What if ancient debates about animals were secretly debates about reading? This paper argues that interpreting animal behaviour helped philosophers test how meaning could move between literature, scripture, and nature.

The article examines the intersection between imperial writings on animals and post-Hellenistic debates about exegesis. Its central claim is that interpreters treated the meaningful but non-verbal animal as a test case of nature’s availability to reading. The animal also became an opportunity to reflect on how exegetes transfer their skills between literature and the natural world.

Four texts illustrate, through different genres and techniques, how animal behaviour shaped and addressed questions of philosophical hermeneutics. Part 1 considers Plutarch’s On the Cleverness of Animals and Gryllus, linking literary competence with natural reasoning and proposing a form of isomorphism between nature and literature.

Part 2 turns to Origen’s Contra Celsum, where animal creation enters a broader discussion of scriptural authority and interpretation. Part 3 reads Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animates as an interpretive manifesto about human–animal relations, cosmic interconnectedness, and reading the world as, and through, literature.

The moral and ontological implications of these writings have been richly studied, but this article approaches them from a different angle by focusing on literary interconnections and textual networks. The new reading treats imperial discussions of animals as real beings, not metaphorical foils to humans, and asks how ancient zoological enquiry informs and tests philosophical hermeneutics.

Here, philosophical hermeneutics means the way a philosophical school or system of truth offers a comprehensive account of the cosmos while relying on authoritative texts. The study examines three vegetarian texts by Plutarch and Porphyry alongside Book 4 of Origen’s Contra Celsum to show how post-Hellenistic authors link reading practices with observing animal behaviour.

Plutarch’s On the Cleverness of Animals and Gryllus connect the interpretability of animal language and behaviour with literary expertise as a tool for understanding the natural world. The Celsus–Origen exchange shows how debates about animal creation affected arguments about Christian scriptural interpretation, especially allegorical readings.

Porphyry asks whether the animal is an interpretable sign of divinity and what interpreting animals reveals about the human interpreter. He re-reads the universe through human–animal relations and grounds that reassessment in textual mastery, including Plutarch’s On the Cleverness of Animals.

Stoic doctrines encouraged Roman imperial intellectuals to understand the cosmos as a unified whole. The notion of sympathy supported conceptions of the universe as an interconnected totality governed by law and ordered by a rational and providential principle.

Because the universe was understood as interconnected and meaningful, nature was expected to be available to rational interpretation. Post-Hellenistic philosophies sought truth from nature as well as from myths, rituals, and literature, bringing exegesis to the centre of philosophical practice.

The texts show sensitivity to the intermediality of imperial exegesis: interpreters approached divinely ordered nature and inspired literature with the assumption that the same skills could operate across domains. Those skills were grounded in human participation in divine rationality.

This expands ancient reading practices beyond textuality to include artwork, ritual, prayers, and lived experiences. Plutarch’s On the Cleverness of Animals explicitly places its discussion of animal behaviour within a literary and philosophical frame.

Although it presents itself as a debate on animal intelligence, it also focuses on how natural enquiry relies on and is shaped by textual authority. Autobulus revisits with Soclarus the question of whether animals possess reason and declares his allegiance to Plato.

Autobulus argues that animals participate in thought and reasoning, which they possess imperfectly but nevertheless have, directly challenging Stoic doctrine. After the exchange between Autobulus and Soclarus, Aristotimus and Phaedimus enter the scene.

They are assigned opposing speeches on whether land animals or sea animals are more intelligent. The ensuing agon connects interpretive proficiency in nature and literature with interpretive rivalry and the use of animals as a test case.

Cleverness embeds Aristotelian discussions of voice and signification within a literary performance that makes animals twice readable. Their sounds are treated as meaningful, and their behaviour is shaped into narrative examples. By making Aristotle’s text available within the debate, Cleverness creates the conditions for Phaedimus’ assertion of a bond between reading proficiency and natural thinking.

Cleverness depends upon the literary competence of its readers of nature. Presented as a dialogue on animal cognition, it is also, and most importantly, a discussion of reading that displays careful control of sources and exposes flawed interpreters, notably the Stoics.

The central agon advances claims about how to combine natural observation with textual interpretation. Whether Aristotimus or Phaedimus wins matters less than the shared outcome: both contestants confirm Autobulus’ claim that animals possess intelligence.

Soclarus seals the argument with a citation from Sophocles, returning the discussion to the literary authority that shaped it throughout. Gryllus challenges Odysseus’ reputation for intelligence and argues that his present life as an animal is better than, and morally superior to, his former human condition.

The claim rests on the statement that animals alone live in accordance with nature and avoid corrupting pleasures. Gryllus sharpens the issue of how interpretive skills move between reading nature and reading literature. It asks how Odysseus interprets the animal, how readers interpret the Odyssey and take its hero as a model of intelligence, and how animal intelligence could unsettle Odysseus’ status as the paradigm of cunning.

More broadly, Gryllus asks whether meaning and morality belong exclusively to verbal communication, or whether speech can distort reason and distance humans from natural life. Origen’s Contra Celsum responds to Celsus’ True Discourse, composed around two hundred forty-eight to two hundred forty-nine CE, which critiques Christianity through ontological, ethical, and exegetical arguments.

Because Celsus’ work survives only through Origen’s quotations, the two authors are treated together. Both reflect early Christianity’s efforts to establish itself as a hermeneutical system on a par with the philosophical schools of the Roman Empire.

Celsus relativises humanity’s place in creation to challenge biblical accounts, while Origen attacks Celsus’ allegorical theory to contest his views on animals. If rationality, moral purity, and Christian truth coincide, disagreement must reflect faulty reasoning and flawed character.

Origen therefore frames Celsus’ errors in both intellectual and ethical terms and portrays Celsus as a poor reader. Origen claims that Celsus relies on inferior sources that he fails to assess critically. Although Celsus knows Philo of Alexandria and Aristobulus, he does not engage seriously with their arguments.

Origen contrasts him unfavourably with Numenius, who drew on both Plato and Moses. Allegorical interpretation is one of the most heated points of debate between early Christian and pagan exegetes. Reading authoritative writings as non-literal sources of eternal and spiritual messages was key to arguments for the universal validity of their texts.

Celsus rejects such readings in Jewish and Christian scripture. Origen asks why Greek interpreters may extract philosophical meaning from their own traditions while denying Jews and Christians the same approach. For Origen, Celsus’ inability to interpret scripture correctly mirrors his failure to understand nature as a providential order.

Origen therefore interweaves his critique of Celsus’ hermeneutics with extended reflections on animals within creation. Origen rejects Celsus’ praise of ants as honouring their dead, arguing that such claims diminish human rationality rather than elevate animals.

He disputes the idea that animals demonstrate intelligence through medicinal plants, arguing that if animals possessed reason, they would organise and transmit such knowledge collectively as humans do. In both cases, communication becomes the decisive criterion separating animals from human communication.

Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animates is composed towards the end of the third century CE and has traditionally been treated primarily as a repository of ancient sources on vegetarianism. More recently, the treatise has been reassessed for the complexity of its ethical theory and broader cosmic implications, while its significance as an exegetical statement has received little sustained attention.

Universal interconnectedness constitutes the interpretive key to Abstinence, which presents reflection on the animal as a litmus test of the philosopher’s understanding of cosmic structures. Animal behaviour, and human interpretations of it, provide an entry point into the readability of the universe and the importance of interpretive skills in natural thinking.

The analysis focuses on two cases of textual engagement and arrangement as examples of the intermediality of Porphyry’s exegetical project. The first concerns the structure of Book 2 on sacrifices; the second concerns the use of Plutarch’s Cleverness in response to Stoic theories on animal intelligence in Book 3.

Book 3 presupposes animals as interpretable beings. Porphyry explicitly invokes the category of to sēmantikon to describe animal speech. Porphyry’s framework, which presupposes a gradation of beings, allows him to study animals as a window onto cosmic order.

This approach might be taken as anti-anthropocentric because it challenges human proximity to the divine. It also authorises the intermedial exegete who decodes literature and nature, using textual and observational evidence to map a rational, hierarchically structured cosmos.

The article examines imperial writings on animals within debates on exegesis and the transferability of interpretive skills across nature and literature. It analyses Plutarch’s On the Cleverness of Animals and Gryllus and Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animates alongside Origen’s Contra Celsum.

Across these cases, understanding animal nature supports hermeneutical claims and frames authoritative scripture. The comparison demonstrates how natural thinking benefits from exegetical training, which equips philosophers to uncover hidden meaning in visible phenomena.

Across Plutarch, Origen, Celsus, and Porphyry, animal nature supports hermeneutical claims and shows how exegetical training equips philosophers to uncover hidden meaning in visible phenomena.