Natural History — Book VIII

Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin

1| Let us pass to the remaining animals, and first to those of the land. The largest is the elephant, and the nearest to human understanding: for they understand the language of their homeland, obey commands, and remember the duties they have learned; they take pleasure in affection and in glory; indeed they have qualities rare even in man, honesty, good sense, fairness, and even a religious reverence for the stars and a veneration of the sun and moon.

2| Authors report that in the forest pastures of Mauretania, at a certain river whose name is Amilo, when the new moon begins to shine, herds of them come down, and there, purifying themselves, solemnly sprinkle themselves with water, and so, having saluted the heavenly body, return to the woods, carrying the tired calves before them.

3| They are believed also to understand the religion of others: when about to cross the sea, they will not board the ships until they have been coaxed by their driver's oath that they will return; and they have been seen, when worn down by sickness (for diseases attack even those great bulks), lying on their backs and throwing grass up toward the sky, as if enlisting the earth in their prayers. As for their teachableness, they do homage to the king, bend their knees, and offer garlands. Among the Indians the smaller ones, which they call bastards, do the ploughing.

4| At Rome they first went under the yoke drawing a chariot in Pompey the Great's African triumph, which is recorded to have happened earlier, when Father Liber triumphed over conquered India. Procilius says that in Pompey's triumph they could not go out through the gate yoked together. At the gladiatorial show given by Germanicus Caesar some even performed a kind of clumsy movement like dancers.

5| It was common for them to throw weapons through the air without the winds carrying them off, to stage gladiatorial bouts among themselves, or to play together in a frolicking war dance. Later they even walked on ropes, four of them carrying one on a litter in imitation of a woman in childbed; and in dining rooms full of people they went to their places through the couches, setting their feet so carefully that none of the drinkers was touched.

6| It is certain that one, slower of wit in taking in what was taught and often punished with beatings, was found at night rehearsing those same lessons. It is a wonder that they even climb ropes stretched upward, but more so that they come back down them, especially when they slope downward. Mucianus, three times consul, is our authority that one of them even learned the shapes of the Greek letters and used to write out in words of that language: "I myself wrote this and dedicated the Celtic spoils"; and likewise that he saw at Puteoli, when some that had been brought by sea were being made to disembark, how, frightened by the length of the gangway stretching far out from the shore, they turned round and went backward, so as to deceive themselves in judging the distance.

7| They know that the only prize for which they are hunted lies in their weapons, which Juba calls horns, but Herodotus, so much older, and common usage, more correctly, call teeth. For this reason, when these fall out through some accident or old age, they bury them. This alone is ivory; the rest, even in these, where the body covers them, is cheap bone. And yet of late, through scarcity, even their bones have begun to be cut into plates: for teeth of great size are now rarely found except from India; all the rest in our part of the world have gone to luxury.

8| Youth is recognized by the whiteness of the teeth. The beasts take the greatest care of them: they spare the point of one so that it may not be blunt for battle, and use the other for work, digging up roots and pushing heavy loads; and when surrounded by hunters they set in front those whose tusks are smallest, so that it may not be thought worth a fight, and afterward, when exhausted, they break the tusks by driving them against a tree and buy themselves off with the plunder.

9| It is a wonder that most animals know why they are sought, and also that almost all know what to beware of. The elephant, it is said, if it chances to meet a man wandering harmlessly in a lonely place, is gentle and peaceable, and will even show him the way; yet the same animal, if it notices a man's footprint before the man himself, trembles for fear of an ambush, stops at the scent, looks round, snorts its anger, and does not tread on it, but digs it out and hands it on to the next, and that one to the one behind, with the same message, down to the last; then the column wheels round and goes back and is drawn up in battle line. So long does that taint last for the smell of all of them, though for the most part it is not even from bare feet.

10| In the same way the tigress too, savage even to the other wild beasts and herself scornful even of the elephant's footprints, is said, on seeing a man's footprint, to carry off her cubs at once. How has she recognized it? Where has she seen before the one she fears? For it is certain that such forests are very little visited. No doubt they may wonder at the very rarity of the track. But from where do they know that it is to be feared? Indeed, why should they dread even the sight of him, when they are so far superior in strength, size and speed? This, surely, is the nature of things, this her power: that the fiercest and largest of wild beasts have never seen what they ought to fear, and yet understand at once when it is to be feared.

11| Elephants always move in herds. The oldest leads the column, and the one next in age closes the rear. When about to cross a river they send the smallest ahead, so that the larger ones going in may not wear down the bed and increase the depth of the water. Antipater is our authority that two of them used by King Antiochus in war were famous even for their names; for they know their names. Certainly Cato, though he removed the names of generals from his annals, recorded that the one which fought most bravely in the Carthaginian battle line was called Surus, from having one tusk broken off.

12| When Antiochus was testing a ford in a river, Ajax refused, though he was otherwise always the leader of the column. Then it was proclaimed that the leadership would belong to the one that crossed; and when Patroclus ventured it, the king for that reason presented him with silver trappings, in which they delight most of all, and with every other mark of first place. The one that had been disgraced chose death by starvation rather than dishonor. For their sense of shame is remarkable: the one defeated shuns the voice of the victor and offers him earth and leafy boughs. Out of modesty they never mate except in seclusion,

13| The male is five years old, the female ten. Mating takes place every two years, on five days, it is said, of each such year, and no more; on the sixth they wash in a river, and do not return to the herd before. They know no adulteries, nor are there any battles among themselves over females, so ruinous in other animals, not because they lack the force of love; for it is reported that one in Egypt loved a girl who sold garlands, and, lest anyone think her commonly chosen, she was wonderfully dear to Aristophanes, most celebrated in the art of grammar,

14| and another loved Menander of Syracuse, a young man just entering youth, in the army of Ptolemy, bearing witness to his longing, whenever he did not see him, by refusing food. And Juba reports that one loved a certain perfume-seller. In all of them the proofs of love were joy at the sight and artless caresses; coins which the people had given were kept and poured into the fold of her dress. Nor is it wonderful that those who have memory should love.

15| For the same author reports that one recognized, in old age, many years afterwards, the man who had been his driver in youth; the same, a certain divination of justice, when King Bocchus had set before thirty elephants the same number of men, tied to stakes, against whom he had resolved to vent his rage, with men running forward among the elephants to provoke them, and it could not be brought about that they should serve as ministers of another's cruelty.

16| Italy first saw elephants in the war of King Pyrrhus, and called them Lucanian oxen, as they were seen in Lucania in the year of the city 472; Rome saw them in a triumph 7 years after, added to the previous number, and the greatest number in the year 502, after the victory of the pontiff Lucius Metellus in Sicily, captured from the Carthaginians. They were 142 or, as some say, 120, carried across on rafts which he had laid on rows of jars fastened together.

17| Verrius reports that they fought in the circus and were killed with javelins, for want of a plan, since it had not been decided either to feed them or to give them to kings; Lucius Piso says they were only led into the circus and, so that contempt for them might grow, were driven by workmen holding blunted spears all round the circus. Nor do the authors who think they were not killed explain what was then done with them.

18| Famous is the combat of one of the Romans against an elephant, when Hannibal had forced our captives to fight among themselves. For he set the one who survived against an elephant, and that man, having agreed to be released if he killed it, met it alone on the sand and finished it, to the great grief of the Carthaginians. Hannibal, understanding that the fame of that combat would bring contempt on the beasts, sent horsemen to kill him as he departed. That their trunk is most easily cut off was shown by the experience of Pyrrhus's battles.

19| Fenestella reports that they fought at Rome first of all in the circus of Claudius Pulcher, in his curule aedileship, in the consulship of Marcus Antonius and Aulus Postumius, in the year 655 from the city's founding, and again twenty years later in the curule aedileship of the Luculli, against bulls.

20| In Pompey's second consulship too, when the temple of Venus Victrix was dedicated, twenty fought in the circus or, as some report, 18, with the Gaetulians hurling javelins from the other side, in the wonderful fight of one of them, who, his feet pierced through, crawled on his knees against the crowds, snatching shields and throwing them high into the air, which, falling, were whirled round in a circle to the pleasure of the spectators, as though they were flung by art and not by the fury of a beast. A great marvel was also in another which was killed with one blow; a javelin driven in beneath the eye had reached the vital parts of the head.

21| All together they tried to break out, not without harm to the people, as iron barriers had been placed round. For this reason Caesar the dictator, later about to give a similar spectacle, surrounded the arena with trenches, which the emperor Nero removed, adding places for the knights. But the elephants of Pompey, having lost hope of flight, sought the pity of the crowd in an indescribable attitude, begging them with a kind of lamentation, bewailing themselves, so that the people were moved by such grief that, forgetting the commander and the munificence devised for his honour, they all rose in tears and invoked curses on Pompey, which he soon paid for.

22| They fought also for Caesar the dictator in his third consulship: twenty against 500 foot soldiers, and again as many with towers, with sixty defenders each, the number of foot soldiers being the same as in the earlier show and an equal number of horse fighting against them; afterwards single ones for the emperors Claudius and Nero at the completion of gladiatorial shows.

23| Of the animal itself such gentleness is told toward the less strong that in a flock of sheep it moves aside with its trunk those it meets, lest it trample any unawares. They harm only when provoked, and this though they always walk in herds, being of all animals the least given to roaming alone. When surrounded by cavalry they take the weak, tired or wounded into the middle of the column, the line relieving in turn as if by command or reason.

24| When captured they are very quickly tamed with barley juice. They are captured in India by one of the tamed ones being driven by its rider, who beats the wild one when it has been caught alone or driven away from the herd; when it is tired he climbs across onto it and guides it just as he did the first. Africa takes them in pits, into which, when one has fallen, the others at once heap branches, roll down masses, build up mounds and try with all their strength to drag him out.

25| Formerly, for the sake of taming them, kings drove them by cavalry into a valley made by hand and deceptive over a long stretch, and shut within its banks and ditches they tamed them by hunger. The proof was that a branch held out by a man was gently accepted. Now for the sake of the tusks their feet, otherwise very tender, are pierced with javelins.

26| The Trogodytae, neighbours of Ethiopia, who live on this hunting alone, climb the trees near the elephants' path; from there they watch for the very last of the whole column and leap down onto its rump. The tail is seized with the left hand, the feet pressed against the left thigh; hanging so, with the right hand he cuts one hamstring with a sharp-edged double axe, and when that leg is slowed, fleeing, he strikes the sinews of the other hamstring, carrying out everything with the greatest speed. Others, in a safer but more deceptive way, fix huge bows stretched at a distance in the ground; young men of outstanding strength hold them, others strain with equal effort, and they plant the arrow-spears in the passing animals, then follow the traces of blood.

27| The females of the elephant kind are much more timid. They are tamed, when raging, by hunger and blows, with other elephants brought up to restrain with chains the one in tumult. At other times, too, especially around mating, they grow wild and with their tusks lay low the stalls of the Indians. For this reason they keep them from mating and separate the herds of females, which they keep no otherwise than herds of cattle. Tamed, they serve in war and carry towers of armed men on their backs, and finish the greater part of the wars of the East: they overturn battle lines and trample down armed men. The same are terrified by the slightest squeal of pigs, and wounded and frightened always retreat, with no less destruction of their own side. The African elephants fear the Indian ones and dare not look at them, for the Indian are also of greater size.

28| The common people think they carry in the womb for ten years, Aristotle for two years and no more than [to give birth once, and more than] one at a time; to live for two hundred years and some 300. Their youth begins at the sixtieth year. They delight in rivers above all and wander around streams, although otherwise they cannot swim because of the size of the body. The same cannot bear cold; this is their greatest evil, with swelling and a flux of the belly, and they feel no other kinds of disease. I find that by drinking oil the darts that stick in their body fall out, but that they stick more easily after sweat.

29| And eating earth is wasting to them, unless they chew it rather often; they swallow even stones; trunks of trees they have as most welcome food. They knock down palms that are too high with the forehead and so eat the fruit as it lies. They chew with the mouth, but breathe, drink and smell with what is not improperly called the hand. Of animals they hate the mouse most, and if they see the fodder placed in the manger touched by it, they refuse it. They feel the greatest torment in drinking when a leech has been swallowed, which I notice began to be commonly called a blood-sucker. When this has fixed itself in the very windpipe, it causes intolerable pain.

30| The hide on the back is very hard, on the belly soft; there is no covering of bristles, not even in the tail a defence for driving off the annoyance of flies (for even so great a bulk feels it), but the skin is latticed, and invites that kind of creature by its smell. So when they have taken in swarms with the skin stretched out, they suddenly draw the lattices together into wrinkles and crush those they have caught. This serves them for tail, mane and fleece.

31| The tusks have a great price, and from them comes the most luxurious material for the images of the gods. Luxury has found a recommendation, and another sought-after flavour in the callus of the hand, for no other reason, I believe, than that it seems to chew ivory itself. The size of tusks is indeed seen most in temples, but nevertheless Polybius reports, on the authority of the petty king Gulusa, that in the farthest parts of Africa, where it borders on Ethiopia, elephants' tusks serve in dwellings in place of doorposts, and that in these dwellings and in the cattle pens fences are made with elephants' tusks in place of stakes.

32| Africa bears elephants beyond the Syrtic deserts and in Mauretania, the Ethiopians and Trogodytae bear them, as has been said, but India bears the largest, and with them there is a perpetual feud with dragons, themselves of such size that they easily embrace them in coils and bind them with the knot of their nodes. That fight ends in the death of both; the beaten animal, falling, crushes the embrace with its weight.

33| There is a wonderful cunning in animals, each in its own cause, and very shrewd. The dragon has difficulty in climbing to so great a height; and so, having watched a well-worn path to the pasture, he throws himself from a lofty tree. The elephant knows he is no match for him in wrestling against the coils; so he seeks the rubbing of trees or rocks. The dragons guard against this and for that reason first bind the feet with the tail; the elephants undo the knots with the trunk; but the dragons hide their head in the very nostrils and at once shut off the breath and tear the softest parts. The same, when they meet them, rear up against them and aim chiefly at the eyes. So it happens that they are often found blind and worn out by hunger and the wasting of grief.

34| What other cause of such discord could anyone bring, except nature arranging a spectacle by matching equals? There is another account too of this combat. They say the blood of elephants is very cold; for that reason in scorching heat it is especially sought by dragons. Therefore, they say, the dragons, plunged in the rivers, lie in wait for them as they drink, and rising, fasten a bite in the ear, with the trunk bound, since that is the only place that cannot be defended by the trunk. The dragons, they say, are so large that they take in all the blood, and so the elephants are drained by them and fall dried up, and the dragons, drunk, are crushed and die with them.

35| Ethiopia produces them equal to the Indian, of twenty cubits each. The only wonder is where Juba got the belief that they are crested. The Ethiopians among whom they are chiefly born are called Asachaei; and they tell that on their seacoasts four or five at a time, interwoven like a hurdle, with heads raised as sails, are carried by the waves to better pastures in Arabia.

36| Megasthenes writes that in India serpents grow to such a size that they swallow whole stags and bulls; Metrodorus, that around the river Rhyndacus in Pontus they seize birds flying over, however high and swift, and swallow them by drawing breath.

37| There is a known case in the Punic wars, at the river Bagrada, of a serpent 120 feet in length, taken by the commander Regulus with ballistae and engines, as if it were a town; its skin and jaws lasted in a temple at Rome until the Numantine war. Credence is given to these by the boas, so called in Italy, which grow to such size that when they were killed on the Vatican under the deified Emperor Claudius, a whole infant was seen in the belly. They are fed at first by sucking cow's milk, from which they took the name.

38| There is no point in describing painstakingly the forms of the other animals, which have been brought together from everywhere and have fairly often come to Italy. Scythia produces very few, from want of shrubs, and Germany, bordering on it, few, yet notable kinds of wild oxen: the maned bisons, and the uri, outstanding in strength and speed, to which the ignorant crowd gives the name of bubali, though Africa produces that, resembling in some way a calf or a stag.

39| The north also bears herds of wild horses, as Asia and Africa do of asses, and moreover the alces, like a beast of burden, except that the height of the ears and neck distinguishes it; also one born on the island Scadinavia and never seen in this world, though told of by many, the achlis, not unlike it but with no bend in the joints of the legs, and for that reason not lying down but leaning against a tree in sleep, and the tree being cut, it is captured by this ambush, though otherwise it is remarkably swift. Its upper lip is very large; for that reason it goes backward in grazing, lest by going forward it be tangled.

40| They say that in Paeonia there is a wild animal called bonasus, with a horse's mane and in other respects like a bull, its horns so bent upon themselves that they are of no use in fighting. For this reason it helps itself by flight, discharging in it its dung, sometimes over a length of three iugera, the touch of which burns those following like some fire.

41| It is wonderful that leopards, panthers, lions and the like, with the point of the claws hidden in sheaths of the body, so that they may not be broken or blunted, walk and run with the claws turned away, and extend them only when seizing.

42| The lion has its chief nobility when the manes clothe the neck and shoulders; for this comes with age in those conceived from a lion. But those which leopards have begotten always lack this mark; so too the females. They have a great desire of mating, and for this reason the males are angry. Africa chiefly sees this, since from lack of water the wild beasts gather at a few rivers. Therefore there are multiform births of animals there, the males mating with females of each kind variously by force or pleasure; whence also the common saying in Greece that Africa always brings something new.

43| By the smell the lion perceives that the lioness has mated with a leopard in adultery, and rises with all his strength for punishment; therefore the female washes away that fault in a river or follows at a greater distance. That the young are born only once, the womb being torn by the edge of the claws in the birth, I see that the common people have believed.

44| Aristotle reports differently, a man whom, since I am to follow him in these matters for the most part, I think I should preface. When King Alexander the Great was inflamed with desire to know the natures of animals and entrusted this inquiry to Aristotle, a man supreme in every branch of learning, some thousands of men over the whole stretch of Asia and Greece were ordered to obey him, all those whom hunting, fowling and fishing supported and who had in their care preserves, herds, beehives, fishponds and aviaries, so that nothing born anywhere might be unknown to him. By questioning them he composed those famous nearly fifty volumes on animals. These, collected by me in brief together with what he had not known, I ask readers kindly to accept, as in all the works of nature and amid the longing of the most illustrious of all kings my care travels briefly.

45| He therefore reports that the lioness at her first litter bears five cubs, and every year one fewer, and from one becomes barren. They are at first shapeless and very small lumps of flesh the size of weasels, at six months they can scarcely walk and only at two months move; and in Europe, he says, lions exist only between the rivers Achelous and Nestus, but far surpass in strength those which Africa or Syria produces.

46| There are two kinds of lions, the compact and short one with more crisped manes. These are more timid than the long ones with simple coat; the latter are contemptuous of wounds. The males pass urine with a leg raised like dogs. Their smell is heavy, and their breath no less so. They drink rarely and feed on alternate days, and after a full meal sometimes go without food for three days. What they can, they swallow whole in chewing, and when the belly cannot contain their greed they extract it by putting their claws down the throat, or if they have to flee when full.

47| He shows that their life is long, by the proof that most are found with teeth gone. Polybius, the companion of Aemilianus, reports that in old age they attack man, since their strength is not enough to chase wild beasts; they then besiege the cities of Africa, and for that reason he saw them crucified, with Scipio, since the rest were deterred by fear of a like punishment from the same offence.

48| Of wild beasts only the lion has mercy towards suppliants. He spares those prostrate, and where he is fierce he roars rather at men than at women, at infants only from great hunger. Juba believes that an understanding of prayers reaches them; at any rate he heard that a captive woman returning to Gaetulia, in the forests, mitigated the attack of many by speaking to them, daring to say that she was a woman, a fugitive, weak, a suppliant of the most noble of all animals and ruler of the rest, a prey unworthy of its glory. The opinion about this varies according to the nature or chance of each, that beasts are soothed by speech, since even serpents are drawn out by song and forced to punishment; whether it is true or false, life has not decided.

49| The tail is the index of the lion's temper, as the ears are of horses; for nature gives these marks to every noble creature. A motionless tail, therefore, shows a calm lion, a gently moving one a lion that is fawning, which is rare: for anger is more frequent, at the beginning of which the ground is beaten, and as it grows the back is lashed as by a kind of spur. The greatest strength is in the chest. From every wound, whether from a claw or a tooth that has been set in, black blood pours. The same animals, when sated, are harmless.

50| Nobility is chiefly detected in dangers, not only in that way in which, scorning missiles, it long guards itself by terror alone, and as if bearing witness that it is compelled, rises, not as forced by danger but as angry at madness. There is that nobler sign of spirit: however great the force of dogs and hunters pressing, it retreats in the fields, in scorn and with halts, where it can be seen; but when it has entered thickets and woods it is borne at the fiercest speed, as though the place hid its shame. While pursuing, it leaps with a bound which it does not use in flight.

51| When wounded it knows the one who struck it, by a wonderful discrimination, and goes for him among any crowd; but the one who has thrown a weapon yet not wounded it, it seizes, whirls round and throws down, without wounding him. When a mother fights for her cubs, it is said to fix the sharpness of its eyes on the ground, so as not to be alarmed by the hunting spears.

52| For the rest they lack guile and suspicion, and do not look sidelong, and likewise do not wish to be looked at. It was believed that a dying lion bites the ground and gives a tear to death. And this animal, so great and so savage, is more terrified by the circles of turning wheels and empty chariots and the crests and even the crowing of cocks, but most of all by fires. It feels a sickness only of loathing of food, in which insult cures it, when it is driven to rage by the wantonness of apes tied near; then the taste of blood is a remedy.

53| The fight of several lions together at Rome was first given by Scaevola, son of Publius, in his curule aedileship; a hundred maned lions first of all by Lucius Sulla, who was later dictator, in his praetorship. After him Pompey the Great in the circus gave 600, among them 315 maned, Caesar the dictator 400.

54| To capture them was once a work of difficulty, especially by pits. In the principate of Claudius chance taught a method, which is almost shameful for so great a beast, when a shepherd of Gaetulia threw a cloak against the rush of one attacking; this spectacle was at once transferred to the arena, that great ferocity growing numb in an almost incredible manner when the head is covered with even a light throw, so that it is bound without resisting. Clearly all its force lies in the eyes, so that it is less wonderful that a lion shut in together with him was strangled by Lysimachus at Alexander's order.

55| Marcus Antony first put them under the yoke and harnessed them to a chariot at Rome, and indeed in the civil war, when the battle had been fought in the plains of Pharsalus, not without a certain portent of the times, that prodigy signifying that noble spirits were submitting to the yoke. For that he was so drawn with the mime-actress Cytheris went beyond even the monstrous portents of those calamities. The first man to dare to handle a lion and show it tamed is reported to be Hanno, among the most famous of the Carthaginians, and he was condemned on that very proof, since a man of such artful talent seemed able to persuade of anything, and freedom was ill entrusted to one to whom even ferocity had yielded so far.

56| There are indeed examples of chance mercies in them too. Mentor of Syracuse in Syria, when a lion met him and rolled before him as a suppliant, stunned with fear, as the beast kept setting itself in front of him as he fled on every side, and licked his footprints like one fawning, noticed in its foot a swelling and a wound. He drew out a splinter and freed it from the torment.

57| A painting at Syracuse bears witness to this event. In a similar way Elpis, a Samian by nation, carried by ship to Africa, seeing near the shore a lion with threatening jaws, sought a tree in flight, invoking Father Liber, since then is the chief place for prayers when there is no hope. But the beast had not pressed upon him as he fled, when it could have, and, lying down at the tree, sought pity with the very mouth with which it had terrified. A bone had stuck in its teeth from too greedy a bite and was tormenting it with hunger, a penalty not only in its own weapons; it gazed at him and, as it were, begged with dumb entreaties, while he, trusting in chance things, did not stand against the beast, and he hesitated much longer from wonder than from fear.

58| At last he came down and pulled it out, as the lion offered it and put it in position where it was most needed. And they say that as long as that ship stood on the shore, the lion repaid the favour by bringing in game. For this reason Elpis dedicated a temple to Father Liber at Samos, which from that deed the Greeks called the temple of kechenotos Dionysou. Shall we wonder afterwards that the footprints of men are understood by wild beasts, when they hope for help even from one of the animals? For why did they not go to others, or how do they know the healing hands of man? Unless perhaps the force of ills compels even wild beasts to try everything.

59| Equally memorable is what the natural philosopher Demetrius reports of a panther: that one lying in the middle of the road suddenly appeared, from longing for a man, to the father of a certain Philinus, a follower of wisdom; that he began to retreat in fear, but the beast rolled about, clearly fawning and throwing itself about in a grief that could be understood even in a panther. She had young, which had fallen far off into a pit.

60| The first sign of compassion, then, was not to be frightened; the next, to turn his attention to her; and following where she drew his garment with a light touch of her claws, when he understood the cause of her pain and at the same time the reward of his own safety, he took out the cubs, she escorting him with them until he was led beyond the wilds, glad and gambolling, so that it was readily apparent she was returning thanks and charging nothing in exchange, which is rare even in man.

61| These things lend credence also to Democritus, who tells that Thoas in Arcadia was saved by a dragon. As a boy he had reared it, being exceedingly fond of it, and his father, fearing the serpent's nature and size, had carried it off into wild places, in which, when he was surrounded by the ambush of robbers and the serpent recognized his voice, it came to his aid. For what is told of infants nourished with the milk of wild beasts when they had been exposed, as of our founders by a she-wolf, I think happens more fittingly by the greatness of their destinies than by the nature of the beasts.

62| The panther and the tiger are almost the only animals marked by variety of spots; in others there is one colour proper to each kind, only that of lions in Syria is black. In panthers the spots are small eyes on a white ground. They say that all four-footed creatures are wonderfully stirred by their smell, but terrified by the fierceness of the head; for this reason, with this hidden, they seize the rest, lured by the sweetness. There are some who report that on their shoulder there is a spot like the moon, growing into a circle and hollowing itself in the same way.

63| Now, throughout that whole kind, they call them variae, and pardi where they are males; the kind is most frequent in Africa and Syria. Some distinguish panthers from these by whiteness alone, and I have so far found no other difference.

64| There was an old decree of the senate that it should not be permitted to import African beasts into Italy. Against this Gnaeus Aufidius, tribune of the plebs, brought a measure to the people and allowed them to be imported for the sake of the circus games. The first to send variae, however, was Scaurus in his aedileship, 150 all together; then Pompey the Great sent 410, the deified Augustus 420.

65| On the fourth day before the May Nones, in the consulship of Quintus Tubero and Paullus Fabius Maximus, the same man, at the dedication of Marcellus' theatre, was the first of all to show a tamed tiger at Rome, in a cage, and the deified Claudius showed 4 together.

66| Hyrcanians and Indians produce the tiger, an animal of fearful speed and best known while its whole litter is being captured, which is always numerous. It is carried off by the man lying in wait on a horse as swift as possible, and he is changed at once to fresh ones. But when the mother, having young, finds the lair empty (for the males have no care of the offspring), she is borne headlong, tracking by scent. As she draws near, with a roar, the robber throws down one of the cubs; she lifts it in her mouth and, driven even faster by the weight, comes back and then catches up again, and so on, until he has returned to the ship, and her fierceness rages in vain on the shore.

67| The East pastures camels among its herds, of which there are two kinds, Bactrian and Arabian; they differ in that the former have two humps on the back, the latter one, and another under the breast on which they rest. In the upper row of teeth, like oxen, they are lacking in both kinds. All of them serve as beasts of burden on the back, and also as cavalry in battles.

68| Their speed is like a horse's, but each has its own measure, as of strength. It does not go beyond the accustomed distance nor take more than the load to which it is trained. They have a natural hatred for horses. They endure thirst even four days and fill themselves, when there is an opportunity to drink, both for the past and for the future, having first disturbed the water by trampling it; otherwise drinking does not please them. They live for fifty years, some for a hundred. Both sexes are themselves subject to madness. A kind of gelding has even been devised for the females who are prepared for war: they become stronger when mating is denied.

69| A certain likeness to these is transferred to two animals. The Ethiopians call a nabun one with a neck like a horse, feet and legs like an ox, a camel's head, its reddish colour set off by white spots, from which it is called camelopardalis; it was first seen at Rome at the circus games of Caesar the dictator. From then on it is seen from time to time, more conspicuous for its appearance than for ferocity, for which reason it has even acquired the name of wild sheep.

70| The games of Pompey the Great first showed the chama, which the Gauls called rufius, with the form of a wolf and the spots of pards. The same games showed from Ethiopia what they call kepoi, whose hind feet were like human feet and legs, and the front ones like hands. Rome has not seen this animal since.

71| At the same games was also seen the rhinoceros with a single horn in the nose, as often. This is born another enemy to the elephant: it sharpens its horn on rocks and prepares itself for the fight, in the struggle aiming chiefly at the belly, which it knows is softer. Its length is equal, its legs much shorter, its colour boxwood.

72| Lynxes, commonly numerous, and sphinxes with dark hair and two breasts on the chest, Ethiopia produces, and many other things like monsters: winged horses armed with horns, which they call pegasi; crocotae, as though conceived from a dog and a wolf, breaking everything with their teeth and at once finishing what they have swallowed in the belly; cercopitheci with black heads, the hair of an ass, and unlike the rest in voice; Indian oxen with one horn and with three; the leucrocota, a very swift beast the size of a wild ass, with stag's haunches, a lion's neck, tail and chest, a badger's head, a cloven hoof, the mouth slit open all the way to the ears, and a continuous bone in place of teeth —

73| (they say this beast imitates human voices. Among the same people is also the one called eale, the size of a river-horse, with the tail of an elephant, black or tawny in colour, the jaws of a boar, and having movable horns longer than a cubit, which it sets alternately in battle and varies, hostile or slanting, as reason has shown) —

74| but also the most savage wild bulls, larger than the farm ones, faster than all, tawny in colour, with blue-grey eyes, the hair turned the wrong way, the mouth gaping to the ears beside the movable horns. The hide has the hardness of flint, rejecting every wound. They hunt all wild beasts; they themselves are captured only in pits, and always die of their own ferocity.

75| Among the same peoples, Ctesias writes, there is born what he calls the mantichora, with a triple row of teeth meeting like the teeth of a comb, the face and little ears of a man, grey-blue eyes, a blood-red colour, the body of a lion, and a tail that fixes in its stings like a scorpion's; its voice is as if the notes of a pipe and a trumpet were mingled; of great speed, and especially greedy for human flesh.

76| In India there are also oxen with solid hooves and a single horn, and a beast named axis, with the hide of a fawn but more and whiter spots, sacred to Father Liber — (the Orsaean Indians hunt apes white over the whole body) — and a most fierce beast, the monoceros, in the rest of its body like a horse, in the head like a stag, in the feet like an elephant, in the tail like a boar, with a deep bellow, and a single black horn standing out two cubits in the middle of the forehead. They say this beast is not taken alive.

77| Among the Western Ethiopians there is a spring, the Nigris, which most have thought to be the source of the Nile, as the proofs we have given persuade. Near it a wild beast is called the catoblepas, otherwise of moderate size and sluggish in its other limbs, bearing with difficulty only its excessively heavy head (always hanging down to the ground), and otherwise the destruction of the human race, since all who have seen its eyes expire at once.

78| The same power belongs to the serpent called the basilisk. The province of Cyrenaica produces it, not more than twelve fingers in size, marked by a white spot on the head like a kind of diadem. With its hiss it drives away all serpents, and does not propel its body in many coils, as the rest do, but advances in the middle high and upright; it kills shrubs, not only those touched but those breathed on, burns up herbs and splits rocks: such is the force of the evil. It was once believed that when it was killed from a horse with a spear, the force travelling up through the spear destroyed not only the rider but the horse also. And for such a monster as this —

79| (for kings have often longed to see it dead) — the venom of weasels is deadly: so completely did it please nature that nothing should be without its match. They thrust these into its caverns, easily recognized by the corruption of the ground. The weasels kill it with their smell, and die at once, and the battle of nature is concluded.

80| But in Italy too the sight of wolves is believed to be harmful, and to take away for the moment the voice of a man whom they see first. Africa and Egypt produce them sluggish and small, the colder region rough and fierce. That men are turned into wolves and restored to themselves again we ought confidently to judge false, or else believe all the fabulous things that we have learned over so many ages. Why, however, that report is so deeply fixed among the common people that they have shape-changers in their curses will be shown.

81| Euanthes, not despised among the authors of Greece, writes that the Arcadians say that one chosen by lot from the family of a certain Anthus is led to a pool in that region, and, his clothing hung on an oak, swims across and goes off into the wilderness and is transformed into a wolf and joins with the others of the same kind for 9 years. If in that time he has abstained from man, he returns to the same pool and, when he has swum across, recovers his form, with the old age of nine years added to his former appearance. He adds this too, that he gets back the same clothing. It is wonderful how far Greek credulity goes!

82| There is no lie so shameless as to lack a witness. Likewise Apollas, who wrote of Olympic victors, tells that Demaenetus the Parrhasian, at a sacrifice which the Arcadians then still made to Jupiter Lycaeus with a human victim, tasted the entrails of the sacrificed boy and turned into a wolf, and that the same man, restored in the 10th year, trained himself in athletics at boxing and returned a victor from Olympia.

83| Moreover it is commonly believed that in the tail of this animal there is a love-poison in a small tuft of hair, and that it throws it away when captured, nor does it have power unless taken from the living animal. The days on which it mates are not more than twelve in the whole year. Among the auguries it is held that the wolf, when hungry, feeds on earth; if it does so with a full mouth after cutting across the path of travellers on their right, no omen is more excellent.

84| There are in that kind those who are called cervarii, such as we have said was seen in the arena of Pompey the Great, from Gaul. They say that for this, though chewing in hunger, if it looks back, forgetfulness of its food steals over it, and going away it seeks something else.

85| As to serpents, it is commonly said that most have the colour of the earth in which they are hidden. There are countless kinds. In the cerastes little horns often project from the body, four of them, by the movement of which, the rest of the body hidden, they entice birds to them. The amphisbaena has a double head, that is, one also at the tail, as if one mouth were too little to pour out venom. Some have scales, some markings, all deadly poison. The iaculus is hurled from the branches of trees, and serpents are to be feared not only on foot, but they fly like a missile from an engine. The necks of asps swell, and there is no remedy for the blow except by at once cutting off the parts touched.

86| This so deadly an animal has one feeling, or rather affection: they generally wander in pairs, and live only with a mate. And so, when either is killed, the other has an incredible care for vengeance: it pursues the killer and, in whatever throng of people, marks him alone by a kind of recognition, breaks through all difficulties, crosses distances and is stopped only by rivers or by very swift flight.

87| It cannot be said whether nature has produced evils or remedies more abundantly. First of all she gave this evil dull eyes, and made them see not facing forward but at the temples (and so it is roused more often by hearing than by sight); then a deadly war with the ichneumon.

88| This animal, born in the same Egypt, is best known for this glory. It plunges itself often into mud and dries itself in the sun, and soon, when it has armoured itself with several coats in the same way, it goes into the fight. In it, lifting its tail, it turns aside and receives the blows without effect, until, watching with head to one side, it attacks the throat. Not content with this, it conquers another animal no gentler.

89| The Nile has the crocodile, a four-footed evil, dangerous equally on land and in the river. This is the only land animal without the use of a tongue, the only one that presses its bite with the upper jaw moving, and in other respects terrible, its row of teeth packed together like a comb. In size it generally exceeds eighteen cubits. It lays eggs as large as geese eggs, and always hatches them out of the place to which in that year the Nile, at its greatest rise, is going to reach, by a kind of foreknowledge. No other animal grows from a smaller origin to a greater size. It is also armed with claws, and has a hide invincible against all blows. It spends the days on land, the nights in water, on account of warmth in each.

90| When it is sated with food of fishes and, with its mouth always full of food, given over to sleep on the shore, a small bird, which is called trochilos there, king of birds in Italy, invites it to open wide for the sake of its own food, first cleaning its mouth by hopping, then the teeth and the inner throat too, which gape as widely as possible for this pleasure of scratching; and when the ichneumon sees it overcome by sleep in this delight, it is sent in through the same throat like a missile and eats out the belly.

91| The scincos, born in the Nile, resembles the crocodile, though smaller even than the ichneumon; it is supreme among antidotes against poisons, and also for inflaming the desire of men. But in the crocodile there was a plague too great for nature to be content with one enemy of it. And so the dolphins, which enter the Nile and which have on the back, as if for this use, a knife-like fin, driving them from their prey and reigning as it were in their own river alone, otherwise unequal in strength, kill them by cunning. For all animals are skilled in this, and know not only their own advantages but also the weaknesses of their enemies, they know their own weapons, they know the opportunities and the unwarlike parts of the opponents. In the belly the skin of the crocodile is soft and thin: so the dolphins, as if frightened, dive, and going under the belly cut it with that spine.

92| Moreover there is a race of men hostile to this beast in the Nile itself, named from the island Tentyra, where they live. Their stature is small, but their presence of mind is wonderful in this one practice. This beast is terrible against those who flee, but fugitive against those who pursue.

93| But these alone dare to go against it; they even swim in the river and, mounted on its back as riders, when it gapes with head thrown back to bite, put a club into its mouth and, holding the ends of it on right and left, drive them captive to land as with reins, and with the voice alone they terrify them and force them to vomit up the recent bodies for burial. And so crocodiles do not swim to that one island, and are put to flight by the smell of that kind of men, as serpents are by the Psylli.

94| This animal is said to have dull eyes in the water, and out of it the keenest sight; and to pass the four months of winter always without food in a cave. Some think that this alone grows as long as it lives; and it lives a long time.

95| A larger beast in height is produced in the same Nile, the hippopotamus, with cloven hooves like those of oxen, the back and mane and neighing of a horse, a snub nose, the tail and curved teeth of boars but less harmful, a hide impenetrable, for shields and helmets, unless they are soaked with moisture. It grazes crops on a purpose, they say, determined beforehand for each day, and leaves the field with its tracks leading out of it, so that no ambush may be laid for it on its return.

96| Marcus Scaurus first showed it, with five crocodiles, at Rome, at the games of his aedileship, in a temporary channel. The hippopotamus has been in a certain part of medicine even a teacher. For, made fat by constant satiety, it comes out onto the shore to look at a recent cutting of reeds, and where it sees the sharpest stump, pressing its body on it, it wounds a certain vein in the leg and so unburdens a body otherwise diseased by the flow of blood, and covers the wound again with mud.

97| Something similar has been shown also by a bird in the same Egypt, which is called the ibis, washing itself with the curve of its beak by that part through which it is most wholesome for the burden of food to be discharged. Nor is it alone: in many animals things have been found that will be of use to man too. The herb dictamnum for drawing out arrows was shown by stags struck by that weapon, expelling it by feeding on that herb; the same, when struck by the phalangium, which is a kind of spider, or by something like it, heal themselves by eating crabs. There is also a special remedy against the bites of serpents with which lizards restore themselves, whenever they have joined battle with them and been wounded.

98| Chelidonia, most wholesome for the sight, swallows showed, treating with it the injured eyes of their young. The tortoise restores its strength against serpents by feeding on cunila, which they call bubula; the weasel, in hunting mice, by rue, when it has joined battle with them. The stork heals itself with origanum, the boar in its diseases with ivy, and by eating crabs, especially those cast up by the sea.

99| The snake, whose body is covered over with a membrane by its winter position, sheds that hindrance with the juice of fennel and springs forth glossy. It sheds first from the head, and no faster than in one day and night, turning it back, so that what was inside becomes the outside of the membrane. The same, with sight dimmed in its winter hiding place, rubs itself against the herb marathus, anoints the eyes and refreshes them; if the scales have grown numb, it scratches itself with the spines of juniper. The dragon quenches the nausea of spring with the juice of wild lettuce.

100| Barbarians hunt panthers with meat rubbed with aconitum. Anguish at once seizes their throats, for which reason some have called this poison pardalianches; but the beast heals itself against it with human excrement, and is otherwise so greedy for it that herdsmen on purpose hang it in some vessel higher than it can reach by a leap, and it wears itself out by leaping and striving and at last expires, though it is otherwise so slow to die that with its entrails thrown out it fights on a long time.

101| The elephant, having swallowed a chameleon of the same colour as foliage, meets this poison of its own with the wild olive. Bears, when they have tasted the fruit of the mandragora, lick ants. The stag resists poisoned fodder with the herb cinara. Wood-pigeons, jackdaws, blackbirds and partridges purge their yearly loathing with a laurel leaf; doves, turtle-doves and domestic fowls with the herb called helxine; ducks, geese and other water birds with the herb sideritis; cranes and the like with marsh rush. The raven, after killing a chameleon (which harms even its conqueror), extinguishes the hostile poison with laurel.

102| There are thousands more, inasmuch as the same nature of things has given to very many animals also the observation of the sky and foreknowledge of winds, rains and storms, each in a different way, which it is boundless to pursue, as boundless indeed as the rest of their partnership with individual men. For they forewarn of dangers too, not only by fibres and entrails, on which a great part of mortals depend, but by another kind of sign.

103| When ruins are impending, mice migrate beforehand, spiders fall first with their webs. Auguries indeed became an art among the Romans, and a college of priests most solemn of all. Among these, in frozen places, there is also the fox, otherwise an animal of dire cunning. Frozen rivers and lakes they cross only after its going and returning. It is observed that it estimates the thickness of the ice by putting its ear to it.

104| Nor are proofs of destruction less clear even from animals to be despised. Marcus Varro is the authority that in Spain a town was undermined by rabbits, in Thessaly by moles, that a community in Gaul was driven out by frogs, in Africa by locusts, and that the people of the island of Gyara in the Cyclades were put to flight by mice, that in Italy Amynclae was destroyed by serpents. This side of the Ethiopian Cynamolgi is a widely deserted region, the people removed by scorpions and solpugae, and the Rhoetienses were driven out by scolopendras, as Theophrastus is authority. But let us return to the remaining kinds of wild beasts.

105| That hyenas have both natures, and become males in alternate years and females in alternate years, and give birth without a male, the common people believe; Aristotle denies it. Its neck, like a mane, extends in one continuous piece with the spine, and it cannot turn except by the circling round of its whole body.

106| Many other marvels are reported, but chiefly that among the stalls of herdsmen it imitates human speech and learns someone's name, to call him out and tear him apart; likewise that it imitates the vomiting of a man to rouse the dogs that it will attack. That graves are dug up by this one animal in search of bodies. That the female is rarely caught. That in the eyes there are a thousand varieties and changes of colour. Moreover, that by the touch of its shadow dogs become mute, and that by certain magical arts every animal it has circled three times stays rooted to its spot.

107| From the mating of this kind the Ethiopian lioness bears the corocotta, which likewise imitates the voices of men and cattle. Its edge is perpetual: in each part of the mouth it has no gums but a continuous tooth, enclosed like a case so as not to be blunted by meeting. Juba is the authority that the mantichora in Ethiopia too imitates human speech.

108| The most hyenas are born in Africa, which also scatters a multitude of wild asses. The males of this kind, one at a time, rule herds of females; they fear rivals in lust and therefore guard the pregnant, and castrate male young by biting. The pregnant, on the other hand, seek hiding places and desire to give birth by stealth, and rejoice in abundance of lust.

109| The beavers of Pontus amputate these same parts from themselves when danger presses, knowing that they are sought for this; physicians call it castoreum. Otherwise the animal of dread bite cuts trees beside rivers as with iron, and when part of a man is seized does not loosen its bite before the bones, broken, crack. Its tail is of fish, the rest of the appearance that of an otter. Both are aquatic, and in both the hair is softer than down.

110| The rubeta frogs too, whose life is both on land and in moisture, stuffed with very many medicines, are said constantly to lay these aside and take them up again by feeding, always keeping the poisons alone for themselves.

111| The sea-calf too has a similar way of life, in the sea and on land, and a nature like that of beavers. It vomits its gall, useful for many medicines, and likewise the rennet for epileptic diseases, knowing that it is sought for these. Theophrastus is the authority that stellions shed old age in the manner of a snake, and therefore at once devour it, forestalling remedies for the falling sickness. They say that their bites are harmless in Greece, harmful in Sicily.

112| Deer too have their own malice, though the gentlest of animals. When pressed by the force of dogs they take refuge of their own accord with man, and in giving birth they avoid less the paths worn by human tracks than the secluded places favourable to wild beasts. Their conception comes after the rising of Arcturus. They carry their young for eight months each, sometimes twins. After conception they separate themselves, but the males left behind rage with the madness of lust and dig pits. Then their muzzles turn black, until rains wash them. The females, before giving birth, purge themselves with a certain herb called seselis, using it for an easier womb; after the birth they feed on two, called tamnus and seselis, and return to the fawn: they wish the first juices of the milk to be steeped in these, for whatever reason.

113| They exercise the young when born by running and teach them to practise flight; they lead them to steep places and show them how to leap. The males, now freed of the desire of lust, seek pasture eagerly; when they feel themselves very fat, they look for hiding places, admitting the inconvenient weight. At other times they always rest in flight, and stand and look back when the pursuit is close, then again resort to the defences of flight. This happens from pain in the intestine, so weak that it is ruptured within by a light blow.

114| They flee, however, when they hear the barking of dogs, always with the wind behind them, so that the scent goes away with them. The shepherd's pipe and singing soothe them when they have pricked up their ears, which are most keen of hearing; when they have lowered them, they are deaf. For the rest the animal is simple and so astonished with wonder at everything that when a horse or a heifer approaches nearer, they do not perceive the man hunting beside it, or if they perceive him, they marvel at the bow itself and the arrows. They cross seas in herds, swimming in a stretched-out line, laying their heads on the haunches of those ahead, and taking turns in returning to the rear. This is chiefly noted in those crossing from Cilicia to Cyprus. They do not see the lands, but swim toward their scent.

115| The males have horns and alone of animals lose them every year at a fixed time in spring. Therefore on that day they seek the most pathless places: they lie hidden, having lost them, as though unarmed, but even these grudging their own good. They deny that the right horn is ever found, as if endowed with some medicine, and this must be admitted to be the more remarkable since in game preserves too they shed every year. They think they are buried by them. But when either is burned, by its smell serpents are put to flight and epileptic diseases are detected.

116| They also carry in them signs of age, adding a single branch each year up to six years; from that time they grow again alike, and age cannot be distinguished; but old age is shown by the teeth, for they have either few or none, and no branches at the base of the horns, which in younger ones are usually seen projecting in front of the forehead.

117| In castrated males the horns neither fall off nor are born; they burst out, however, from budding swellings, at first like dry skin, then grow on tender stalks like reed-panicles, feathered with soft down. As long as they lack them, they go out to pasture at night. As they grow they harden in the heat of the sun, and keep trying them against trees; when they are satisfied with their strength, they go out into the open. Stags have been caught with ivy growing green on their horns, grown on them when they are tender, from rubbing on trees, while they test them, as on a piece of wood. There are sometimes white ones too, such as the hind of Quintus Sertorius is reported to have been, which he had persuaded the peoples of Spain was prophetic.

118| And these have a fight with the serpent: they track out its caves and drag them out, resisting, by the breath of their nostrils. Therefore the smell of burnt deer's horn is unique for driving away serpents, and against bites the chief remedy is from the rennet of a fawn killed in its mother's womb.

119| The life of deer is admitted to be long; after 100 years some were taken again, still wearing the gold collars that Alexander the Great had put on them, now covered over by the skin in great fatness. This animal does not feel fevers, and indeed cures this fear. We know that certain women of rank were accustomed on every morning to taste that flesh and for a long life were free from fevers, which they hold valid only if it dies by a single wound.

120| There is one of the same appearance, differing only in a beard and a fleece on the shoulders, which they call the tragelaphus, born nowhere else than beside the river Phasis. Africa almost alone does not produce deer, but it does the chameleon, although it is more common in India. Its form and size were those of a lizard, except that the legs are straight and higher. The flanks are joined to the belly as in fishes; and the spine stands out in the same way.

121| The muzzle, as in a small creature, not unlike a pig's, the tail very long, ending in a thinness, coiling itself in viper-like circles, the claws hooked, the movement slower like a tortoise's, the body rough like a crocodile's, the eyes in a hollow recess, with a slight separation, very large, and coloured like the body. It never covers them, nor does it look round by moving the pupils, but by turning the whole eye.

122| Itself high up, with the mouth always open, it alone of animals is fed neither by food nor drink nor by any other nourishment than air, with a mouth terrible to look at, harmless otherwise. And its nature of colour is more wonderful: for it changes it repeatedly in the eyes and the tail and the whole body, and always renders whatever it touches nearest, except red and white; when dead it is pale. The flesh in the head and jaws and at the joint of the tail is very scanty, and nowhere else in the whole body; blood only in the heart and around the eyes; the viscera without a spleen. It hides in the winter months, like lizards.

123| The tarandrus of the Scythians also changes its colors, as does nothing else among the animals clothed in hair, except in India the lycaon, which is reported to have a maned neck. For the thoes (this is a kind of wolf, taller in length but unlike them in the shortness of its legs, swift at leaping, living by the hunt, harmless to man) change their appearance, not their color, being shaggy through the winters and bare in summer.

124| The tarandrus has the size of an ox, a head larger than a deer's and not unlike it, branching horns, cloven hoofs, and a coat of hair as large as a bear's; but when it chooses to be of its own color, it is like an ass. Its hide is so hard that breastplates are made of it. When afraid, it takes on the color of all the trees, shrubs, flowers and places in which it lies hidden, and for that reason it is rarely caught. It would be a wonder for so many-sided an appearance to be given to a body; it is more wonderful that it is given to the hair as well.

125| India and Africa produce hystrices, covered with a spiny skin in the manner of hedgehogs, but the hystrix has longer quills and, when it stretches its skin, they are shot out like missiles. It fixes them in the muzzles of dogs that press upon it and hurls them a little farther. It hides itself during the winter months, which is the nature of many animals and above all of bears.

126| Their mating is at the beginning of winter, and not in the common manner of four-footed animals, but with both lying down and embracing; then they withdraw into dens separately, in which they give birth on the 30th day, at most five cubs. These are a white and shapeless flesh, a little larger than mice, without eyes, without hair; only the claws project. By licking they gradually shape it. And nothing is rarer than to see a bear giving birth. For this reason the males lie hidden for forty days, the females for four months.

127| If they have not found dens, they build them from a heap of branches and shrubs, impenetrable to rain and spread with soft foliage. In the first twice seven days they are pressed by so heavy a sleep that they cannot be roused even by wounds. Then in a marvelous way they grow fat in their torpor. That is the fat suited to medicines and effective against falling of the hair. After these days they sit up and live by sucking their forepaws. They warm their stiff cubs by pressing them to the breast, brooding no differently than birds on eggs.

128| Marvelous to tell, Theophrastus believes that during this time even the cooked flesh of bears, if kept, increases in bulk; that there is then no sign of food and nothing found in the belly but the least moisture, and only a few drops of blood around the heart, and nothing in the rest of the body.

129| They come forth in spring, but the males extremely fat, the reason for which is not obvious, since they are not fattened even by sleep, apart from the 14 days, as we have said. On coming out they devour a certain plant, arum by name, to loosen their intestines, which are otherwise clogged, and they chew twigs with their teeth, first softening their mouths. Their eyes are dulled, and this is the chief reason they seek honeycombs, so that the mouth, wounded all over by the bees, may relieve that heaviness by letting blood.

130| The head is the weakest part of the bear, which in the lion is the strongest. Therefore, when violence presses them, intending to throw themselves down from some rock they cast themselves with their hands covering the head, and often in the arena they are killed by a blow of the fist that breaks the skull. Spain believes there is a poison in the brain, and burns the heads of those killed in the shows before witnesses, since drunk it drives to the madness of bears. They walk even on two feet; they climb down a tree backwards.

131| They tire bulls by hanging from their muzzles and horns with all their feet, by their weight. Nor in any other of the animals is stupidity more cunning in doing harm. The annals record that, in the consulship of Marcus Piso and Marcus Messala, on the 14th day before the Kalends of October, Domitius Ahenobarbus, curule aedile, gave in the circus a hundred Numidian bears and as many Ethiopian hunters. I wonder that "Numidian" was added, since it is agreed that the bear is not born in Africa.

132| The Pontic mice also hide away in winter, the white ones at any rate, whose palate is most acute in tasting; how the authors came to know this I wonder. The Alpine ones also hide away, which are the size of meles, but these first carry fodder into their dens; indeed they relate that a male and female in turn, lying on their backs and embracing a bundle of gnawed grass, are dragged by turns to the den, each holding the other's tail in its teeth, and that for this reason their backs are rubbed bare at that season. Similar to these are those in Egypt, and likewise they sit upright on their haunches, walk on two feet, and use their forefeet as hands.

133| Hedgehogs too prepare food for winter, and having rolled over fruit lying on the ground so that it is fixed on their spines, and holding one more in the mouth, they carry it into hollow trees. The same creatures foretell a change of the wind from north to south by withdrawing into their bed. But when they sense a hunter, drawing in the mouth, the feet and the whole underside, where they have thin and harmless down, they roll themselves into the shape of a ball, so that nothing can be seized except the spines.

134| In despair, moreover, they discharge upon themselves a wasting urine, harmful to their own hide and spines, knowing they are caught for this. For that reason the art of hunting them is to empty the urine out first, and then the hide has its chief value; otherwise it is spoiled, brittle, with rotten spines that fall away, even if the creature, withdrawn by flight, lives. For this reason they pour over themselves this harmful fluid only in the last hope, since they themselves hate their own poison, so sparing themselves and awaiting the final limit, that for the most part captivity comes first. Afterwards the ball is loosened by sprinkling hot water, and, caught by one of its hind feet and hung up, it is killed by starvation. There is no other way to kill it and spare the hide.

135| The animal itself is not, as most of us suppose, superfluous to human life; if it had not those spines, the softness of fleeces given to mortals in the sheep would be to no purpose, for garments are finished smooth with this hide. Fraud has found great profit there too in a monopoly; about no matter have there been more frequent decrees of the senate, and there is no emperor to whom the complaints of the provincials have not been brought.

136| There is also a marvelous account of the urine of two other animals. We are told that the leontophonon is the name of a small creature, born nowhere else than where the lion is born; the lion, tasting it, though so great is his strength and he rules the rest of the four-footed animals, dies at once. So hunters burn its body and sprinkle it like meal over other flesh, lying in wait for the beasts, and they kill them even with the ash: so opposed is the poison. Not undeservedly, then, the lion hates it, and on seeing it breaks it and kills it without a bite; it, on the other hand, scatters its urine, knowing that this too is deadly to the lion.

137| The fluid of lynxes, voided in the places where they are born, freezes or dries hard into gems like carbuncles and shining with a fiery color, called lyncurium, and for this reason amber is said by most to be produced in this way. The lynxes know this and understand it, and out of envy they cover their urine with earth, and it hardens the more quickly for that.

138| Another cunning in fear belongs to the meles: by the stretching of its inflated skin it wards off the blows of men and the bites of dogs. Squirrels too foresee a storm, and having stopped up the holes on the side from which the wind is going to blow, they open doors on the other side. For the rest, their tail, which is hairier, serves them as a covering. So for the winters some have provided fodder, and for others sleep serves as food.

139| Of serpents the viper alone is said to hide in the earth, the others in the hollows of trees or rocks. And they endure even a year's hunger, provided only that cold is kept off. At the time of retreat all of them sleep deprived of venom. In a similar way snails too, indeed they a second time in the summers also, clinging especially to rocks or, even when upturned and torn away by some injury, still not coming out.

140| In the Balearic islands, indeed, those called cavaticae do not creep out from the hollows of the earth (nor do they live on grass) but cling to one another like grapes. There is also another, less common kind, covering itself with a lid attached to the same shell. These are always buried in the earth, and having once been dug up only around the Maritime Alps, they have now begun to be dug up in the Velitrine territory as well. The most highly praised of all are on the island of Astypalaea.

141| Lizards, a kind most hostile to snails, are said not to live beyond six months. Arabian lizards are a cubit long, and on Mount Nysus in India 24 feet in length, tawny or crimson or blue in color.

142| Of the animals too that live with us, many are worth knowing, and most faithful of all to man are the dog and the horse. We have heard that a dog fought against robbers for its master and, finished off with wounds, did not leave his body, driving off birds and wild beasts. We have heard of another in Epirus that recognized in an assembly the murderer of its master and by tearing and barking forced him to confess the crime. Dogs, 200 of them, led back the king of the Garamantes from exile, fighting against those who resisted. Because of wars the Colophonians and likewise the Castabalenses kept cohorts of dogs.

143| These fought first in the line of battle, never shrinking back; these were the most trustworthy auxiliaries and did not need pay. Dogs defended the houses of the Cimbri, placed on wagons, after the Cimbri were slain. A dog, when Jason the Lycian was killed, refused to take food and wasted away by hunger. Another, to which Duris gives the name Hyrcanus, when the pyre of King Lysimachus was kindled, threw itself into the flames, and likewise the dog of King Hiero.

144| Philistus also recalls Pyrrhus, the dog of the tyrant Gelo; and that of Nicomedes king of Bithynia is recalled, which tore his wife Cosingis because of a rather playful jest with her husband. Among us, the noble Vulcatius, who taught Cascellius the civil law, returning from his suburban estate on an asturco as evening fell, was defended by a dog against a highwayman; likewise the senator Caelius, sick at Placentia, was set upon by armed men, and he was not wounded until the dog was killed.

145| But above all in our own age it was attested in the public records of the Roman people, while Appius Junius and Publius Silius were consuls, when, in the matter of Nero the son of Germanicus, punishment was being carried out on Titius Sabinus and his slaves, that the dog of one of them could not be driven away even from the prison and did not leave the body when it was thrown down on the Gemonian steps, uttering mournful howls, in the presence of a great ring of the Roman people; and when someone from it threw food to it, it carried it to the mouth of the dead man. The same dog swam out, when the corpse was thrown into the Tiber, trying to hold it up, while a crowd poured out to see the animal's faithfulness.

146| They alone know their master, and recognize even a stranger if he comes suddenly; they alone know their own names, they alone the voice of the household. They remember journeys however long, and no creature but man has greater memory. Their onset and savagery is softened by a man sitting down on the ground.

147| Life finds out very many other things in them every day, but in hunting their cleverness and keen scent are chief. It examines the tracks and follows them, drawing on a leash the tracker who accompanies it to the beast; and when the beast is sighted, how silent and secret, yet how signifying is the pointing, first with the tail, then with the muzzle! So even when worn out by age, blind and weak, they are carried in the lap, catching the winds and scent and stretching out their muzzles toward the lairs.

148| The Indians want dogs to be conceived from tigers, and for this reason at the time of mating they tie up the females in the forests. They think that at the first and second litter the offspring are born too fierce, and only at the third do they rear them. The Gauls do the same with wolves; their packs each have a leader and chief from among the dogs. They accompany him in the hunt and obey him; for among themselves they exercise even authority.

149| (It is certain that they lick the water of the river Nile as they run, so as not to give the greed of crocodiles an opportunity.) When Alexander the Great was making for India, the king of Albania had given him as a gift one dog of unusual size, and, delighted by its appearance, he ordered bears to be let out against it, then boars, and then fallow deer; it lay motionless, in contempt. The commander, a man of lofty spirit, was offended by such sluggishness in so great a body and ordered it killed. Report carried this to the king. And so, sending a second, he added instructions that he should not wish to try it on small animals but on a lion or an elephant: he had had two, and with this one killed there would be no other besides.

150| Alexander did not delay, and saw the lion broken at once. Afterward he ordered an elephant brought in, and was delighted by no other spectacle more. For with its hair bristling over its whole body, it first thundered with an enormous bark, then rushed upon it, leaping at it, and rising against its limbs now on this side, now on that, in a skilled combat, attacking and evading just where there was most need, until it brought the animal down, whirled round in constant circling, the ground shaking at its fall.

151| The race of dogs has two litters a year. The proper age for bearing is a year. They are pregnant for sixty days. They give birth to blind young, and the more abundantly they are nursed, the later they receive sight, yet never after the 21st day nor before the seventh. Some report that if one is born, it sees on the ninth day, if twins, on the tenth, and that for each additional pup as many more days of delay in light are added, and that by the one which is female, born of a first-time mother, Fauns are seen. The best in a litter is the one which begins to see last, or the one which the mother carries first to the bed.

152| The madness of dogs when Sirius is burning, as we have said, is destructive to man, and so, for those bitten, deadly through fear of water. For this reason it is met by precautions through those 30 days, with chicken dung especially mixed into the dogs' food, or, if the disease has come first, hellebore. For the bite itself the only remedy, discovered lately by a kind of oracle, is the wild rose's root, called cynorrhoda.

153| Columella is the authority that if on the 40th day after a dog is born its tail is docked by biting, and the last joint of the tail is taken off with the sinew of the spine pulled out, the tail does not grow and the dogs do not become rabid. Among the prodigies, as far as I have noted, we have heard of a dog that spoke, and of a serpent that barked when Tarquinius was driven from his kingdom.

154| The same Alexander also had the fortune of a very rare horse. They called him Bucephalas, either from his grim look or from the mark of a bull's head impressed on his shoulder. They say he was bought for 13 talents from the herd of Philonicus of Pharsalus, the boy's fancy being already captured by his beauty. This horse, when decked in the royal trappings, would take no one but Alexander onto its back, though at other times it took anyone at all. In battles too he is reported to have given a certain memorable service: wounded in the attack on Thebes, he would not allow Alexander to pass to another horse; and many other things of the same kind, for which the king, when it died, conducted its funeral and surrounded its tomb with a city bearing its name.

155| The horse of Caesar the dictator, too, is said to have let no one else onto its back; it is also said to have had forefeet like a human being's, and it is set up in that form in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix. The deified Augustus also made a tomb for a horse, about which there is a poem of Germanicus Caesar. At Agrigentum the tombs of several horses have pyramids. Juba is the authority that a horse was passionately loved by Semiramis, even to the point of coupling.

156| The Scythian cavalry, indeed, resounds with the glory of its horses: when a petty king, fighting an enemy who had challenged him, was killed, and the enemy came to strip him, he was finished off by the dead man's horse with blows and bites; another horse, when the covering was drawn from its eyes and it learned it had coupled with its mother, made for the precipices and killed itself. For an equal cause in the territory of Reate we find a groom torn to pieces. For they have also an understanding of kinship, and in the herd a mare keeps company with her sister of the previous year even more willingly than with her mother.

157| Their docility is so great that the entire cavalry of the army of the Sybarites is found to have been accustomed to move in a kind of dance to the music of a band. The same animals have foreknowledge of battle and mourn lost masters: sometimes they shed tears out of longing. When King Nicomedes was killed, his horse ended its life by starvation.

158| Phylarchus reports that Centaretus of the Galatians, when Antiochus was killed in battle, took his horse and mounted it exultant, but that the horse, fired with indignation, with its bridle mastered so that it could not be ruled, went headlong over the precipices and died along with him. Philistus says that a horse, left behind by Dionysius, sticking in mud, when it had pulled itself out followed its master's tracks with a swarm of bees clinging to its mane, and by that portent the tyranny was seized by Dionysius.

159| Their natures are beyond description. Javelin-throwers find them obedient, the horses helping their difficult efforts with the very movement and straining of their bodies; likewise they hand to the rider the weapons gathered from the ground. For in the circus, yoked to chariots, they admit without doubt that they understand encouragement and glory.

160| At the circus games of the Secular Games of Claudius Caesar, when the driver of the whites, Corax, was thrown in the starting gates, the horses took the lead, held off those who opposed them, spread out, and did everything against their rivals that they ought to have done had a most skilled driver been in command; and, as it shamed men that their skills be surpassed by horses, when the lawful course was finished they stood at the chalk line.

161| A greater omen among the ancients occurred at the plebeian circus games, when the driver was thrown, and the horses, as if he were still standing, ran to the Capitol and three times circled the temple; but the greatest was that horses came from Veii to the same place with palm and garland, Ratumenna, who had won there, having been flung out, from whom the gate afterwards took its name.

162| The Sarmatians prepare their horses for a long journey by starving them the day before, giving only a little to drink, and so they mount them and ride a hundred and fifty miles in a continuous run. Some live fifty years, the mares a shorter span; the mares reach the end of their growth at five years, the males one year later. The form of horses, such as ought above all to be chosen, has been most beautifully set out by the poet Virgil; but we too have spoken of it in the book composed on throwing the javelin from horseback, and I see that it is well agreed among all. A different standard, however, is sought for the circus. And so, though two-year-olds are put under the yoke elsewhere in other service, there they are not admitted to competition before five years old.

163| In that kind they carry their young eleven months and give birth in the twelfth. Mating is at the spring equinox, common to both at two years old, but from the third year the offspring is sturdier. The male sires up to 33 years, seeing that after the twentieth year they are sent from the circus to breed. At Opus they say one lasted even to 40, helped only in raising the forepart of his body.

164| But for begetting, few animals are less fertile. For this reason intervals are allowed between coverings, and not even fifteen coverings in the same year can he endure. The desire of mares is extinguished when the mane is cut off. They bear every year up to the fortieth. A horse is reported to have lived 75 years.

165| In this kind the pregnant mare gives birth standing, and loves her offspring beyond others. And indeed in horses a poison of love is born, called hippomanes, on the forehead, the size of a dried fig, black in color, which the mare at once devours when the birth is delivered, or else does not admit the foal to the udder. If anyone has it, snatched away, the kind is driven to madness by the smell. If the mother is lost in the herd, the other mares who have foaled raise the orphan. They say that for the first three days after being born he cannot touch the ground with his mouth. The more spirited, the more deeply he dips his nostrils in drinking. The Scythians prefer to use mares in wars, since they pass urine without hindering their run.

166| It is agreed that in Lusitania, around the town Olisipo and the river Tagus, mares turned to face the west wind conceive a living breath, and that this results in a birth and the offspring is born very swift in this way, but does not live beyond three years. In the same Spain there is the Gallaecian people and the Asturian; of the equine kind they have those we call tieldones; they produce smaller ones, called asturcones, whose pace in running is not the common one but a soft rolling, with an alternating stretching of the legs, from which the art of trotting is said to be taught to horses. The horse has almost the same diseases as man, besides the turning of the bladder, as in every animal of the beast-of-burden kind.

167| Marcus Varro is the authority that an ass was bought for 400,000 sesterces by the senator Quintus Axius, a price, I think, that surpasses the price of all animals. The service of the kind is without doubt generous, in plowing also, but most of all in the breeding of mules. Their native country is also considered, the Arcadian ones in Achaia, in Italy the Reatine. The animal itself is very intolerant of cold. For this reason it is not bred in Pontus, and it is not put to mate at the spring equinox like other livestock, but at the solstice.

168| The males are worse during rest from work. Birth from the thirtieth month is the earliest, but from the third year proper, the same number as mares, in the same months and in a similar way. But an incontinent womb discharges the seed with urine, unless she is driven to a run with blows after mating. Rarely does she bear twins. When about to give birth she flees the light and seeks darkness, so as not to be seen by man. She bears all her life, which for her lasts to the thirtieth year.

169| Her fondness for her offspring is the highest, but her dislike of water greater: through fires they press to their young, yet if the smallest stream lies between, they shrink even from wetting their feet at all. Those in the herds drink only from springs they are accustomed to, and so as to go to the drinking by a dry path. They do not cross bridges, because the rivers show through the gaps, and, marvelous to say, they refuse to drink if the water is changed; to drink they must be forced or coaxed. And only a spacious looseness in their bed is safe; for they conceive various sights in their sleep with frequent kicking, and unless the kick has flashed out into empty space, the rebound from some harder material at once brings lameness.

170| The profit from them exceeds rich estates. It is known that in Celtiberia single females have produced four hundred thousand sesterces each, especially by the foaling of mules. They say that in these the hairs of the ears and eyelids matter; for although the rest of the body is of one color, as many colors as were there are given back. Maecenas began the custom of dining on their foals, and at that time they were greatly preferred to wild asses. After him the authority of the flavor of the ass perished. (When sight fails, this kind fails very quickly.)

171| From an ass and a mare a mule is born in the 13th month, an animal exceptional in strength for labors. For such births they choose mares neither younger than four nor older than ten, and they say that each kind is kept from the other unless in infancy of that kind which covers, milk has been drawn; for this reason, in the dark, they slip ass foals to the udders of mares, or colts to those of she-asses. A mule is born both from a horse and from a she-ass, but unbridled and of untamed slowness. All offspring of old animals are slow as well. The ass's mating following a conception from a horse destroys it by abortion,

172| A horse's mating after an ass's does not do the same. It has been observed that females are best got with young on the seventh day after giving birth, and that males get them with young better when tired. A female that has not conceived before she sheds the teeth called foal-teeth is understood to be barren, and so is one that has not begun to breed at her first covering. The ancients called the males born of a horse and a she-ass hinnuli, and, on the other hand, mules those that asses and mares produced.

173| It has been observed that what is born from two different kinds becomes of a third kind, and is like neither of the parents, and that those very creatures that are born so do not breed, in every kind of animal; therefore mules do not bear young. It is in our annals that they have often borne, but it was held as a prodigy. Theophrastus reports that in Cappadocia they commonly bear, but that the animal there is of its own kind. The kicking of a mule is checked by frequent drinking of wine.

174| In the records of several Greeks there is something born of a mare by the coupling of a mule which they called a ginnus, that is, a small mule. From a mare and tamed wild asses are born mules swift in running, of exceptional hardness of hoof, but of lean body and unbroken spirit. But the sire begotten of a wild ass and a she-ass surpasses all. The wild asses of Phrygia and Lycaonia are the best. Africa boasts of their foals, as outstanding in flavor, which she calls lalisiones.

175| It appears from the records of the Athenians that a mule lived 80 years; for they rejoiced, when they were building the temple on the citadel, that one, left behind through old age, urged on by its company and effort the beasts climbing up, and they made a decree that the grain dealers should not keep it away from their sieves.

176| The oxen of India are reported to have the height of camels, and horns four feet in breadth. In our world the Epirote have the highest praise, from the care, as they say, of King Pyrrhus already in his time. He achieved this by not calling them to breed before four years old; so they were very large, and to this day remnants of the stock last. But now yearlings are asked for fertility, though more tolerably two-year-olds, and bulls are used for breeding at four years. Single bulls fill ten cows in the same year. They say that if the bulls, after mating, go off to the right side, males have been begotten; if to the left, females.

177| Conception is completed by a single covering, and if it has gone astray, the female seeks the male again after the 20th day. They give birth in the 10th month; whatever is born before is useless. There are authorities who say that the cow calves on the very day she completes the tenth month. They rarely bear twins. Mating begins at the rising of the Dolphin, on the eve of the Nones of January, and lasts 30 days, and some also in autumn, among the nations that live on milk, so arranged that at every time of the year that food is left. Bulls do not mate more often than twice a day.

178| Oxen alone of the animals graze also walking backwards, among the Garamantes indeed in no other way. Life for the females is longest at 15 years, for the males 20. Their strength is in the fifth year. They are said to grow fat by washing in hot water, and if anyone, with the skin cut, drives breath into the inward parts with a reed.

179| Those not of fine appearance are not to be reckoned degenerate either: the Alpine have the most milk, with the smallest bodies, the most labor with the head, not the neck, yoked. The Syrian have no dewlaps, but a hump on the back. The Carian too, in part of Asia, ugly to see with a swelling standing up over the shoulders from the neck, with horns dislocated, are reported excellent at work; otherwise, those of black or white color are rejected for work. Bulls have smaller horns than oxen, and thinner.

180| The breaking-in of oxen is in the third year, later it is late, earlier premature. It is best when the young bullock is trained along with a broken one. For this animal we have as partner in labor and the cultivation of the field, and the care taken of it by our forebears was so great that among the examples is a man condemned by the Roman people, a day having been appointed, who, when his insolent favorite said in the country that he had not eaten tripe, had killed an ox, and was driven into exile as if he had killed his own farm tenant.

181| Bulls have nobility in their look, with a grim forehead, bristly ears, and horns ready for fighting, demanding battle. But the whole threat is in the forefeet. He stands with anger swelling, drawing back each foot in turn and scattering sand over his belly, and he alone of animals is fired by this spur.

182| We have seen them fight at command and, shown off for sport, be whirled round, falling on their horns be caught and again guided, and now lying be lifted from the ground, and even stand on the car of a two-horse chariot at speed like charioteers. It was an invention of the people of the Thessalians to kill bulls with a horse galloping alongside, by twisting the neck by the horn; the dictator Caesar first gave this spectacle at Rome.

183| From this come the rich victims and the most splendid appeasement of the gods. In this animal alone of all those with a long tail, the tail is not of complete measure at birth as in the rest: in this one alone it grows until it reaches right down to the feet. For this reason the test of victims in the calf is that it reach the joint of the hock; with a shorter one they do not obtain favorable omens. This too is noted, that calves carried to the altar on a man's shoulders are hardly ever favorable, just as neither with a limping nor with a foreign victim nor with one pulling itself away from the altars are the gods appeased. It is frequent among the prodigies of the ancients that an ox spoke, and when this was reported the senate was accustomed to meet in the open air.

184| The ox in Egypt is even worshiped in place of a divinity; they call him Apis. His mark is on the right side a whitening spot like the horns of the moon beginning to grow, and a knot under the tongue, which they call a cantharus. It is not lawful for him to pass certain years of life, and they kill him by drowning him in the fountain of the priests, to seek another with mourning to substitute, and until they have found him they grieve, even with heads shaved; yet he is never sought for long.

185| When found, he is led to Memphis by 100 priests. He has twin shrines, which they call chambers, the auguries of the peoples: to have entered the one is joyful, in the other he portends dread. He gives answers to private persons by accepting food from the hands of those who consult him. He turned away from the hand of Germanicus Caesar, who was dead not long after. Otherwise he is kept apart; when he rushes out into the crowds, he advances with the lictors clearing the way, and bands of boys accompany him singing a song in his honor; he seems to understand and to wish to be worshiped. These bands, suddenly frenzied, foretell the future.

186| A cow is shown to him once a year, marked with her own signs, though different ones, and they report that she is always found and put to death on the same day. At Memphis there is a place in the Nile which from its shape they call the Phiala, where every year they sink a golden and a silver bowl on the days which they hold as the birthdays of Apis. These are seven, and it is a marvel that on them no one is touched by the crocodiles, and that on the eighth, after the sixth hour of the day, the beasts' ferocity returns.

187| Great too is the favor of the flock, both in the appeasement of the gods and in the use of fleeces. As oxen cultivate the sustenance of men, so the protection of their bodies is owed to the flock. Breeding in both sexes is from two years old to nine, in some to 10; the offspring of first-time mothers are smaller. Mating for all runs from Arcturus' setting, that is, from the 3rd day before the Ides of May, up to the setting of the Eagle, that is, the 10th day before the Kalends of August. They carry the young 150 days; those conceived afterward are weak. The ancients called cordi those born after that time. Many prefer winter lambs to spring ones, since it matters more to be strong before the solstice than before midwinter, and this is the only animal for which it is of use to be born at midwinter.

188| It is natural for the ram to disdain young ewes and to go after old ones, and he himself is better with age, and a hornless one is more useful. His fierceness is restrained by boring his horn near the ear. With the right testicle tied up he begets females, with the left males. Thunder brings abortion to solitary sheep; the remedy is to gather them together, that they may be helped by company. They say males are conceived by a blast of the north wind,

189| females by the south, and in that kind of animal the rams' mouths are especially examined, because whatever color the veins under the tongue have, that is the color of the wool in the offspring, and it is mixed if there are several. A change of waters and of drink also varies it. Of sheep there are two chief kinds, the covered and the country kind, the former softer, the latter more particular in pasture, since the covered one is not troubled by brambles.

190| Of the coverings for it the Arabian ones are foremost. But the most highly praised wool is the Apulian, and that which in Italy is called of the Greek flock, elsewhere Italian; the third place is held by the Milesian sheep. The Apulian are short in fleece and famed only for cloaks; around Tarentum and Canusium they have the highest renown, and in Asia the Laodicean in the same kind. No white is preferred to that of the Po region, nor has any wool at this date exceeded a hundred sesterces to the pound.

191| Sheep are not shorn everywhere; in some places the custom of plucking lasts. There are many kinds of colors, since even those they call natural have no names in some ways: Spain has the best of black fleece, Pollentia near the Alps of gray, Asia of ruddy, which they call Erythraean, likewise Baetica, Canusium of tawny, Tarentum of its own dark color. All greasy wool has a medicinal power. The wool of Histria and Liburnia is nearer hair than wool, unfit for combed garments, and so is that which Salacia commends in Lusitania for checkered weaving. Similar is that around the Piscinae of the province of Narbonensis, similar too in Egypt, from which a garment, worn out by use, is dyed and again lasts through time. There is also the shaggy wool of coarse hair in carpets, now long held in the highest favor; Homer is the authority that they were certainly in use. The Gauls decorate these in one way, the nations of the Parthians in another.

192| Wools too, pressed together by themselves, make a garment, and if vinegar is added, they even resist iron, nay even fire, as the last refuse of the stuff. For what is drawn out in the bronze vessels of the polishers comes into use as stuffing, in the Gauls', I suppose, invention;

193| certainly it is distinguished today by Gallic names. Nor could I easily say at what age this began; for with the ancients the bed was of straw, as even now in camps. The gausapae began in my father's memory, the amphimallia in ours, as also the shaggy ventralia. For a tunic with the broad stripe woven in the manner of a gausape is only now beginning. Of wools the black take no color. Of the dyeing of the rest we shall speak in their own places, in the shellfish of the sea or the nature of herbs.

194| Marcus Varro is the authority, from his own seeing, that Tanaquil's wool, on her distaff and spindle (she was also called Gaia Caecilia), still lasted in his day in the temple of Sancus, and that the royal toga, wavy, made by her, was in the temple of Fortune, which Servius Tullius had used. Hence it came about that a dressed distaff and a spindle with its thread accompany maidens when they marry. She was the first to weave the straight tunic, such as are put on with the plain toga by the young recruit and by new brides. The wavy garment was first among the most splendid;

195| from it the sororiculata derived. Fenestella writes that shaved togas and the Phryxian ones began in the last times of the deified Augustus. The frequent poppy-patterned have an older origin, already noted in Torquatus under the poet Lucilius. The praetextae found their origin among the Etruscans. I understand that kings used the trabeae; painted garments are already found in Homer, and from them the triumphal ones were born.

196| The Phrygians invented making this with the needle, and for that reason such cloths are called Phrygian. King Attalus in the same Asia invented the weaving in of gold, whence the name Attalic. Babylon most celebrated the weaving in of different colors in picture-work, and gave it its name. To weave with very many threads, which they call polymita, Alexandria established; to divide with checks, Gaul. Metellus Scipio records among the charges against Cato that Babylonian dining-room coverings had already then sold for eight hundred thousand sesterces, which recently cost the emperor Nero four million sesterces.

197| The praetextae of Servius Tullius, in which the statue of Fortune that he had dedicated was wrapped, endured until Sejanus's end, and it was a marvel that they had neither fallen apart nor felt the injuries of moth-worms in five hundred and sixty years. We have seen by now even the fleeces of living sheep dyed with purple, scarlet and conchylium in pounds of a foot and a half, as though luxury compelled them to be born so.

198| In the sheep itself nobility is sufficiently shown by shortness of leg and by the covering of the belly. Those whose belly was bare they called apicae and condemned. The tails of the sheep of Syria are a cubit long, and in that part is the greatest share of the wool. It is thought premature to castrate lambs unless they are five months old.

199| There is in Spain, but chiefly in Corsica, a kind not unlike sheep, the musmones, with a fleece nearer to goat's hair than to a sheep's fleece; from this kind and from sheep the ancients called the offspring umbri. The head is the weakest part of the flock, for which reason they must be made to graze turned away from the sun, since the woolly are the stupidest of animals: where they have been afraid to go in, they follow one that is dragged by the horn. Their longest life is 10 years, in Ethiopia 13. For goats in the same place 11, in the rest of the world at most eight. Each kind is filled within the fourth mating.

200| Goats give birth even to four, but very rarely; they carry for 5 months, like sheep. He-goats become sterile with fatness. Before three years they breed less usefully, and in old age, and not beyond four years. They begin in the seventh month and while still sucking. A hornless one is more useful in either sex. The first mating in a day does not fill, the next is more effective and then the next. They conceive in November, so as to bear in March when the shoots swell, sometimes at a year old, always at two; if not by the third year, they are useless. They bear for eight years.

201| They are liable to miscarry from cold. A goat relieves eyes that are overspread by pricking with a rush, drawing blood, a he-goat with a bramble. Mucianus reported that he saw the cleverness of this animal on a very narrow bridge, when two met from opposite directions: since the narrowness would not admit turning around, and the length with its slenderness would not admit turning back blindly, with a torrent flowing threateningly underneath, one lay down and so the other stepped over it, trampling it.

202| Males they approve the most snub-nosed possible, with long and drooping ears, and shoulders as hairy as possible; the mark of nobility in the females is two small flaps hanging down from the neck on the body. Not all have horns, but in those that have them there are also signs of the years from the growth of knots. In hornless ones the abundance of milk is greater. Archelaus is the authority that they breathe through the ears, not the nostrils, and are never free of fever. For that reason, perhaps, their breath is hotter than that of sheep and their mating more ardent.

203| They say they also see by night no less than by day: hence, if those whom they call nyctalopes eat goat's liver, the evening sight is restored to them. In Cilicia and around the Syrtes they are clothed with a fleece fit for shearing. Goats, when the sun inclines to setting, are said in the pastures not to look at one another, but to lie turned away, while in the remaining hours they lie facing, and among kin.

204| A tuft of hair hangs from the chin of all, which they call aruncus. If anyone seizes one of the herd and drags it by this, the others look on, stupefied; this happens too when one of them has bitten a certain herb. Their bite is deadly to a tree. By licking the olive also they make it barren, and for that reason they are not sacrificed to Minerva.

205| The covering of the swine herd is from the west wind to the spring equinox, the age is the eighth month, in some places even the fourth, up to the eighth year. They bear twice a year, the time in the womb is four months, the number for fertility up to twenty, but they cannot rear so many. Nigidius reports that in the 10 days around midwinter they are born with teeth already. They are filled by one mating, which is even doubled on account of the ease of miscarrying. The remedy is that mating should not happen at the first desire nor before the ears are slack.

206| Males do not breed beyond the third year. Females wearied by old age couple lying down. For them to eat their young is no prodigy. The young of a sow is pure for sacrifice on the fifth day, of a sheep on the 7th day, of an ox on the 30th. Coruncanius said that ruminal victims were not pure until they became bidentes. A pig that has lost an eye is thought to die soon; otherwise life is up to 15 years, in some even twenty. But they become fierce, and the kind is otherwise subject to diseases, chiefly quinsy and scrofula.

207| A sign of a weak pig is blood at the root of a bristle plucked from the back, and a head slanting in walking. When very fat they feel a scarcity of milk, and with the first litter they are less numerous. Wallowing in mud pleases the kind. The tail is twisted; it is noted too that sacrifice goes more easily when it twists to the right than to the left. They fatten in 60 days, but more when fattening is begun with three days' fast. This animal is the dullest of all, and it was not inelegantly thought that breath was given it in place of salt.

208| It is established that a swineherd's voice was recognized when the pigs had been driven off by theft, and that, when they had sunk the boat by leaning over to one side, they came back. Moreover, leaders in the city learn to seek the market on market-day and the houses, and wild ones have the wit to confuse their tracks in a marsh and to lighten their flight with urine.

209| Females too are castrated, as are camels also, after two days without food, hung by the forefeet and the womb cut out; so they fatten more quickly. An art is also applied to the liver of the females as of geese, the invention of Marcus Apicius, feeding them on dried figs and, when they are sated, killing them suddenly after giving them a drink of honeyed wine. Nor does any other animal furnish richer material for the glutton: nearly fifty flavors, whereas the others have one each. Hence the pages of the censors' laws and the forbidding at dinners of paunches, glandia, testicles, wombs, and boars' heads, so that nevertheless no dinner of Publilius, the poet of mimes, after he had cast off slavery, is recorded without a sow's paunch, and he even gave it the name "sumen".

210| Wild swine, moreover, found favor. Already the speeches of Cato the censor reproach the boar's brawn. Yet when divided into three parts, the middle was served, called the boar's loin. The first of the Romans to set a whole boar before guests at a feast was Publius Servilius, the father of that Rullus who in Cicero's consulship brought forward the agrarian law: so recent is the origin of what is now a daily thing. And this too the annals noted, to be sure for the amendment of the manners of those at whose dinners not the whole meal, but at the beginning, two and three boars at a time are eaten.

211| Preserves for these and the other woodland animals were first devised among those of the toga by Fulvius Lippinus; he began to feed wild beasts in the territory of Tarquinii, and imitators were not long lacking, Lucius Lucullus and Quintus Hortensius.

212| Wild swine give birth once a year. The males are very rough in mating. Then they fight among themselves, hardening their ribs by rubbing against trees and plastering themselves with mud. The females are rougher in giving birth, and almost the same in every kind of beast. Boars do not breed except when a year old. In India the curves of the tusks are a cubit long; two come out from the snout, as many from the forehead, like the horns of calves. The hair of the wild kind is like bronze, in the rest black. But in Arabia the swine kind does not live.

213| In no kind is mixture with the wild so easy; the ancients called the offspring so born hybridae, as it were half-wild, and the name was carried over even to men, as to Gaius Antonius, Cicero's colleague in his consulship. Not only in swine, however, but in all animals as well, of whatever kind there is any tame one, there is found also a wild one of the same, seeing that so many kinds even of wild men have been described.

214| Goats, however, change into very many likenesses. There are goats, there are rock-goats, there are ibexes of marvelous swiftness, though with the head burdened by vast horns like sheaths of swords. On these it balances itself, as if whirled by some engine, especially on the rocks, seeking to leap from one mountain to another, and by the recoil springs more swiftly wherever it pleases. There are also oryges, said by some alone to be clothed with hair growing the opposite way and turned toward the head. There are also fallow deer and pygargi and strepsicerotes and many others not unlike. But the former the Alps send, the latter regions overseas.

215| Of apes too there are several kinds. Those nearest the figure of man are distinguished among themselves by their tails. They say that with marvelous cleverness they are smeared with birdlime and shod with snares in imitation of hunters; Mucianus says they have even played at draughts, and distinguish by sight nuts made of wax; that a hollow moon makes sad those of that kind that have a tail, and the new moon is greeted with leaping. For the other four-footed animals too are afraid of eclipses of the heavenly bodies.

216| The kind of apes has a special affection for its young. Those that have borne in tameness inside houses carry their young about, show them to everyone, and are glad that they be handled, like those who understand congratulation, and so for the most part kill them by embracing. The nature of the cynocephali is fiercer, as of the satyrs. The callitriches differ in nearly their whole appearance; there is a beard on the face, and the tail is spread wide in its front part. This animal is said not to live under any other sky than that of Ethiopia where it is born.

217| Of hares too there are several kinds. In the Alps they are white, and are believed to take snow for fodder in the winter months; certainly when it melts they turn reddish every year, and it is otherwise an animal reared in intolerable cold. Of the kind of hares are also those which Spain calls rabbits, of numberless fertility, and bringing famine to the Balearic islands by ravaging the harvests. (They hold the young cut out of the belly or taken from the udders, with the entrails not cleaned out, in highest favor as food; laurices

218| they call them.) It is certain that the Balearic people sought military help from the deified Augustus against their increase. There is great favor for the viverrae because of this hunting; they put them into the burrows, which in the ground have many openings (whence the animal's name too), and so catch the rabbits driven out above. Archelaus is the authority that as many as are the cavities of the body for excrement in the hare, so many are the years of its age; the number found is certainly various. The same says that each has both powers in it, and that it breeds equally without a male.

219| Nature in this regard has been kind, producing harmless and edible animals fruitful. The hare, born as prey to all, alone besides the dasypus conceives again while pregnant, rearing one, bearing in the womb another clothed with hair, another without down, another just begun, all at once. Attempts have also been made to make garments of hare's hair, which in touch is not as soft as on the skin, and which falls apart because of the shortness of the hair.

220| These are rarely tamed, though they cannot rightly be called wild; for there are many creatures neither gentle nor wild, but of a nature between the two, as among birds swallows and bees, in the sea dolphins.

221| In this class many have also placed these dwellers in our houses, the mice, an animal not to be despised even in public portents. When they gnawed the silver shields at Lanuvium, they foretold the Marsic War; when they gnawed the bands that the commander Carbo used in his footwear at Clusium, they foretold his death. There are several kinds of them in the region of Cyrenaica, some with a broad forehead, some with a pointed one, others with prickly hair like hedgehogs.

222| Theophrastus is our authority that on the island of Gyara, after they had driven out the inhabitants, they gnawed even iron, which by some natural property they also do among the Chalybes in the ironworks. In the gold mines, indeed, their bellies are cut open for this reason, and the theft is always detected; so great is their delight in stealing. The annals record that when Hannibal was besieging Casilinum a mouse was sold for 200 denarii, and that the man who sold it died of hunger while the buyer lived.

223| When white ones appear, they make a happy omen. For we have annals full of auspices broken off by the squeaking of sorices. Nigidius is our authority that sorices too lie hidden in winter, like dormice, which the censors' laws and the leading man Marcus Scaurus in his consulship removed from dinners in the same way as shellfish or birds brought in from another world.

224| This too is a half-wild animal, and the same man who set up preserves for boars set up preserves for it in jars. In this it has been noticed that they do not herd together unless they belong to the same forest, and that, if strangers separated by a river or a mountain are mixed with them, they fight to the death. With remarkable devotion they feed their parents when worn out by old age. Their old age is ended by the winter's rest, for these too lie hidden and sleep, and in summer they grow young again. The nitelae also have a like rest in winter.

225| It is a wonder that nature has not only given different animals to different lands, but also, within the same region, has denied certain kinds to certain places. In the Mesian forest of Italy these dormice are found only in one part. In Lycia the dorcades do not cross the mountains next to the Sexis, nor the onagers the boundary that divides Cappadocia from Cilicia. On the Hellespont stags do not pass into other territories, and around Arginusa they do not go beyond Mount Elaphus, and on that mountain their ears are even split.

226| On the island of Poroselene weasels do not cross the road. Likewise at Lebadea in Boeotia moles, when brought in, shun the very soil, though close by at Orchomenus they undermine all the fields. From their skins we have seen bedroom coverlets: so true is it that not even religious awe keeps luxury away from portents. In Ithaca hares brought in die, on the very edges of the shore at that, and so do rabbits on Ebusus, though they swarm in Spain and the Balearics nearby.

227| At Cyrene the frogs were dumb; frogs with voices were brought in from the mainland, and their kind survives. They are still dumb on the island of Seriphus; yet the same frogs, moved elsewhere, sing, which is reported to happen also in Lake Sicandrus in Thessaly. In Italy the bite of shrew-mice is venomous; the region beyond the Apennines does not have them. Wherever they are, if they cross a wheel-rut they die. On Olympus, the mountain of Macedonia, there are no

228| wolves, nor on the island of Crete; there, indeed, there are neither foxes nor bears, nor any harmful animal at all except the phalangium. We shall speak of that kind among the spiders in its place. More remarkable still, on the same island, outside the region of the Cydoneatae, there are no stags, and likewise no boars, attagens or hedgehogs; and in Africa there are neither boars nor stags nor roe deer nor bears.

229| Again, certain animals harmless to the natives kill newcomers, like the small snakes in Myrinthe, which are said to be born from the earth. Likewise in Syria, especially along the banks of the Euphrates, the snakes do not touch Syrians as they sleep, or, even if they bite when trodden on, are not felt to be harmful; but they are deadly to people of any other nation, killing them greedily and with torment, and for this reason the Syrians do not kill them. On the other hand Aristotle reports that on Latmus, a mountain of Caria, strangers are not harmed by the scorpions, but natives are killed. But we shall speak of the kinds of the remaining animals too [and besides those of the land].

Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/pliny/019-natural-history-book-viii#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.

← All of Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder: Letters, Panegyricus & Natural History