More Epictetus

Quite a few moderns might be offended by Epictetus' use of the expression, 'wild beasts' as a pejorative. Several generations of children have now been Disneyfied. Bambi might not have been the first cartoon character to anthropomorphise the animal world, portraying an entirely fictitious harmoniousness of nature, but Bambi is the one I always think of. No longer red of tooth and claw, the Forest would be an Edenic place where peace and love would rule- if it weren't for perfidious Man. Many others followed that lead, for instance Farley Mowat in his work of fiction, "Never Cry Wolf." I know he doesn't say it was fiction and I, being young and naive, took it seriously at first. According to this book wolves are gentle and playful creatures that have been unjustly persecuted by perfidious Man.
Jane Goodall must have been inspired by some such work to eschew the company of her fellow humans and become a sort of voyeur of the simian world. I don't mean to trivialize her efforts but we have to remember she saw what she wanted to see. Even so, it eventually came out that chimps weren't the comical figures shown in Hollywood movies nor were they the wise old ladies and gentlemen of the remote jungle Goodall longed to find. They hunted for meat, engaged in lethal territorial conflicts, and had a hierarchical social structure with many points in common with human society. But at least the females seemed to rule the roost which gave the feminists lots of talking points. At least they all lived in harmony with the rest of nature, unlike perfidious Man while observations of tool use among them helped demote perfidious man from one of his privileged positions. Or so it seemed to the faithful ecocultists.
All this appealed immensely to the urban audience that read of these exploits in National Geographic and watched the contrived presentations on PBS. Urbanites are insulated from the realities of nature. The wildest thing seen in most cities is a flock of pigeons. In recent years, however, coyotes have discovered they quite like being town dwellers. These urban sophisticates cultivate a taste for dog and cat meat, to the consternation of ladies out walking their cockapoos. Quite the tasty snack for a coyote. Eagles have always provided a thrill to nature lovers. What could be more noble than the stern keen-eyed gaze of the bald eagle, what more inspiring than to see a pair of them winging upward and upward in a thermal until they are so high they can no longer be seen. But, oops, those talons and that cruelly curved beak ain't just for photo ops. This spring one resident female eagle in Victoria acquired the nickname 'Birdzilla' as she systematically destroyed the perennial blue heron nesting site in Beacon Hill Park. How could that be, how could the noble eagle be so savage? Well folks, that's why they call that category of birds raptors. As in rape, rapacious, from the Latin word for plunderer.
But I don't think Epictetus was referring to the savagery of animals so much as to their limitations. With a few exceptions (squirells burying nuts, etc) wild animals only live on the energy provided by the last meal and are always on the lookout for the next feeding moment. Watch a seagull open his gullet to down a big mac in one gulp while another seagull tries to grab it away. Anything is fair, anything is potentially edible, doesn't matter what foul hole it's found in, just jam as much down the maw as quickly as possible. A seagull doesn't care about another seagull's little ones. Street people behave just the same. Similarly, a cat has absolutely no sympathy for the mouse, and a cat hunts whether it needs to eat or not. It has a skillset, and a set of equipment it must use and so a cat enjoys killing. Large kitties, like lions, are able to ingest large quantities of food to tide them over until the next kill, and to conserve energy until that time take long naps.
Even stone age man learned how to store and preserve food. Herders took things a step further by tending a food supply on the hoof that provided them not only with food, but clothing, tools, and ornamentation. A quantum leap took place with the invention of farming. Farmers were the first true capitalists. That is to say they kept back a portion of their crop as seed for the next year. But even a bad year or two could be survived if sufficient grain was stored for such an eventuality. You can read about it in the Hebrew texts. Then as now some people foolishly squandered, their capital while others horde it and use it to get rich during hard times...unless the foolish squanderers decided to expropriate from the evil capitalist.
Successful human societies learn how to set up a series of rules to regulate these kinds of disputes. Even more successful are the societies that discover how a nice surplus of food also results in a surplus of labour, labour not needed for the actual production of the food. Really successful archaic farming societies discovered that this excess pool of labour could be put to use in ways that made food production even more effective. Tool makers, and all sorts of trades flourished. A class of people devoted to organizing this activity arose, priests, moneychangers, accountants, Wall Street. And became a magnet to rapacious marauders. In Epictesus' day the ancient world reached a kind of pinnacle, but one problem for wealthy societies has always been that there are other societies that are not so good at producing wealth but want it anyway. So another occupation that has always been important is that of the soldier. And for that you need manly men, men willing to put their lives on the line for the greater good. In what is called the postmodern west a large and influential body of opinion has arisen to denigrate the need for the traditional manly virtues Epictetus wanted to cultivate in the Roman Empire. For that he knew it was needful for the citizen to have a love and understanding of the roots of his society, of it's values, of it's treasures of the mind. That must have been because that love was declining in his day just as it is in ours.
Ants and bees also store food and deal with marauders but no other animal but man is able to use reason to solve the problems of existence. Only humans can contemplate themselves from an outside perspective. It is said that apes, crows, and some other animals are able to use rudimentary logic to solve problems, but only humans can devise systems of logic. I'm pretty sure that this faculty is what Epictetus meant when he contrasted men with animals. That doesn't necessarily mean we're better than animals. It was a well accepted truism in the ancient world that this capacity for reason had the potential for making humans far more brutal and savage than any animal could ever be.
Just to finish off with Epictetus, I should say that while much of his pedagogic advice travels across the centuries rather well there are large portions that don't. For instance, I don't think he thought of women as sharing a man's capacity for reason, and the Stoics in general advocated using women as common property. Presumably this came from Plato's idea of the perfect state as ruled by a class of Guardians who shared all property, including women. The best Epictetus could do was mitigate some of the difficulties that might arise when disputes over women arose, as they always do.
I don't think much of feminists but my main argument against them is that as much as they they hate men they hate their own femininity even more. They most of all hate their biological role as mothers. If you want to see a modern allegory on how feminists regard the act of child bearing watch the female made movie of several years ago called "The Alien." Ahh, but all this is for another post.