birds and beasts

BIRDS AND BEASTS

OF THE

GREEK ANTHOLOGY

NORMAN DOUGLAS

Hunter of hares, may fortune smile on thee:
Such is the gift of Pan.

And thou, O fowler, who with lime and reeds
Seekest to capture winged and feathered breeds
That roost beneath this hill--praise Pan !
Pan from his eyrie guards yon sacred copse;
Bid him descend to join the chase, that he
With hounds and reeds may thy companion be.

LEONIDAS OF TARENTUM (F. W. M.).

PRIVATELY PRINTED

1927

TO HIS FRIEND

J. E. B.

WHOSE VERSES HAVE ENLIVENED
THIS DISMAL DISCOURSE

Florence - Printed by the Tipografia Giuntina, directsd by L. Franceschini.

CONTENTS

page
Introduction ............... 9

Mammals. ............... 15

Birds ................. 68

Reptiles and Batrachians ..........122

Sea-beasts ............... 146

Creeping things ............. 177

Bibliography ............... 207

Index ................. 209

INTRODUCTION

Books have been written on the Natural History of the Bible, on that of Shakespeare, of Homer, Virgil and so forth: why not a similar one on the fauna of the Greek Anthology--though the flora, perhaps, would be even more interesting ? So I often thought, while reading and re-reading this marvellous collection which had been my companion for many months past. Three years, I finally concluded, might suffice for the venture. Three years, under some vine-wreathed arbour, with the necessary books at one's elbow, and one's soul at ease .... Such a thing, it is obvious, should be a holiday performance; written con amore and not otherwise; in reverential, playfully-erudite fashion. Three years or even more; for 1 soon realized that the enterprise might well blossom--why not?--into a general treatise on ancient Natural History and the changes in animal economy which have occurred in the interval between then and now; that it would open up, incidentally, a number of questions social,

INTRODUCTION

aesthetic and humanitarian, showing how the attitude of mankind towards birds and beasts has altered since those days. Three years, I kept on saying to myself--where shall they be found?

I shall not find them.

Be that a pretext for putting together the following notes which may serve as material for some one more fortunately situated. The pencillings then scrawled in my Anthology are fast fading; I amplified them later with references to such authorities as were accessible, but a good many others would have to be consulted if the undertaking were to be brought up to date, such as, for instance, von der MÃ¼hle's book on the Birds of Greece, which I have not been able to procure.

An undertaking, for the rest, of the gentlemanly kind; quite useless. No doubt an interesting little paper might be written, were we to investigate nothing but the Natural History of a single period or of a single poet, such as Meleager; or that of a well-marked group of them, like Lucilius and those other wits who introduced the animal world chiefly for the sake of the amusing similes they could extract therefrom; or if we devoted ourselves to one particular beast, say, the lion or the bee, and traced its progress through the Anthology from the earliest to the latest references. A monograph of this kind would be brief indeed but

INTRODUCTION

not without a certain value from a scientific point of view. To compile, on the other hand, a long list of creatures mentioned only at hazard (some of the most conspicuous animals are not so much as named in this collection); a list of creatures mentioned by poets good and bad, poets of divers nationalities, poets scattered over a large geographical area and over a period of fifteen hundred years of time--to compile such a list: what more exquisitely unprofitable?

Nevertheless, now that the thing is done, it strikes me that these utterances of a considerable section--segment, rather--of the ancient world present, for all their variety, a certain inner coherence. That must be because the writers happened to be poets, who view life from more or less the same angle through all the ages; poets, whose observations of natural phenomena were casual and unsystematic, whose interpretation of such things shifts more slowly than that of the scientists, and shifts, when it does so, along a plane different from theirs. Not one of them can be called a poet-naturalist in the sense of some half-dozen English ones; Aristotle is modern, compared to the latest of them; indeed, he belongs to another world of thought. How birds and beasts affect these men, what they say about them and what they fail to say, reveal, when taken as a whole, an outlook that is well riveted together--an outlook harmonious,

INTRODUCTION

and yet, with a faint persistence, dissimilar to that of the present day; it is as if we were glancing from a window upon some unfamiliar landscape.

Like our own poets, they are quite ready to introduce the animal creation into their pages, and in so doing they often register what seem to be the most irrelevant and wearisome trivialities; some of their lines are sheer doggerel. But these trivialities, I think, have their significance. That is why the reader of the following pages cannot but notice that I have chronicled them one after the other with pedantic deliberation, to the verge of tediousness and possibly beyond it. My reason is this: it is trivialities, mere trivialities, which betray them in the long run; nothing but the cumulative weight of trifles can turn the scale and demonstrate the particular detail wherein our point of view has come to change from that of their time. For we find no Natural History, properly speaking, in the Greek Anthology; what its authors say about animals constitutes a human rather than a scientific document; it is a minute but clearly demarcated province in the history of feeling--which is only another way of saying once more that its writers were poets. All such history changes slowly,, since, unconcerned with political or social or scientific movements, it can but reflect the almost imperceptible interaction between nature, a relatively stable envi-

INTRODUCTION

ronment, and that old and yet relatively unstable heart of man.

Glancing in cursory fashion through the Anthology, one might be tempted to formulate some theory such as this: that the poets' interest in--or at least mention of--wild animals is not constant in its intensity but follows, rather, a curved line: low at first, in the grand era, and confined chiefly to decorative ones such as lions, it rises high, declines awhile, rises again in the Hellenistic and rhetorical period, drops almost to zero towards the close (Byzantinism). The theory will not hold water. Though none of its writers is preeminent as an observer of wild creatures, there is also no gulf in the long stretch of years; every single century, from Anyte to Agathias, produces its crop.

It was my intention to include the domestic animals in this survey. The project has been abandoned not without reluctance, because a mass of material had already been accumulated, and because, as a matter of fact, a study of this group would throw more intimate side-lights upon the lore and home life of the ancients than does the other; it would have an ethical import of its own. The wild animals must suffice for the moment; there are some hundred and fifty-three of them, and the references to them amount to close upon six hundred.

INTRODUCTION

I had intended also to give, in the shape of footnotes, proper references to Aristotle and so forth, and had actually proceeded awhile with the ponderous task before realizing that such a method would be like attaching a lump of lead to a soap-bubble. For it became more and more evident that the notes were going to outweigh my text in sheer bulk, besides giving to this trifle an insupportable air of documentation, of Teutonic Gediegenheit. Hence their omission from the pages which follow. I content myself with giving most of the Anthology references, and even them I have quite omitted in three little sections (on the dolphin, bee, and cicada); they run more pleasantly without the distracting numerals in brackets. The reader who distrusts my statements about these animals can verify them by going through the text himself, and I wish him joy of his labours.

A short bibliography is added; it avoids the repetition of long book-titles.

MAMMALS

Many are the references to lions; they were slain with lances and spears, as they are to this day by the natives of Africa. A poem (6,217) relates how a eunuch priest of Cybele, sheltering during a snowstorm in a cave, saves himself from a lion's attack by beating the great kettle-drum which was used in the worship of that goddess and which scares it away; perhaps the strange sight of this fellow helped to discomfit the monster. Here we have one of numerous cases where a single story has appealed to several writers, who paraphrase it with variations and elaborations of their own: Alcaeus, Simonides, Dio-scorides, Antipater and Antistius all dwell upon the same theme. Another poem (6,221) tells of an old and decrepit lion seeking refuge on a rough night with some shepherds and their flock, and leaving them next morning unharmed. That particular lion, at his time of life, should have been a man-eater--a variety already known to Aristotle, who rightly remarks that it is a question of age.

MAMMALS

An Arab dedicates to Pan the skin of a lion, together with the lance that slew it, which still bears the marks of its teeth (6,57). Panopeus, hunter of lions and leopards, dies from the sting of a scorpion (7,578); the accident is not impossible, though this may be merely a rhetorical exercise, showing how the boldest man may be overcome by the most ignoble of beasts:

'Tis in this tomb strong Panopeus rests,
Lion-hunter, piercer of rough panthers' breasts.
On the hills a scorpion from earth issuing
Wounded his heel with its death-giving sting.
Upon the ground lie his poor darts and spear,
Alas !--the playthings of audacious deer.

Other lion-killers are named--such as in 6,262.

Hercules, slayer of the Nemean lion, is frequently hymned; so are the lions associated with Cybele; brave men like Leonidas have lions sculptured on their tombs (in this case there is also a play on the name); oracles refer to the beast more than once, as does a problem (14,7) about a lion of brass which spouted water from its eyes and from other parts of its body; we have the well-known lines from Aristophanes comparing Alcibiades to a lion-cub which should not have been reared in the city; a figure of

MAMMALS

Eros, driving a chariot drawn by lions--a favourite motif--is noted by Marcus Argentarius (9,221) as forming the device on a ring--

Upon this seal Love whom none e'er withstands
I see, guiding strong lions with his hands;
One flaunts o'er them a whip, the other holds
The reins; and grace abundant him enfolds.
I fear this bane of men; he who wild beast
Can tame won't pity mortals in the least.

Besides these, there is an anonymous poem (7,626) praising the Roman Emperor because he emptied Libya of her lions and other prowling monsters, and sent them to Rome to fight in the Circus. Such beast-fights are alluded to more than once in the Anthology, and we have a noteworthy epigram (9,581) put into the mouth of a Byzantine Emperor, deprecating the bloodshed connected with these shows. I find no reference to performing animals, to lions jumping through hoops or elephants on tight ropes: it may be that the poets were sensible of the ineptitude of such exhibitions. Nor is there mention of menageries, of those paradises or vivaria for which men like Lucullus and Hortensius were famous, and concerning which Aulus Gellius has left us one of his usual dry dissertations.

MAMMALS

I cannot say when the lion became extinct in Europe, Herodotus speaks of the lions and wild bulls in his description of Xerxes' march through Macedonia; he says the former were ferociously destructive to the camels that carried the army provisions, and then proceeds to give other details about them and to note the exact geographical range to which they were then confined. How like Herodotus! Aristotle and Xenophon both confirm the existence of these Macedonian lions. There seems to be little doubt that they also existed in Greece at an early period, on Mount Olympus, Cithaeron and Parnassus; Pau-sanias gives some information on this subject, and the Nemean lion's den is pointed out to this day. A well-known scholar denies that lions were ever found in the Peloponnese: he regards the Nemean story as an importation. But if the beast inhabited Thessaly, there is no reason why it should not have spread southward; indeed, I fail to see by what means it could have been kept out of the Morea. Dion Chry-sostom speaks of it as extinct in Europe. Three hundred years later, at the tail end of antiquity, Them-istius regrets that Thessaly can furnish no more lions for beast-shows.

Besides the previously-mentioned leopard-killer another one is named (Didot III, 2, 565). And No. 633

MAMMALS

of the same section consists of a two-line epitaph on a boxer who was killed in a fight with a leopard, which shared the same fate--

See me, Lascepius, a boxer, who

Was slain by the same leopard that I slew.

So far as I can discover, the only other mention of this animal is in the inscription over the gateway of Smyrna citadel (Jacobs' Appendix, 336) which speaks of the cruel hand of time devouring this once famous city even as a leopard devours a fawn. The beast may perhaps be found, as in the days of Spratt and Forbes (Travels in Lycia, 1858), in the Lycian mountains, where it is known by the Turkish name of kaplan. There is a hint of the leopard, as "panther" in an enigma (14,24). Erhard (p. 79) says "On Samos a panther was shot"--he gives no further details.

The lynx, enemy of goats, occurs in a ten-line address to Eros (5, 179) by Meleager, who refuses the God of Love a dwelling near his heart; it would be, he says, like keeping a lynx beside the goats. The lynx's eye is also mentioned (Didot III, 3, 79); that is all.

I have never heard of lynxes in Greece proper, and doubt whether they still exist anywhere, although

MAMMALS

their reputation for keen sight survives as a. proverb. The Athens Museum contains a woefully stuffed specimen which was killed on the Parnes, a few hours from the capital, on the 18 March, 1862, and Heldreich (p. 11) mentions one or two localities.

A bear-hunter is named (Didot III, 2, 565). There is no other mention of the bear--Homer also has only a single reference to it--save in a punning epigram by Ammianus (i i, 23 i) on a certain objectionable person called Markos, the first letter of whose name, he suggests, should be taken away, leaving Arkos, a bear, "of which he deserves many" (to tear him in pieces).

I know nothing of the present distribution of bears in the Anthology regions; a few were still to be found on Pindus and Olympus in 1844, and there is a Macedonian proverb to the effect that "once you catch your bear, it will dance for you". As to the Peloponnesus, Leake says that the occasional appearance of bears in the mountains both of Arcadia and Laconia is "generally attested by the inhabitants" and they are now "seldom seen in any part of the Morea" (1833). I have enquired about them, but could elicit nothing; they have doubtless been driven out by this time, although Arcadia derives its name from them. The Morea, being now turned into an

MAMMALS

island, would in any case not harbour such monsters for long. They were common in the days of Pausa-nias; Taygetus, he says, was full of them. Tristram is therefore mistaken when he tells us that bears became extinct early in the historic period in southern Greece.

The Emperor Hadrian killed a bear, and hung its skin in the temple of Eros at Thespiae with a dedication by himself which in still extant (Kaibel, 811).

The ravening wolf, on the other hand, was a popular subject as he continues to be. So in the lines (9, 432) by Theocritus, consoling poor Thyrsis for the loss of a kid, which has been laid hold of by the wolf in its claws (in its claws: how unlike Theocritus! It has been proposed to substitute the word gnathos, jaw)--

What use, poor Thyrsis, to cry out thine eyes
And to consume thyself with doleful sighs?
The pretty kid in Hades found her bourne,
For with his claws a rough wolf has her torn.
The dogs bay, now she's dead, but bay in vain,
Since bone nor vestige more of her remain.

Crooked claws are attributed to the wolf in an oracle (Didot III, 6, 217), but only for the sake of symmetry; the lion, a few lines earlier, having set

MAMMALS

the example of being gampsonyx, crook-clawed. In _the same oracle occurs the compound ainolykos, dreadful-wolf.

There is also an epitaph on the shipwrecked mariner who, swimming ashore and thinking himself safe at last, is slain by a wolf as he sets foot on land--a poem of which there is an imitation. Both of them perhaps were exercises, since a single wolf could hardly overpower the weakest man (7, 289 and 550).

We have further an anonymous quatrain, supposed to be spoken by a goat which has been compelled by a foolish shepherd to suckle a young wolf, to its own future detriment; and a strange account of how a pack of wolves, pursuing a traveller into the Nile, formed a bridge across the river by holding each others' tails in their mouths. The same unlikely yarn is told about wolves, and also about mice, by Aelian. The she-wolf that nursed Romulus and Remus is commemorated in the last of the Cyzicene epigrams, and Ion mentions the wolf-hounds which were traditionally, responsible for the death of Euripides. Two dedicatory poems (6, 35 and 106) describe hunters suspending on a wild plane tree, in honour of Pan, a skin and the stout crook-handed staff used for throwing at wolves; Phaedimus hymns Apollo's wolf-slaying quiver; Meleager talks of "sheep catching a

MAMMALS

wolf" and Strato, on a certain disreputable occasion, compares himself to a wolf that finds a lamb standing at the door and waiting for him. As to its voracity, Diphilus, an early comic poet, calls the inhabitants of Argos wolves; Lucilius accuses one Gamus of having the appetite of five wolves.

There is no reference to werewolves, for which Arcadia was famous.

Strange that the fox should barely be mentioned by name, since the ancients knew its habits so well, and contrived many stories about it, and valued its skin and ate its flesh, and protected their vineyards against its attacks. The word occurs in an oracle (Didot III, 6, 132) that mentions the hill Orchalides "which the fox never leaves". Little foxes or fox-cubs, alopekideus, are named elsewhere (ibid. 6, 277) as gaining the confidence of doves, and the opprobrious term kynalopex, dog-fox, is found more than once.

There is little doubt, mereover, that the robber beast which Anyte describes as stealing upon a cock in his sleep (7, 202) was a fox--

No longer as of old shalt thou so early stir
And rouse me from my bed with thy wings' rapid whirr;
For on thy sleep soft crept the Spoiler and thus slew
Thee as across thy throat his claws he sudden drew.

MAMMALS

The bird's throat, she says, was rent by its talons; an odd little blunder for the wise and tuneful Anyte to make, unless the animal in question was something of the cat species. This is doubtful, for she calls it sinis, the destroyer (there was a legendary robber called Sinis); and it is a singular coincidence that the Greek word for fox, alopex, should be derived from the Sanscrit lopakas, which is taken to mean "the destroyer" (A. de Gubernatis, vol. II, p. 122).

The cat, ailouros, hardly appears at all--a good deal of the mouse-catching in ancient households being done by tame ferrets or weasels as late, at least, as the days of Petronius (Satyricon, 46). Some prince is accused of stealing gold like a cat (11, 359). A fatal accident is recorded as happening to a partridge which had left its native rocks--perdix graeca therefore, a prettier but less well flavoured fowl than ours--to become the property, the pet, of Agathias Scholasticus. Its head was bitten off by the cat. Both master and a disciple of his bewail the sad event and hurl imprecations upon the assassin, whom Agathias vows he will solemnly slaughter over the mangled corpse of his victim. Here (7, 206) is what Damo-charis, the disciple, has to say--

Companion thou of the man-eating horde;
One of Actaeon's hounds, cat most abhorred!

MAMMALS

Eating Agathias' partridge thou at least
Hurt him, thy lord, as if he'd been thy feast.
Thy whim's now partridges ! Meanwhile the mice
Dance, and run off with all thy dainties nice.

They seem to have made no pet of this ailouros, a name derived from its wavy tail, a name which, if not puzzling, would perhaps, be more appropriate for the dog than for our modern cat. Their cats may have resembled the Angora or Persian breed; they were obviously not of the Manx variety. These men kept their eye on caudal appendages: witness the fish silouros, from its habit of shaking its tail as it moves along; the crab (also a kind of fish) pagouros, because its tail is fast; hippouros, the horse-tail fish; irachouros and melanouros, the rough and black tail; lampcuros, the fox with shining tail; skiouros and kampsiourus, the squirrel, the shadytailed one.... Arcturus is hardly to the point, nor the pilot Palinurus, nor the thorny plant Paliouros, nor the town Kerkesoura mentioned by Strabo (now Aksas) on the West bank of the Nile.

My friend D. P. Petrocochino of Athens, who kindly encourages such fancies of mine, has collected, with the help of Mr. Philintas (a well-known linguist and contributor to the new Greek encyclopedia), some more of these tail-words, mostly non-zoological, ancient and modern, substantives and adjectives: kynosoura,

MAMMALS

kolouros, kolobouros, seiouros, kountouros, leukouros, malouros, meiouros, lykoura, lykosoura, ankhouros, sainouros, ouragos, ouriachos, ourakos, ouraios, triko-louros, ouropygion, ophiouros or ophisouros, kakouros, seisoura, platyouros, diouros. The Greek family of Coundoariotis derives its name from a postal service they had, in which short-tailed horses--kountoura aloga--were used.

Modern zoology has invented a few more, such as brachyurus which would correspond to the last-named, and panurus (all-tail: the bearded tit)....

The cat's other name gattos or katta, of Nubian origin like our Â«catÂ», does not occur in the Anthology. The modern gatta is still no great favourite in Greek households. But I am encroaching on the province of domestic animals.

Erymanthus was famous for its deer, likewise the Arcadian forest region of Maenalus--the district beloved of Apollo and Pan, now bleak save on the North side, which in the days of our fathers became celebrated for something else as well: the Maenalus fir, that interesting growth which aptly bears the name of the tree-loving Queen Amalia under whose reign it was discovered. There is no mention of Actaeon, but we have an anonymous epigram on a statue of the slaughter by Hercules of the fabled

MAMMALS

Maenalian hind; Perses tells of the three doughty sons of Leontiades, each of whom shot a stag from horseback in Maenalus and hung up its head in the temple of Apollo.

According to these poets--Xenophon gives more details--deer were hunted with hounds, and killed with spears and arrows, or driven into nets. They were also tracked by their slots in winter, as appears from the following poem by Callimachus (12, 102) which contains a considerable amount of truth--

O Epicedes, through the frost and snow
The hunter follows where the hares' runs go,
And tracks the slot of hinds. But should one say:
"Look! there's one wounded!" for it he'll not stay.
Thus too my love. The fleeing he pursues,
And that which lies before him he eschews.

Their antlers, like the trophies of other wild animals, were suspended on trees, on the pine, beech, plane, and the juniper "sacred among hunters Â» (6, 253). This last gives some food for reflection. The tree is called arkeuthos--a name which occurs more than once in these pages; and Theophrastus, our first authority, has described it so well that there can be little chance of identifying it with anything save the modern kentros, juniperus phoenicia, as was done long

MAMMALS '

ago. Now, firstly, I do not remember seeing a juniper of this species--the Syrian juniperus excelsa grows taller--more than thirty feet in height and that not in Greece (one I planted myself, under favourable conditions of soil and exposure, is now nearly twenty), and the trunk is so relatively slender that a stag's head nailed against it would present an absurd spectacle. Not that there is any mention in these poems of a stag's head actually attached to one of them; but this animal constituting the sportsman's greatest prize, it would follow that the favourite juniper was preferred to all other trees. Secondly, I should not call it a forest growth--Theophrastus himself insists upon its fondness for rocks; it avoids those wooded and shady regions which the deer loves. Thirdly, so far as I can recollect, I have never yet seen the natural stump of a juniper--if the poet meant its stump rather than its trunk--great or small. They seem to be not only of uncommonly tough texture, but of uncommonly long life.

I cannot guess the size of the "high-stemmed junipers" mentioned by Philippson (p. 282); my friend Mr. Shirley Atchley of Athens, who has walked over most parts of Greece, tells me that the tallest juniper of this kind which he has ever seen may have been fifteen feet high (some on Parnassus struck me as higher); that, for example, on the foothills of Aigalion

MAMMALS

opposite Salamis something like a wood of them might spring up, if the plants were left undisturbed; and that Thompson, in his "Flowering Plants of the Riviera" gives twenty feet as its greatest height, and refers to an unusually large -specimen with a trunk three feet in circumference. Both Thisleton Dyer and Sir A. Hort maintain the old identification of arkeu-thos with juniperus Phoenicia.

There, I suppose, we must leave the matter, unless--unless these writers were alluding not to the juniper but to one of the six larger conifers of Greece: abies cephalonica, panachaica and R-Amaliae, and pinus halepensis, laricio and pinea (the former of which were, and still are, known as elate, whereas their other ancient name, peuke, is now applied to the pine--called pitys in antiquity). Firs would be appropriate in relation to the stag, which is the most fir-haunting beast in Europe; they are liable to mortal accidents from snow and wind and--owing to their height--from lightning, when they leave a slowly decaying trunk such as hunters might find convenient for their purpose.

The hunters, yes; the poets, perhaps no; and that is why I dwell on this trifle. We must be on our guard with these poets, and not only in the matter of plants. Exigencies of versification are responsible for some little botanical and zoological confusion in

MAMMALS

nearly all poetry, and one really cannot expect these charming people to be meticulous about such trifles; they have enough to do avoiding hiatuses and minding their quantities. So one of these epigrams (10, 12) bids the weary wanderer rest his limbs under a juniper, where there was a bench. It is not the kind of tree I should choose for a siesta or under which I should place a bench; its limbs are often so low that one would have to crawl there on all fours. Enough of junipers.

Old huntsmen, grown weary of the chase, dedicate the manifold implements of their calling, including the dogs' collars, to some appropriate deity, as do fishermen and fowlers and other craftsmen--cooks and sailors and schoolmasters and musicians and prostitutes and farmers and blacksmiths and carpenters and eunuchs and soldiers and several more--under the same conditions. Significant reading they make, these little catalogues, for the social history of their day.

The poets of the Anthology draw no clearer distinction as to species than do some of ours. Elaphos = red deer (cervus elaphus); so much is certain. But when (6,336) it receives the epithet balios, dappled, we are to understand, I think, the fallow-deer. This was the common stag of Western Asia and, according to Keller, not found wild in Greece or any other part of Europe in historical times, though it may have

- MAMMALS

existed there previously (Forsyth Major, in his "Tyr-rhenis", marks it down as occurring in Sardinia, Heldreich in Akarnania).

Seeing that a certain proportion of the Anthology poets, some of the best, came from regions East of Greece, we may take it for granted that cervus damn was the deer they had in mind. Indeed, it must have been this species in the case of Phalaecus, unless he was indulging in poetic licence. He speaks (6, 165) of the "spotted (stiktos) skin of a completely flayed achaines Â». This animal, according to the dictionaries, is the young of the deer at a life-period when it has single points to its horns. Now these points in cervus elephus are not there until the beast is a brocket, in its third year; the spots, on the other hand, disappear in the fourth month after birth. If achaines, therefore, has horns and is still spotted, it must be cervus dama and cannot be the red deer. Sundevall, on the other hand, supported by the evidence of various ancient writers, says that the word achaines applies to the red deer and to no other kind; that it was the deer "common to the Greek landscape of Achaia" (whence the name of that province); and Sundevall's authority counts for much. This is tedious to read, and still more tedious to unravel, but 1 am going through with it.

The term prox is found, I believe, only once in the Anthology (14, 24). It is taken to mean "Gazelle,

MAMMALS

or roe". One cannot decide from the context which of these is intended; I should say the latter, or possibly the fawn. The word is allied to prokas.

Dorkas, again (a girl's name in more than one poem), is the gazelle or antelope; and in the case of Nikis the Lybian (Isopsepha of Leonidas of Alexandria), who dedicates to Artemis the weapons wherewith he killed such animals, the gazelle, native of Lybia, may be intended. In most instances dorkas can mean nothing but roe or fawn, although, firstly, it is impossible in any one case to say which of the two is signified, and although, secondly, the correct terms for young deer, nebros and kemas (not hellos), both occur, and will allow conversely of being rendered as roe (cervus capreolus] or even as full-grown red deer. A nebros is described as spotted, stiktos(\\, 40): what are we to make of this ? The skins of young deer were often worn, but they are of uniform colour save in those first four months. The passage in question may refer to the fallow-deer--

Cleodemus is still small, albeit this tiny son

Of Eumenes to dance with the young boys has begun.

Look ! Even a dappled fawn's skin has he girded on,

And nodding ivy sits his yellow curls upon.

Big make him, Theban King, that this wee acolyte

May soon the full-grown youths lead in the holy rite!

MAMMALS

In short, we cannot definitely say of any of the six names here given to deer (daphos, achaines, prox, dorkas, nebros and kemas] that they apply to one animal and to no other--which is a record in the matter of poetical confusion; a confusion, for the rest, that repeats itself among prose writers, who have no pretext for being inexact in such matters. So Strabo, in speaking of the dorkades as one of the great rarities of Spain, can have been thinking not of the roe nor of the fawn, both of which were common, nor yet of antelopes or gazelles, neither of which existed there, but of the Pyrenean ibex; the "wild goats" of Taygetus mentioned by Pausanias were probably chamois; and Aelian, when he talks of the straight horns which the kemas uses for attacking hunters, must have meant a species of antelope rather than a deer-calf, which has no horns at all.

There are two epigrams about the death of deer, one more strange than the other. The first, by Apol-lonides (9, 244), relates how a herd of deer sought refuge from their snow-clad mountains in the moist warmth of a river and were held fast there, to the delight of the country-folk, by a sudden frost which covered the river with ice. Tiberius Illustrius (9, 370) tells the fate of a dorkas which, escaping from hounds into the sea, is drawn to land by fishermen in their nets; and in Didot III (2, 387) is an epitaph on a

MAMMALS

hind which was captured in similar fashion. Xeno-phon says that one can sometimes drive stags into the sea, an occurence which is frequently observed, since deer are excellent swimmers. Macedonius has a quatrain (9, 275) about a certain Codrus who caught a swift deer out of the waves of the sea. The myth of Saron is connected with a stag which took to the water of what was afterwards the Saronic Gulf; he pursued it into the waves and was drowned. Neither stags nor hinds are so lucky nowadays, as can be seen from the following newspaper account (14 November, 1926) which deserves to be rescued from oblivion, testifying, as it does, to the sportsmanlike instincts for which some Englishmen are famed. "Residents at Minehead witnessed a thrilling scene yesterday, when a hind entered the sea near Warren Point, hotly pursued by followers of the Devon and Somerset staghounds. An exciting chase in the surf followed, the huntsmen pursuing the deer in two motor boats. The pursuit continued for nearly a mile before the animal was caught. Ultimately it was landed on the quay and there killed. Many hundreds of people watched the proceedings".

The deer's fleetness of foot is often commemorated; also its longevity, which was supposed to be four times that of the crow, which was nine times that of man. As a matter of fact, forty years appears

MAMMALS

to be the age-limit of a stag. Out of the shin-bone of the fawn they made flutes, tibiae, which seem to have given forth feeble sounds--whereas Sardinians used to make particularly good ones out of the leg-bones of flamingoes; Pindar's lyre is described (App. Plan. 305) as outringing all the others, even as the Etruscan trumpet outblares this flute--flageolet or pipe, I should say. The skins of deer were worn at Bacchic festivals, and one of the five performers thereat is pictured (9, 603) as holding aloft the body of a stag--rather a cumbrous partner for a dance, since a warrantable English stag weighs, according to the Master of



	BIRDS AND BEASTS OF THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY

	BY NORMAN DOUGLAS

	Hunter of hares, may fortune smile on thee: Such is the gift of Pan. And thou, O fowler, who with lime and reeds Seekest to capture winged and feathered breeds That roost beneath this hill--praise Pan ! Pan from his eyrie guards yon sacred copse; Bid him descend to join the chase, that he With hounds and reeds may thy companion be.

	LEONIDAS OF TARENTUM (F. W. M.).

	PRIVATELY PRINTED 1927



	TO HIS FRIEND J. E. B. WHOSE VERSES HAVE ENLIVENED THIS DISMAL DISCOURSE



	CONTENTS

	page Introduction ............... 9 Mammals. ............... 15 Birds ................. 68 Reptiles and Batrachians ..........122 Sea-beasts ............... 146 Creeping things ............. 177 Bibliography ............... 207 Index ................. 209



	INTRODUCTION aesthetic and humanitarian, showing how the attitude of mankind towards birds and beasts has altered since those days. Three years, I kept on saying to myself--where shall they be found? I shall not find them. Be that a pretext for putting together the following notes which may serve as material for some one more fortunately situated. The pencillings then scrawled in my Anthology are fast fading; I amplified them later with references to such authorities as were accessible, but a good many others would have to be consulted if the undertaking were to be brought up to date, such as, for instance, von der MÃ¼hle's book on the Birds of Greece, which I have not been able to procure. An undertaking, for the rest, of the gentlemanly kind; quite useless. No doubt an interesting little paper might be written, were we to investigate nothing but the Natural History of a single period or of a single poet, such as Meleager; or that of a well-marked group of them, like Lucilius and those other wits who introduced the animal world chiefly for the sake of the amusing similes they could extract therefrom; or if we devoted ourselves to one particular beast, say, the lion or the bee, and traced its progress through the Anthology from the earliest to the latest references. A monograph of this kind would be brief indeed but 10



	INTRODUCTION not without a certain value from a scientific point of view. To compile, on the other hand, a long list of creatures mentioned only at hazard (some of the most conspicuous animals are not so much as named in this collection); a list of creatures mentioned by poets good and bad, poets of divers nationalities, poets scattered over a large geographical area and over a period of fifteen hundred years of time--to compile such a list: what more exquisitely unprofitable? Nevertheless, now that the thing is done, it strikes me that these utterances of a considerable section--segment, rather--of the ancient world present, for all their variety, a certain inner coherence. That must be because the writers happened to be poets, who view life from more or less the same angle through all the ages; poets, whose observations of natural phenomena were casual and unsystematic, whose interpretation of such things shifts more slowly than that of the scientists, and shifts, when it does so, along a plane different from theirs. Not one of them can be called a poet-naturalist in the sense of some half-dozen English ones; Aristotle is modern, compared to the latest of them; indeed, he belongs to another world of thought. How birds and beasts affect these men, what they say about them and what they fail to say, reveal, when taken as a whole, an outlook that is well riveted together--an outlook harmonious, II



	INTRODUCTION and yet, with a faint persistence, dissimilar to that of the present day; it is as if we were glancing from a window upon some unfamiliar landscape. Like our own poets, they are quite ready to introduce the animal creation into their pages, and in so doing they often register what seem to be the most irrelevant and wearisome trivialities; some of their lines are sheer doggerel. But these trivialities, I think, have their significance. That is why the reader of the following pages cannot but notice that I have chronicled them one after the other with pedantic deliberation, to the verge of tediousness and possibly beyond it. My reason is this: it is trivialities, mere trivialities, which betray them in the long run; nothing but the cumulative weight of trifles can turn the scale and demonstrate the particular detail wherein our point of view has come to change from that of their time. For we find no Natural History, properly speaking, in the Greek Anthology; what its authors say about animals constitutes a human rather than a scientific document; it is a minute but clearly demarcated province in the history of feeling--which is only another way of saying once more that its writers were poets. All such history changes slowly,, since, unconcerned with political or social or scientific movements, it can but reflect the almost imperceptible interaction between nature, a relatively stable envi- 12



	INTRODUCTION ronment, and that old and yet relatively unstable heart of man. Glancing in cursory fashion through the Anthology, one might be tempted to formulate some theory such as this: that the poets' interest in--or at least mention of--wild animals is not constant in its intensity but follows, rather, a curved line: low at first, in the grand era, and confined chiefly to decorative ones such as lions, it rises high, declines awhile, rises again in the Hellenistic and rhetorical period, drops almost to zero towards the close (Byzantinism). The theory will not hold water. Though none of its writers is preeminent as an observer of wild creatures, there is also no gulf in the long stretch of years; every single century, from Anyte to Agathias, produces its crop. It was my intention to include the domestic animals in this survey. The project has been abandoned not without reluctance, because a mass of material had already been accumulated, and because, as a matter of fact, a study of this group would throw more intimate side-lights upon the lore and home life of the ancients than does the other; it would have an ethical import of its own. The wild animals must suffice for the moment; there are some hundred and fifty-three of them, and the references to them amount to close upon six hundred. 13



	INTRODUCTION I had intended also to give, in the shape of footnotes, proper references to Aristotle and so forth, and had actually proceeded awhile with the ponderous task before realizing that such a method would be like attaching a lump of lead to a soap-bubble. For it became more and more evident that the notes were going to outweigh my text in sheer bulk, besides giving to this trifle an insupportable air of documentation, of Teutonic Gediegenheit. Hence their omission from the pages which follow. I content myself with giving most of the Anthology references, and even them I have quite omitted in three little sections (on the dolphin, bee, and cicada); they run more pleasantly without the distracting numerals in brackets. The reader who distrusts my statements about these animals can verify them by going through the text himself, and I wish him joy of his labours. A short bibliography is added; it avoids the repetition of long book-titles.

	14



	MAMMALS An Arab dedicates to Pan the skin of a lion, together with the lance that slew it, which still bears the marks of its teeth (6,57). Panopeus, hunter of lions and leopards, dies from the sting of a scorpion (7,578); the accident is not impossible, though this may be merely a rhetorical exercise, showing how the boldest man may be overcome by the most ignoble of beasts:

	'Tis in this tomb strong Panopeus rests, Lion-hunter, piercer of rough panthers' breasts. On the hills a scorpion from earth issuing Wounded his heel with its death-giving sting. Upon the ground lie his poor darts and spear, Alas !--the playthings of audacious deer. Other lion-killers are named--such as in 6,262. Hercules, slayer of the Nemean lion, is frequently hymned; so are the lions associated with Cybele; brave men like Leonidas have lions sculptured on their tombs (in this case there is also a play on the name); oracles refer to the beast more than once, as does a problem (14,7) about a lion of brass which spouted water from its eyes and from other parts of its body; we have the well-known lines from Aristophanes comparing Alcibiades to a lion-cub which should not have been reared in the city; a figure of 16



	MAMMALS Eros, driving a chariot drawn by lions--a favourite motif--is noted by Marcus Argentarius (9,221) as forming the device on a ring-- Upon this seal Love whom none e'er withstands I see, guiding strong lions with his hands; One flaunts o'er them a whip, the other holds The reins; and grace abundant him enfolds. I fear this bane of men; he who wild beast Can tame won't pity mortals in the least. Besides these, there is an anonymous poem (7,626) praising the Roman Emperor because he emptied Libya of her lions and other prowling monsters, and sent them to Rome to fight in the Circus. Such beast-fights are alluded to more than once in the Anthology, and we have a noteworthy epigram (9,581) put into the mouth of a Byzantine Emperor, deprecating the bloodshed connected with these shows. I find no reference to performing animals, to lions jumping through hoops or elephants on tight ropes: it may be that the poets were sensible of the ineptitude of such exhibitions. Nor is there mention of menageries, of those paradises or vivaria for which men like Lucullus and Hortensius were famous, and concerning which Aulus Gellius has left us one of his usual dry dissertations.

	17



	MAMMALS I cannot say when the lion became extinct in Europe, Herodotus speaks of the lions and wild bulls in his description of Xerxes' march through Macedonia; he says the former were ferociously destructive to the camels that carried the army provisions, and then proceeds to give other details about them and to note the exact geographical range to which they were then confined. How like Herodotus! Aristotle and Xenophon both confirm the existence of these Macedonian lions. There seems to be little doubt that they also existed in Greece at an early period, on Mount Olympus, Cithaeron and Parnassus; Pau-sanias gives some information on this subject, and the Nemean lion's den is pointed out to this day. A well-known scholar denies that lions were ever found in the Peloponnese: he regards the Nemean story as an importation. But if the beast inhabited Thessaly, there is no reason why it should not have spread southward; indeed, I fail to see by what means it could have been kept out of the Morea. Dion Chry-sostom speaks of it as extinct in Europe. Three hundred years later, at the tail end of antiquity, Them-istius regrets that Thessaly can furnish no more lions for beast-shows. Besides the previously-mentioned leopard-killer another one is named (Didot III, 2, 565). And No. 633 18



	MAMMALS of the same section consists of a two-line epitaph on a boxer who was killed in a fight with a leopard, which shared the same fate-- See me, Lascepius, a boxer, who Was slain by the same leopard that I slew. So far as I can discover, the only other mention of this animal is in the inscription over the gateway of Smyrna citadel (Jacobs' Appendix, 336) which speaks of the cruel hand of time devouring this once famous city even as a leopard devours a fawn. The beast may perhaps be found, as in the days of Spratt and Forbes (Travels in Lycia, 1858), in the Lycian mountains, where it is known by the Turkish name of kaplan. There is a hint of the leopard, as "panther" in an enigma (14,24). Erhard (p. 79) says "On Samos a panther was shot"--he gives no further details. The lynx, enemy of goats, occurs in a ten-line address to Eros (5, 179) by Meleager, who refuses the God of Love a dwelling near his heart; it would be, he says, like keeping a lynx beside the goats. The lynx's eye is also mentioned (Didot III, 3, 79); that is all. I have never heard of lynxes in Greece proper, and doubt whether they still exist anywhere, although 19



	MAMMALS their reputation for keen sight survives as a. proverb. The Athens Museum contains a woefully stuffed specimen which was killed on the Parnes, a few hours from the capital, on the 18 March, 1862, and Heldreich (p. 11) mentions one or two localities. A bear-hunter is named (Didot III, 2, 565). There is no other mention of the bear--Homer also has only a single reference to it--save in a punning epigram by Ammianus (i i, 23 i) on a certain objectionable person called Markos, the first letter of whose name, he suggests, should be taken away, leaving Arkos, a bear, "of which he deserves many" (to tear him in pieces). I know nothing of the present distribution of bears in the Anthology regions; a few were still to be found on Pindus and Olympus in 1844, and there is a Macedonian proverb to the effect that "once you catch your bear, it will dance for you". As to the Peloponnesus, Leake says that the occasional appearance of bears in the mountains both of Arcadia and Laconia is "generally attested by the inhabitants" and they are now "seldom seen in any part of the Morea" (1833). I have enquired about them, but could elicit nothing; they have doubtless been driven out by this time, although Arcadia derives its name from them. The Morea, being now turned into an 20



	MAMMALS island, would in any case not harbour such monsters for long. They were common in the days of Pausa-nias; Taygetus, he says, was full of them. Tristram is therefore mistaken when he tells us that bears became extinct early in the historic period in southern Greece. The Emperor Hadrian killed a bear, and hung its skin in the temple of Eros at Thespiae with a dedication by himself which in still extant (Kaibel, 811). The ravening wolf, on the other hand, was a popular subject as he continues to be. So in the lines (9, 432) by Theocritus, consoling poor Thyrsis for the loss of a kid, which has been laid hold of by the wolf in its claws (in its claws: how unlike Theocritus! It has been proposed to substitute the word gnathos, jaw)-- What use, poor Thyrsis, to cry out thine eyes And to consume thyself with doleful sighs? The pretty kid in Hades found her bourne, For with his claws a rough wolf has her torn. The dogs bay, now she's dead, but bay in vain, Since bone nor vestige more of her remain. Crooked claws are attributed to the wolf in an oracle (Didot III, 6, 217), but only for the sake of symmetry; the lion, a few lines earlier, having set 2\



	MAMMALS the example of being gampsonyx, crook-clawed. In _the same oracle occurs the compound ainolykos, dreadful-wolf. There is also an epitaph on the shipwrecked mariner who, swimming ashore and thinking himself safe at last, is slain by a wolf as he sets foot on land--a poem of which there is an imitation. Both of them perhaps were exercises, since a single wolf could hardly overpower the weakest man (7, 289 and 550). We have further an anonymous quatrain, supposed to be spoken by a goat which has been compelled by a foolish shepherd to suckle a young wolf, to its own future detriment; and a strange account of how a pack of wolves, pursuing a traveller into the Nile, formed a bridge across the river by holding each others' tails in their mouths. The same unlikely yarn is told about wolves, and also about mice, by Aelian. The she-wolf that nursed Romulus and Remus is commemorated in the last of the Cyzicene epigrams, and Ion mentions the wolf-hounds which were traditionally, responsible for the death of Euripides. Two dedicatory poems (6, 35 and 106) describe hunters suspending on a wild plane tree, in honour of Pan, a skin and the stout crook-handed staff used for throwing at wolves; Phaedimus hymns Apollo's wolf-slaying quiver; Meleager talks of "sheep catching a

	22



	MAMMALS wolf" and Strato, on a certain disreputable occasion, compares himself to a wolf that finds a lamb standing at the door and waiting for him. As to its voracity, Diphilus, an early comic poet, calls the inhabitants of Argos wolves; Lucilius accuses one Gamus of having the appetite of five wolves. There is no reference to werewolves, for which Arcadia was famous. Strange that the fox should barely be mentioned by name, since the ancients knew its habits so well, and contrived many stories about it, and valued its skin and ate its flesh, and protected their vineyards against its attacks. The word occurs in an oracle (Didot III, 6, 132) that mentions the hill Orchalides "which the fox never leaves". Little foxes or fox-cubs, alopekideus, are named elsewhere (ibid. 6, 277) as gaining the confidence of doves, and the opprobrious term kynalopex, dog-fox, is found more than once. There is little doubt, mereover, that the robber beast which Anyte describes as stealing upon a cock in his sleep (7, 202) was a fox-- No longer as of old shalt thou so early stir And rouse me from my bed with thy wings' rapid whirr; For on thy sleep soft crept the Spoiler and thus slew Thee as across thy throat his claws he sudden drew. 23



	MAMMALS The bird's throat, she says, was rent by its talons; an odd little blunder for the wise and tuneful Anyte to make, unless the animal in question was something of the cat species. This is doubtful, for she calls it sinis, the destroyer (there was a legendary robber called Sinis); and it is a singular coincidence that the Greek word for fox, alopex, should be derived from the Sanscrit lopakas, which is taken to mean "the destroyer" (A. de Gubernatis, vol. II, p. 122). The cat, ailouros, hardly appears at all--a good deal of the mouse-catching in ancient households being done by tame ferrets or weasels as late, at least, as the days of Petronius (Satyricon, 46). Some prince is accused of stealing gold like a cat (11, 359). A fatal accident is recorded as happening to a partridge which had left its native rocks--perdix graeca therefore, a prettier but less well flavoured fowl than ours--to become the property, the pet, of Agathias Scholasticus. Its head was bitten off by the cat. Both master and a disciple of his bewail the sad event and hurl imprecations upon the assassin, whom Agathias vows he will solemnly slaughter over the mangled corpse of his victim. Here (7, 206) is what Damo-charis, the disciple, has to say-- Companion thou of the man-eating horde; One of Actaeon's hounds, cat most abhorred! 24



	MAMMALS Eating Agathias' partridge thou at least Hurt him, thy lord, as if he'd been thy feast. Thy whim's now partridges ! Meanwhile the mice Dance, and run off with all thy dainties nice. They seem to have made no pet of this ailouros, a name derived from its wavy tail, a name which, if not puzzling, would perhaps, be more appropriate for the dog than for our modern cat. Their cats may have resembled the Angora or Persian breed; they were obviously not of the Manx variety. These men kept their eye on caudal appendages: witness the fish silouros, from its habit of shaking its tail as it moves along; the crab (also a kind of fish) pagouros, because its tail is fast; hippouros, the horse-tail fish; irachouros and melanouros, the rough and black tail; lampcuros, the fox with shining tail; skiouros and kampsiourus, the squirrel, the shadytailed one.... Arcturus is hardly to the point, nor the pilot Palinurus, nor the thorny plant Paliouros, nor the town Kerkesoura mentioned by Strabo (now Aksas) on the West bank of the Nile. My friend D. P. Petrocochino of Athens, who kindly encourages such fancies of mine, has collected, with the help of Mr. Philintas (a well-known linguist and contributor to the new Greek encyclopedia), some more of these tail-words, mostly non-zoological, ancient and modern, substantives and adjectives: kynosoura, 25



	MAMMALS kolouros, kolobouros, seiouros, kountouros, leukouros, malouros, meiouros, lykoura, lykosoura, ankhouros, sainouros, ouragos, ouriachos, ourakos, ouraios, triko-louros, ouropygion, ophiouros or ophisouros, kakouros, seisoura, platyouros, diouros. The Greek family of Coundoariotis derives its name from a postal service they had, in which short-tailed horses--kountoura aloga--were used. Modern zoology has invented a few more, such as brachyurus which would correspond to the last-named, and panurus (all-tail: the bearded tit).... The cat's other name gattos or katta, of Nubian origin like our Â«catÂ», does not occur in the Anthology. The modern gatta is still no great favourite in Greek households. But I am encroaching on the province of domestic animals. Erymanthus was famous for its deer, likewise the Arcadian forest region of Maenalus--the district beloved of Apollo and Pan, now bleak save on the North side, which in the days of our fathers became celebrated for something else as well: the Maenalus fir, that interesting growth which aptly bears the name of the tree-loving Queen Amalia under whose reign it was discovered. There is no mention of Actaeon, but we have an anonymous epigram on a statue of the slaughter by Hercules of the fabled 26



	MAMMALS Maenalian hind; Perses tells of the three doughty sons of Leontiades, each of whom shot a stag from horseback in Maenalus and hung up its head in the temple of Apollo. According to these poets--Xenophon gives more details--deer were hunted with hounds, and killed with spears and arrows, or driven into nets. They were also tracked by their slots in winter, as appears from the following poem by Callimachus (12, 102) which contains a considerable amount of truth-- O Epicedes, through the frost and snow The hunter follows where the hares' runs go, And tracks the slot of hinds. But should one say: "Look! there's one wounded!" for it he'll not stay. Thus too my love. The fleeing he pursues, And that which lies before him he eschews. Their antlers, like the trophies of other wild animals, were suspended on trees, on the pine, beech, plane, and the juniper "sacred among hunters Â» (6, 253). This last gives some food for reflection. The tree is called arkeuthos--a name which occurs more than once in these pages; and Theophrastus, our first authority, has described it so well that there can be little chance of identifying it with anything save the modern kentros, juniperus phoenicia, as was done long 27



	MAMMALS ' ago. Now, firstly, I do not remember seeing a juniper of this species--the Syrian juniperus excelsa grows taller--more than thirty feet in height and that not in Greece (one I planted myself, under favourable conditions of soil and exposure, is now nearly twenty), and the trunk is so relatively slender that a stag's head nailed against it would present an absurd spectacle. Not that there is any mention in these poems of a stag's head actually attached to one of them; but this animal constituting the sportsman's greatest prize, it would follow that the favourite juniper was preferred to all other trees. Secondly, I should not call it a forest growth--Theophrastus himself insists upon its fondness for rocks; it avoids those wooded and shady regions which the deer loves. Thirdly, so far as I can recollect, I have never yet seen the natural stump of a juniper--if the poet meant its stump rather than its trunk--great or small. They seem to be not only of uncommonly tough texture, but of uncommonly long life. I cannot guess the size of the "high-stemmed junipers" mentioned by Philippson (p. 282); my friend Mr. Shirley Atchley of Athens, who has walked over most parts of Greece, tells me that the tallest juniper of this kind which he has ever seen may have been fifteen feet high (some on Parnassus struck me as higher); that, for example, on the foothills of Aigalion 28



	MAMMALS opposite Salamis something like a wood of them might spring up, if the plants were left undisturbed; and that Thompson, in his "Flowering Plants of the Riviera" gives twenty feet as its greatest height, and refers to an unusually large -specimen with a trunk three feet in circumference. Both Thisleton Dyer and Sir A. Hort maintain the old identification of arkeu-thos with juniperus Phoenicia. There, I suppose, we must leave the matter, unless--unless these writers were alluding not to the juniper but to one of the six larger conifers of Greece: abies cephalonica, panachaica and R-Amaliae, and pinus halepensis, laricio and pinea (the former of which were, and still are, known as elate, whereas their other ancient name, peuke, is now applied to the pine--called pitys in antiquity). Firs would be appropriate in relation to the stag, which is the most fir-haunting beast in Europe; they are liable to mortal accidents from snow and wind and--owing to their height--from lightning, when they leave a slowly decaying trunk such as hunters might find convenient for their purpose. The hunters, yes; the poets, perhaps no; and that is why I dwell on this trifle. We must be on our guard with these poets, and not only in the matter of plants. Exigencies of versification are responsible for some little botanical and zoological confusion in 29



	- MAMMALS existed there previously (Forsyth Major, in his "Tyr-rhenis", marks it down as occurring in Sardinia, Heldreich in Akarnania). Seeing that a certain proportion of the Anthology poets, some of the best, came from regions East of Greece, we may take it for granted that cervus damn was the deer they had in mind. Indeed, it must have been this species in the case of Phalaecus, unless he was indulging in poetic licence. He speaks (6, 165) of the "spotted (stiktos) skin of a completely flayed achaines Â». This animal, according to the dictionaries, is the young of the deer at a life-period when it has single points to its horns. Now these points in cervus elephus are not there until the beast is a brocket, in its third year; the spots, on the other hand, disappear in the fourth month after birth. If achaines, therefore, has horns and is still spotted, it must be cervus dama and cannot be the red deer. Sundevall, on the other hand, supported by the evidence of various ancient writers, says that the word achaines applies to the red deer and to no other kind; that it was the deer "common to the Greek landscape of Achaia" (whence the name of that province); and Sundevall's authority counts for much. This is tedious to read, and still more tedious to unravel, but 1 am going through with it. The term prox is found, I believe, only once in the Anthology (14, 24). It is taken to mean "Gazelle, 31



	MAMMALS or roe". One cannot decide from the context which of these is intended; I should say the latter, or possibly the fawn. The word is allied to prokas. Dorkas, again (a girl's name in more than one poem), is the gazelle or antelope; and in the case of Nikis the Lybian (Isopsepha of Leonidas of Alexandria), who dedicates to Artemis the weapons wherewith he killed such animals, the gazelle, native of Lybia, may be intended. In most instances dorkas can mean nothing but roe or fawn, although, firstly, it is impossible in any one case to say which of the two is signified, and although, secondly, the correct terms for young deer, nebros and kemas (not hellos), both occur, and will allow conversely of being rendered as roe (cervus capreolus] or even as full-grown red deer. A nebros is described as spotted, stiktos(\\, 40): what are we to make of this ? The skins of young deer were often worn, but they are of uniform colour save in those first four months. The passage in question may refer to the fallow-deer-- Cleodemus is still small, albeit this tiny son Of Eumenes to dance with the young boys has begun. Look ! Even a dappled fawn's skin has he girded on, And nodding ivy sits his yellow curls upon. Big make him, Theban King, that this wee acolyte May soon the full-grown youths lead in the holy rite! 32



	MAMMALS In short, we cannot definitely say of any of the six names here given to deer (daphos, achaines, prox, dorkas, nebros and kemas] that they apply to one animal and to no other--which is a record in the matter of poetical confusion; a confusion, for the rest, that repeats itself among prose writers, who have no pretext for being inexact in such matters. So Strabo, in speaking of the dorkades as one of the great rarities of Spain, can have been thinking not of the roe nor of the fawn, both of which were common, nor yet of antelopes or gazelles, neither of which existed there, but of the Pyrenean ibex; the "wild goats" of Taygetus mentioned by Pausanias were probably chamois; and Aelian, when he talks of the straight horns which the kemas uses for attacking hunters, must have meant a species of antelope rather than a deer-calf, which has no horns at all. There are two epigrams about the death of deer, one more strange than the other. The first, by Apol-lonides (9, 244), relates how a herd of deer sought refuge from their snow-clad mountains in the moist warmth of a river and were held fast there, to the delight of the country-folk, by a sudden frost which covered the river with ice. Tiberius Illustrius (9, 370) tells the fate of a dorkas which, escaping from hounds into the sea, is drawn to land by fishermen in their nets; and in Didot III (2, 387) is an epitaph on a 33



	MAMMALS hind which was captured in similar fashion. Xeno-phon says that one can sometimes drive stags into the sea, an occurence which is frequently observed, since deer are excellent swimmers. Macedonius has a quatrain (9, 275) about a certain Codrus who caught a swift deer out of the waves of the sea. The myth of Saron is connected with a stag which took to the water of what was afterwards the Saronic Gulf; he pursued it into the waves and was drowned. Neither stags nor hinds are so lucky nowadays, as can be seen from the following newspaper account (14 November, 1926) which deserves to be rescued from oblivion, testifying, as it does, to the sportsmanlike instincts for which some Englishmen are famed. "Residents at Minehead witnessed a thrilling scene yesterday, when a hind entered the sea near Warren Point, hotly pursued by followers of the Devon and Somerset staghounds. An exciting chase in the surf followed, the huntsmen pursuing the deer in two motor boats. The pursuit continued for nearly a mile before the animal was caught. Ultimately it was landed on the quay and there killed. Many hundreds of people watched the proceedings". The deer's fleetness of foot is often commemorated; also its longevity, which was supposed to be four times that of the crow, which was nine times that of man. As a matter of fact, forty years appears 34



	MAMMALS to be the age-limit of a stag. Out of the shin-bone of the fawn they made flutes, tibiae, which seem to have given forth feeble sounds--whereas Sardinians used to make particularly good ones out of the leg-bones of flamingoes; Pindar's lyre is described (App. Plan. 305) as outringing all the others, even as the Etruscan trumpet outblares this flute--flageolet or pipe, I should say. The skins of deer were worn at Bacchic festivals, and one of the five performers thereat is pictured (9, 603) as holding aloft the body of a stag--rather a cumbrous partner for a dance, since a warrantable English stag weighs, according to the Master of