It would seem that the view of the river flowing into the sea was, for the Greeks, a natural phenomenon, unworthy of special attention -as it is for us. Nothing could be further from the truth. A careful analysis of the extant sources leads to the conclusion that the Greeks perceived a strong distinction between the rivers and the sea. Moreover, they perceived this distinction as part of the natural mechanism, not some quirk of nature that could only be recorded in the realm of paradoxography. Moreover, in terms of géographie imaginaire, the innate 'disagreement' between the rivers and the sea -naturally predestined to each other's existence -went beyond the usual aquatic division and opposition between the land and sea. This raises the question of how important this natural disagreement was to Greek culture. It turns out that perceptions about the organization of water resources reveal the Hellenic tendency to use the spatial location to explain cultural differences, political particularism and the fear of loss of historical memory. Thus, the strong distinction between the rivers and the sea is part of the Greek cultural heritage.Researchers of antiquity agree that the ancient Greeks saw nature through the lens of politics, culture and religion. Conversely, the nature simultaneously shaped the same spheres of activity of the Greeks who perceived landscape as three harmonized, complementary and inseparable dimensions: natural (physical), human and imaginary. In modern terms,

This article presents the oldest European accounts that describe the reactions of animals to their own reflections on the surface of a body of water or in a mirror. The analysed sources will encompass Greco-Roman accounts, including the reception of these accounts in the Middle Ages. While this article belongs to the field of the history of science, it seeks to provide a historical commentary with insights from contemporary studies (the mirror test, MSR). The article presents surviving ancient and medieval accounts about particular animal species that describe their ability or inability to recognise a mirror reflection. The species discussed are the horse, mule, dog, birds (sparrow, partridge, rooster, quail, jackdaw, starling and pheasant), the monkey and tiger. Brief mention is also made of the sheep, pigeon, goose, parrot, raven and cat.

The snake′s familiar erotic connotation, consolidated in various interpretations, tends to limit consideration of the multifaceted capacity of this symbol as a carrier of specific content, which depending on the context, may be used in various meanings. Academic discussion on the symbolic meaning of the snake in Cleopatra′s act of suicide generally confines itself only to the Egyptian perspective or, more broadly, to that of the east (the uraeus, Isis, Bacchic elements), without considering the Roman space of military symbolism. The validity of reinterpreting the snake symbol in this specific situation is supported both by the fact that an image of Cleopatra with snake on display was carried in the triumphal procession, and by Octavian′s own association with it, which ascribes a military character to the reptile and provides reasons for the propaganda use of that symbol.

The article aims to answer the following questions: How did the ancient Greeks associate animals with space, geography and their own settlements? Did they attribute nationality and territory to animals? Did they think animals missed their homelands? Could a foreign animal — according to the Greeks — experience a process of cultural integration, namely Hellenization? The Greeks attributed regional identity to animals, defined by the local geography and by the history of a region enclosed by borders. At the same time, the world of animals seemed to be ethnically diversified, for the Hellenes coined the terms: “Hellenic animal” — belonging to the Greek culture; and “barbaric animal” — belonging to a foreign culture. According to the ancient Greeks, each animal had its homeland and customs, and could feel at home in some place on the globe. Additionally, there are some examples of non-native animals who experienced the process of “Hellenization.”

Ethologists have observed that some animals use organised violence against members of their own species. Some well-known scholars call this form of animal aggression war, deliberately omitting the quotation marks. And how was it in antiquity? Was war believed to be part of the animal world? The aim of the presented article is to analyse the ancient written sources in search of correlations between the notion of war and animals, and to determine what conceptual assumptions lie at the heart of this correlation. In light of the preserved records, it seems that the conviction about the existence of an inherent correlation between war and the animal world emerged slowly; that is, basic military terms (polemos, machē, etc.) were used with respect to animals reluctantly in the beginning and rather metaphorically, but gained popularity over time. Even though animals appear in the military context beginning from Homer's Iliad, Aristotle was most probably the first one to explicitly formulate a thesis about the presence of war (polemos) in the animal world. Aristotle's concept of war comes down to a series of duels fought between animals. It seems that what made it easier for Aristotle to transfer the notion of a battle (machē) from the human world to the animal world was the Greek tendency to present duels between soldiers as being equivalent to a clash between two armies.