[2][3] Although Physiognomonics is the earliest work surviving in Greek devoted to the subject, texts preserved on clay tablets provide evidence of physiognomy manuals from the First Babylonian dynasty, containing divinatory case studies of the ominous significance of various bodily dispositions.
[4] While loosely physiognomic ways of thinking are present in Greek literature as early as Homer, physiognomy proper is not known before the classical period.
Physiognomy was mentioned in a work by Antisthenes on the Sophists, which provides evidence of its recognition as an art (techne).
Hence often jesters compare someone who is not beautiful to a goat breathing fire, or again to a ram butting, and a certain physiognomist reduced all faces to those of two or three animals, and his arguments often prevailed on people.
[5] The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise begins with an allusion to Aristotle's Prior Analytics (II.27, on the body-soul correlation), and many of the physiognomic connections discussed are mentioned specifically in the History of Animals.