One example first appeared in a manual from the second century A.D. "It's an assignment for kids to pretend they're an ape and they're going to convince their ape friends to build a city," says Hawhee. "It's more fun [than a lecture], partly because it's calling on their imagination and also because it's not asking them to actually form a government. It's introducing it at a different level. It also gave them practice speaking for somebody else."
Animal examples also played a big role in popular guidebooks for adults who wanted to become better public speakers, along the lines of a self-help book. The manuals would talk about how to use animals to exemplify certain traits or behaviors in a brief, memorable way: Dogs are friendly, oxen are strong, foxes are clever and usually up to no good.
"Erasmus says it's about livening up our language," says Hawhee. "If you're describing how somebody talks, especially if they're disappointing you, don't just say they talk, say they're bleating. If you can't hear them, they're mewing."
Mentioning a familiar animal will trigger a response in the audience that is much more direct and visceral than an abstract word like "courage," she says. In a treatise on writing style, Greek author Longinus used an image of a wounded lion whose tail was still twitching in defiance. "He can't move, but the will to move is still very apparent and his spirit is still intact," says Hawhee. "I think using the energy of animals, and the vividness, is a highly effective way of writing. There are a lot of these qualities of language that are really difficult to teach, and that's where the use of animal imagery comes in."
Be as the bees
In many cases, says Hawhee, the texts she studied go beyond using animal traits to describe human behavior; they advise that we should aspire to be like a specific kind of animal. Erasmus, a prodigious collector of natural history details, was especially keen on honey bees as role models for writers and speech-makers.
"Bees do not collect everything indiscriminately from every source," he wrote. "In the same way, one should not expect to find everything in the same author, but select from each the most useful thing he has. From poets and orators one gets splendor of language, from logicians skill in argument, from philosophers a knowledge of nature, from theologians the principles of the good life."
Another favorite of Erasmus came from the sea. "The octopus was seen as a shape-shifting animal, very flexible, responding to its situation," says Hawhee. "So the proverb 'Be the octopus' meant 'adapt to the situation.' And that's very rhetorical."
Then there are the mock encomia, brief passages lauding creepy-crawly animals we don't normally admire. "The idea was, let's take this to its limit," says Hawhee. "If we're going to exercise ourselves in praising things, let's praise things that you can't imagine praising. So we've got to find the characteristics that we might praise about it. A lot of them are about how amazing it is that they can disrupt so much, given their size."
Dutch Renaissance author Daniel Heinsius sang the praises of the body louse: "It hath made choice of a quiet and retired course of life, not fluttering as birds do, nor skip-hopping as a flea, but according to the dignity of his life, stable and still: he walketh with a slow and gravely composed gate: nor doth he seem to embrace any point of philosophy more than the Pythagorean silence; for nothing disturbeth more the intentiveness of the mind than a hurry and a bustling noise."
Other mock encomia praised flies, fleas, and bedbugs. "I scratched my head most of the time I was writing that chapter!" says Hawhee.