She is a contributor to TLS, the Australian Book Review, Meanjin, History Today, the Conversation, and other magazines. The first woman appointed full professor in Classics and Ancient History at Sydney University, she is a historian of ancient Greece with a broad interest in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the ancient world and a particular expertise in the history of ideas (including religion, historiography, and classical reception studies). She was a member of the ARC College of Experts (2019-2022) and is senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religions (ORE), Associate editor in the editorial collective of Public Humanities (a new journal published by Cambridge University Press), and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Ancient Historyand Antichthon.
Kindt's highly regarded books include Rethinking Greek Religion (2013) and Revisiting Delphi. Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece (2016).
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human, and reported the following:
Flipping forward and opening The Trojan Horse on page 99 will get you right into the thick of the fascinating story of the Cyclops Polyphemus and his encounter with Odysseus as represented in Homer’s Odyssey. I show that the way in which the Cyclops features in Homer’s famous story anticipates and reverberates not only with later philosophical views on the scope and limits of what it means to be human; the story of Odysseus’ run in with Polyphemus also foreshadows some of the tropes in which certain humans are typecast as ‘other’ and ‘less than human’ in much more recent times. This applies for example to the Cyclops’ man-eating habit and to the fact that he cannot seem to tolerate wine – two stereotypes about human ‘otherness’ that feature in many ethnographic accounts of distant peoples well into the twentieth century. I point out that the consumption of wine as a marker of humanity also features in various other chapters of the book (and the human-animal entanglements they depict) for example in a painting of the Minotaur by Pablo Picasso and in Joseph Kafka’s account of Red Peter, an ape who becomes socialised as a human.Learn more about The Trojan Horse and Other Stories at the Cambridge University Press website.
Yes, the Page 99 Test works. Really well actually. The sample page touches upon several themes central to the book. In discussing the problematic humanity of the Cyclops the page directly points to the questions at the core of the book: what makes us human? What (if anything) sets us apart from all other creatures in the world? The contrast between the clever wit of Odysseus and the dim-witted Polyphemus (who is easily tricked by Odysseus into letting Odysseus and his comrades escape from his island) references a powerful argument made by certain ancient and modern thinkers: that the human stands out from all other creatures through the presence of logos (ancient Greek for ‘speech’ but also ‘reason’). This position originated with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle but became one of the most influential and widely-shared arguments made for human exceptionalism and superiority. And yet, as I show in this book, the ancient Greek and Roman world also featured a large array of other thinkers who used narrative and storytelling to push back on this argument and to showcase the many ways in which humans and other animals are alike.
At the same time, the forward-facing cross-references to Picasso and Kafka on the sample page provide an inkling as to how the book is structured: the book has ten chapters each of which revolves around a single ancient creature which, like the Cyclops Polyphemus, sits uneasily between human and animal: The Sphinx, Xanthus (Achilles’ speaking horse), the lion of Androclus, the Trojan Horse, the Trojan boar, the political bee, the Socratic gadfly, the Minotaur, and the Shearwaters of Diomedea. Each chapter starts from the ancient stories that brought the creature in question alive; each chapter then sets out to follow the trail of the creature into the modern world and into the work of a modern thinker who speaks to the question of what makes us human. The figure of the Sphinx, for example makes, an appearance in the works of the Viennese physician and inventor of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and the Socratic gadfly (which first emerges in Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial) helps to define the politically engaged citizen in the oeuvre of the famous political theorist Hannah Arendt. Overall, then, the book shows how views first articulated in the ancient Greek and Roman world have shaped and continue to shape modern (Western) conceptions of the human.
--Marshal Zeringue
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