Gregory McNamee’s translation of Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals was published in July of this year, approximately 1,800 years after we assume the book to have been written. Aelian’s stories are presented in short, species-specific chunks—“Dolphins, I understand, are mindful of their dead”—or grouped thematically: “If a lion eats lion’s-bane, it will die. If you drop oil on an insect, it will die… If you scatter roses on beetles, you will destroy them.” These high-relief profiles do not blend into kinds or kingdoms according to any normative taxonomy, but then nothing in this collection suggests that Aelian ever looked at an animal to begin with. He boasts that he never left Italy or went to sea, where he might have observed, for instance, that octopuses do not couple until they die of exhaustion and that whelks are not led by a king in vertical migration.

McNamee’s edition is designed as a gift book, sized for coffee table or bathroom; each chunk stands alone, no more than a page in length, set apart from the others by stark but friendly animal silhouettes that might have originated as clip-art. The original object, however, would have been one enormous page—which is to say a scroll. The technology of third-century Rome involved more human hands performing fewer and far less robotic tasks, zero electricity, and much less transformation of resources into stuff of finally unidentifiable provenance. For that reason the literary technologies that made reading and writing possible were closer to the natural world: Roman scrolls were made of parchment, often with fancifully decorated wooden rods and linen place-markers. Aelian wrote with a stylus on a tablet, a hinged frame composed of two sheets of soft wax—wax produced not so far away by bees, whom he reported to be industrious but also enchantingly demure, creatures who “dislike foul odors and sweet perfume alike, just as modest young girls do.” Metaphorically speaking, the text was the very surface of the earth, traced on living soil.

Aelian’s language was Greek, the pure paratactic style of Demosthenes: spare, compressed at times to epigram, a conversational sequence of apparently unplanned juxtapositions and transitions—“It occurs to me just now to say something about hounds”—that trace the play of a lively mind. Aelian’s sentences, rendered admirably by McNamee, enact the structure of the book, in which he claimed to have “tried to weave a story that is like a field of...