『吾輩は猫である』の二つの逸話の材源について --アイスキュロスの死とアグノディケ--

Abstract

Natsume Soseki inserted a lot of anecdotes from ancient Greece and Rome in his first novel, Wagahai wa neko dearu (I am a cat). This article discusses the sources of two of those anecdotes: Aeschylus' death and Agnodice's story. A bizarre anecdote on Aeschylus' death is transmitted from antiquity that he died struck by a turtle falling upon his head after an eagle, mistaking the poet's bald head for a rock, dropped it in the air. Five books in Soseki's existing library have a mention of this episode in their text, among which two can be excluded from candidate sources. The other three are Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Lionel Barnett's The Greek Drama, and Sir William Smith's A Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology, and Geography (abridged edition by G. E. Marindin). In conclusion, Smith's dictionary is the most probable source for Soseki, though none of the three books have any decisive evidence. The second anecdote to examine is about how an Athenian woman named Agnodice was permitted to be a midwife. This episode is recorded only in Hyginus' Fabulae 274 in classical texts. It is unlikely that Soseki read Hyginus in Latin or in translation and he must have found the anecdote in some modern book. In contrast to the case of Aeschylus' death, that source book is obvious in a sense, since Soseki left a note in English of a certain transcription mentioning Agnodice's story, though its source book was unidentifiable so far. By web search the book in question was revealed to be Christopher Wordsworth's Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century, which Soseki probably consulted for preparing his lecture at the university on eighteenth century English literature.