Sitta von Reden, Money in Classical Antiquity

Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages

Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules

Salted fish and stinking, once theought us from afar,
Now the boys have caught ‘em fresh, and all alive they are!”

Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, pg. 13-14

For most of human history the relationship between other animals and humans has been a highly charged one; much of mythology, folklore, etc. is based on it, and it isn’t surprising that everything from fish to unicorns to lions to dragons to etc. figure in heraldry, etc.  For example the pelican (which in the Middle Ages was said to pluck the flesh from its own breast)  was analogized to Jesus on the cross throughout much of Christian history; and Shakespeare uses the pelican as a means to describe the relationship between King Lear and his errant daughters:

Death, traitor! nothing could have subdued nature
To such a lowness but his unkind daughters.
Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers
Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?
Judicious punishment! ’twas this flesh begot
Those pelican daughters.

Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (1997).

Susan Brand’s translation of Lucan’s Civil War (1992).  In the mid-1990s I read the translation by Graves.  It is less well known than the work of Virgil and Ovid, but every bit its equal in my opinion.