Introduction: "Animals Under Empire"

The prepositions classicists pair with the word "empire" can say quite a lot about the structures of power and subjectivity we see across the Roman world.In his foundational study of Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, Tim Whitmarsh begins by forgoing "any preposition marking the relationship between" Greek literary production and the apparatus of Roman imperium. 1Coordinating conjunctions could, for Whitmarsh, more effectively express the "complex reciprocity" between the construction of Greek cultural identity and the colonial remaking of the Roman Mediterranean.Now, however, more than two decades out from Whitmarsh and amidst the flourishing of cultural animal studies in classics, the time may be right to revisit which hierarchies and dependencies we reveal by putting prepositions back into the matrix of man, animal, and empire.In many book titles, the prepositional force of "in" stresses the location of non-human animals within the human and imaginative geographies of Greco-Roman antiquity.These studies show a variety of animal species becoming actors in classical literature and culture, religion and myth, and in (or on) the art and artifacts of daily life. 2 More crucially, they note the gap between animals as represented in literary and artistic media, and the real non-human animals who were drawn into diverse spheres of human activity, such as sacrifice and sport.1 Whitmarsh 2001.1-2, in a discussion that likewise extends to his modelling of elite Greek status under Rome as "radically fissured"-an avoidance of the center/periphery dichotomy that also informs our own approach to empire. 2 See