
Speaker
I'm sure people will have many questions down the line about this and that. I haven't seen these episodes yet. So, I mean, I have no doubt I'm going to have you back on probably multiple times. So whenever you want to come on. Yeah, I love it. and Anytime. Yeah.
00:41:56
Speaker
Well, this has been awesome. I'm glad we got those questions answered and I'll think of some more for next time as well. Awesome. Thank you again. All right. Thank you. Please rate and review the podcast on Apple. Please leave a comment on YouTube here if you have any more for Elise or me and subscribe if you're not subscribed and the usual things I'm supposed to say. All right. Well, thanks Elise. Appreciate it. Pleasure. Take care.
00:42:25
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.