Simonides of Amorgos in the seventh century B.C., is remarkable for this kind of illustration.  After some lamentations about human life, he observes that nothing is better than a good wife, or worse than a bad one, and he proceeds to compare women to various animals.  He is also evidently very serious over the subject, and regards it as no joke at all.  Perhaps there was also something to be said on the other side, for he remarks that a gadding wife cannot be cured, even if you “knock out her teeth with a stone.”  He likens them to pigs and polecats, horses and apes; and only praises the descendant of the bee.  In a passage undoubtedly of early date, and attributed to Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, (540-500) the writer enumerates the various ways, in which other animals are superior to man.  “If by the will of God there were an equality and community in life, so that the herald of the Olympian games should not only call men to the contest, but also bid all animals to come, no man would carry off a prize; for in the long race the horse would be the best; the hare would win the short race; the deer would be best in the double race.  No man’s fleetness would count for anything, and no one since Hercules would seem to have been stronger than the elephant or lion; the bull would carry off the crown in striking, and the ass in kicking, and history would record that an ass conquered men in wrestling and boxing.”

But the light in which the lower animals were regarded, produced other fanciful combinations.  Not only were men given the attributes of animals, but animals were endowed with the gifts peculiar to man.  All things were then possible.  Standing as he seemed in the centre of a plain of indefinite or interminable extent, how could any man limit the productions or vagaries of Nature, even if he possessed far more than the narrow experience of those days?  Moreover, the boundary lines were vague between the natural and supernatural, and the latter was supposed to be constantly interposing in the ordinary affairs of life.  Among other beliefs then prevalent, was one in the existence of a kind of half nature, such as that in Centaurs, dragons, and griffins.  In the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions lately deciphered, we read, of one Heabani, a semi-bovine hermit, supposed to have lived 2,200 B.C.  Thus the accounts in Scripture of the serpent accosting Eve, and of Balaam arguing with his ass, would not have seemed so remarkable then as they do to us.  In an Egyptian novel—­the oldest extant, cir. 1,400 B.C.—­a cow tells Bata that his elder brother is standing before him with his dagger ready to kill him.  He understood, we are told, the language of animals, and was afterwards transformed into a bull.  Greek tradition as recorded by Plato, Xenophon, Babrius, and others, speaks of an early golden age in which men and animals held colloquies together “as in our fables;” whence we should conclude this much—­that there was a time when poets very commonly introduced them as holding conversations, and when philosophers illustrated their doctrines from the animal world.