Ritual, spectacle or gambling? Memories of cockfighting in ancient Greece. Linguistic and anthropological considerations

The social practice of cockfighting in ancient Greece has been the subject of numerous studies which have emphasized in particular the statute of educational spectacle, a real manifesto for the ideology of Greek kalokagathia. The rooster, a courageous animal and prototype of male gender identity, would have been the protagonist of several narratives, written or figured, aimed at enhancing or disambiguating some foundational experiences of the classical Greek social life from war behaviour to agonal performance passing through the homoerotic relationship. This contribution follows a different interpretative way, concentrating on the subjects of the enunciation of similar stories according to a historical and anthropological perspective. At the centre of the investigation will be in fact the rhetorical models, the subjects and the contexts in which these tales about the fight between animals have been produced and disseminated, many centuries after the Athens of Pericles which they deal with. Secondly, the study will focus on an analysis of the terms most often associated with roosters in an attempt to reconstruct a part of the shared representation about this animal, to finally propose a further and more complex possibility of interpretation concerning the agones among the animals that will be able to take into account the ancient cultural representations oriented to present the alektryones as impulsive, patricidal and violent, putting them in fact outside the human cultural norms.