knowledge; they showed themselves true precursors of the modern world by
their researches into scientific zoology, which were carried on with
zeal long before Aristotle took the subject in hand. We cannot judge of
these early researches because they are nearly all lost; but Aristotle’s
“History of Animals,” even after the revival of learning, was still
consulted as a text-book, and perhaps nothing that he wrote contributed
more to win for him the fame of
“... maestro di color che sanno.”
The story goes that this work was written by desire of Alexander the
Great or, as some say, Philip of Macedon, and that the writer was given
a sum which sounds fabulous in order that he might obtain the best
available information. What interest most the modern reader are the
“sayings by the way” on the moral qualities or the intelligence of
animals. “Man and the mule,” says Aristotle, “are always tame”—a
classification not very complimentary to man. The ox is gentle, the wild
boar is violent, crafty the serpent, noble and generous the lion. Except
in the senses of touch and taste, man is far surpassed by the other
animals—a remark that was endorsed by St. Thomas Aquinas, who inferred
from the limitation of man’s senses that he would have made bad use of
them if they had been more acute. Aristotle laid down the axiom that man
alone can reason, though other animals can remember and learn, but he
never pursued this theory as far as it was pushed by Descartes, much
less by Malebranche. He believed that the soul of infants differed in no
respect from that of animals. All animals present traces of their moral
disposition, though these distinctions are more marked in man. Animals
understand signs and sounds, and can be taught. The females are less
ready to help the males in distress than the males are to help the
females. Bears carry off their cubs with them if they are pursued. The
dolphin is remarkable for the love of its young ones; two dolphins were
seen supporting a small dead dolphin on their backs, that was about to
sink, as if in pity for it, to keep it from being devoured by wild
creatures. In herds of horses, if a mare dies, other mares will bring up
the foal, and mares without foals have been known to entice foals to
follow them and to show much affection to them, though they die for want
of their natural sustenance.
Aristotle says that music attracts some animals; for instance, deer can
be captured by singing and playing on the pipe. Animals sometimes show
fore-thought, as the ichneumon, which does not attack the asp till it
has called others to help it—which reminds one of the dog whose master
took him to Exeter, where he was badly treated by the yard-dog of the
inn; on this, he escaped and went to London, whence he returned with a
powerful dog-friend who gave the yard-dog a lesson which he must have
long remembered. Hedgehogs are said by Aristotle and other ancient
authors to change the entrance of their burrows according as the wind
blows from north or south; a man in Byzantium got no small fame as a
weather prophet by observing this habit. He thinks that small animals
are generally cleverer than larger ones. A tame woodpecker placed an
almond in a crevice of wood so as to be able to break it, which it
succeeded in doing with three blows. Aristotle does not mention the
similar ingenuity of the thrush which I have noticed myself; it brings
snails to a good flat stone on which it breaks the shell by knocking it
up and down. He admired the skill of the swallow in making her nest.
Although he knew of the migrations of birds, and declared that cranes go
in winter to the sources of the Nile, “where there is a race of
pigmies—no fable, but a fact,” he was not free from the erroneous idea
(which is to be found in modern folk-lore) that some birds hybernate in
caves, out of which they emerge, almost featherless, in the spring. Of
the nightingale, he says that it sings ceaselessly for fifteen days and
nights when the mountains are thick with leaves.
The spider’s art and graceful movements receive due praise, as do the
cleanly habits of bees, which are said to sting people who use unguents
because they dislike bad smells. “Bright and shiny bees” Aristotle
asserts to be idle, “like women.”
Of all animals his favourites are the lion and the elephant. The lion is
gentle when he is not hungry and he is not jealous or suspicious. He is
fond of playing with animals that are brought up with him, and he gets
to have a real affection for them. If a blow aimed at a lion fails, he
only shakes and frightens his attacker, and then leaves him without
hurting him. He never shows fear or turns his back on a foe. But old
lions that are unable to hunt sometimes enter villages and attack
mankind. This is the first observation of the “man-eating” lion or
tiger, and the reason given for his perverse conduct is still believed
to be the right one.
Aristotle assigned the palm of wisdom to the elephant, a creature
abounding in intellect, tame, gentle, teachable, and one which can even
learn how to “worship the king”—which is what many of us saw the
elephants do at the Delhi Durbar.
[Illustration:
STELE WITH CAT AND BIRD.
Athens Museum.]
In a later age, Apollonius of Tyana confirmed from personal observation
all Aristotle’s praise; he watched with admiration the crossing of the
Indus by a herd of thirty elephants which were being pursued by
huntsmen; the light and small ones went first, then the mothers, who
held up their cubs with tusk and trunk, and lastly the old and large
elephants. Pliny gave a similar account of the way in which elephants
cross rivers, and it is, I believe, still noticed as a fact that the old
ones send the young ones before them. The officer whose duty it was to
superintend the embarcation of Indian elephants for Abyssinia during the
campaign of Sir Robert Napier told me how a very fine old elephant, who
perfectly understood the business in hand, drove all the others on
board, but after performing this useful service, when it came to be his
turn, he refused resolutely to move an inch, and had to be left behind.
The sympathy with animals for which Apollonius was remarkable made him
feel for these great beasts brought into subjection; he declares that at
night they mourn over their lost liberty with peculiar piteous sounds
unlike those which they make usually; if a man approaches, however, they
cease their wailing out of respect for him. He speaks of their
attachment to their keeper, how they eat bread from his hand like a dog
and caress him with their trunks. He saw an elephant at Taxila which was
said to have fought against Alexander the Great three hundred and fifty
years before. Alexander named it Ajax, and it bore golden bracelets on
its trunk with the words: “Ajax. To the Sun from Alexander son of Jove.”
The people decked it with garlands and anointed it with precious salves.
Several classical writers bore witness to the pleasure which elephants
took in music; they could be made to dance to the pipe. It was also said
that they could write. Their crowning merit—that of helping away wounded
comrades, which is vouched for by no less an authority than Mr. F. C.
Selous—does not seem to have been observed in ancient times.
In Greek mythology the familiar animals of the gods occupy a place
half-way between legend and natural history. Viewed by one school as
totems, as the earlier god of which the later is only an appendix, to
more conservative students they may appear to be, in the main, the
outgrowth of the same fondness for coupling man and beast and fitting
man with a beast-companion suited to his character, which gave St. Mark
his lion and St. John his eagle. The panther of Bacchus is the most
attractive of the divine _menagerie_, because Bacchus, in this
connexion, is generally shown as a child and the friendships of beasts
and children are always pleasing.
The affection of Bacchus for panthers has been attributed to the fact
that he wore a panther-skin, but there seems no motive for deciding that
the one tradition was earlier than the other; the rationale of a myth is
often evolved long after the myth itself. Perhaps, after all, the
stories of gods and animals often originated in the simple belief that
gods, like men, had a weakness for pets!
In the Pompeian collections at Naples there are several designs of
Bacchus and his panther; one of them shows the panther and the ass of
Silenus lying down together; in another, a very fine mosaic, the winged
genius of Bacchus careers along astride of his favourite beast; in a
third, a chubby little boy, with no signs of godhead about him, clambers
on to the back of a patient panther, which has the long-suffering look
of animals that are accustomed to be teased by children. It may be
noticed that children and animals, both somewhat neglected in the older
art, attained the highest popularity with the artists of the age of
Pompeii. Children were represented in all sorts of attitudes, and all
known animals, from the cat to the octopus and the elephant to the
grasshopper, were drawn not only with general correctness but with a
keen insight into their humours and temperaments.
It is said that a panther was once caught in Pamphylia which had a gold
chain round its neck with the inscription in Armenian letters: “Arsaces
the king to the Nysæan god.” Oriental nations called Bacchus after Nysa,
his supposed birthplace. It was concluded that the king of Armenia had
given its freedom to this splendid specimen to do honour to the god. The
panther became very tame and was fondled by every one, but when the
spring came it ran away, chain and all, to seek a mate in the mountains
and never more came back.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
ANIMALS AT ROME
ROME, the eternal, begins with a Beast-story. However much deeper in the
past the spade may dig than the reputed date of the humanitarian
She-wolf, her descendant will not be expelled from the grotto on the
Capitol, nor will it cease to be the belief of children (the only
trustworthy authorities when legends are concerned) that the grandeur
that was Rome would have never existed but for the opportune
intervention of a friendly beast!
The fame of the She-wolf shows how eagerly mankind seizes on some touch
of nature, fact or fable, that seems to make all creatures kin. Rome was
as proud of her She-wolf as she was of ruling the world. It was the
“luck” of Rome; even now, something of the old sentiment exists, for I
remember that during King Edward’s visit old-fashioned Romans were angry
because this emblem was not to be seen in the decorations.
[Illustration:
(_Photo: Bruckmann._)
CAPITOLINE SHE-WOLF.]
The story did not make such large demands on credulity as sceptics
pretend. The wolf is not so much the natural enemy of man as the cat is
of the mouse: yet cats have been known to bring up families of mice or
rats which they treated with affection. In recent times a Russian bear
was stated to have carried away to the woods a little girl whom it fed
with nuts and fruits. The evidence seemed good, though the story did
sound a little as if it were suggested by Victor Hugo’s “Épopée du
Lion.” But in India there are stories of the same sort—stories actually
of She-wolves—which appear to be impossible to set aside. In a paper
read before the Bombay Natural History Society, the well-known Parsi
scholar, Jivanji Jamsedji Modi, described how he had seen one such
“wolf-boy” at the Secundra Orphanage: the boy had remained with wolves
up to six years old when he was discovered and captured, not without
vigorous opposition from his vulpine protectors.
The historical record of Rome as regards animals is not a bright one.
The cruelty of the arena does not stain the first Roman annals; the
earliest certified instance of wild-beast baiting belongs to 186 B.C.,
and after the practice was introduced it did not reach at once the
monstrous proportions of later times. Still, one does not imagine that
the Roman of republican times was very tender-hearted towards animals.
Cato related, as if he took a pride in it, that when he was Consul he
left his war-horse in Spain to spare the public the cost of its
conveyance to Rome. “Whether such things as these,” says Plutarch, who
tells the story, “are instances of greatness or littleness of soul, let
the reader judge for himself!” When the infatuation for the shows in the
arena was at its height, the Romans felt an enormous interest in
animals: indeed, there were moments when they thought of nothing else.
It was an interest which went along with indifference to their
sufferings; it may be said to have been worse than no interest at all,
but it existed and to ignore it, as most writers have done, is to make
the explicable inexplicable. If the only attraction of these shows had
been their cruelty we should have to conclude that the Romans were all
afflicted with a rare though not unknown form of insanity. Much the same
was true of the gladiatorial shows. Up to a certain point, what led
people to them was what leads people to a football match or an
assault-at-arms. Beyond that point—well, beyond it there entered the
element that makes the tiger in man, but for the most part it was
inconscient.
[Illustration:
LION BEING LED FROM THE ARENA BY A SLAVE.
(_Nennig Mosaic._)]
When we see Pola or Verona or Nîmes; when we tread the crowded streets
to the Roman Colosseum or traverse the deserted high-road to Spanish
Italica; most of all, when we watch coming nearer and nearer across the
wilderness between Kairouan and El Djem the magnificent pile that stands
outlined against the African sky—we all say the same thing: “What a
wonderful race the Romans were!” It is an exclamation that forces itself
to the lips of the most ignorant as to those of the scholar or
historical student. At such moments, it may be true, that the less we
think of the games of the arena the better; the remembrance of them
forms a disturbing element in the majesty of the scene. But they cannot
be put out of mind entirely, and if we do think of them, it is desirable
that we should think of them correctly. It so happens that it is
possible to reconstruct them into a lifelike picture. There exists one,
though, as far as I know, only one, faithful, vivid, and complete
contemporary representation of the Roman Games. This is the superb
mosaic pavement which was discovered in the middle of the last century
by a peasant striking on the hard surface with his spade, at the village
of Nennig, not far from the Imperial city of Treves. The observer of
this mosaic perceives at once that the games were of the nature of a
“variety” entertainment. There was the music which picturesque-looking
performers played on a large horn and on a sort of organ. (The horn
closely resembles the pre-historic horns which are preserved in the
National Museum at Copenhagen, where they were blown with inspiring
effect before the members of the Congress of Orientalists in 1908.)
There was the bloodless contest between a short and tall athlete, armed
differently with stick and whip. In the central division, because the
most important, is shown the mortal earnest of the gladiatorial fight,
strictly controlled by the Games-master. In the sexagion above this is a
hardly less deadly struggle between a man and a bear: the bear has got
the man under him but is being whipped off so that the “turn” may not
end too quickly, and, perhaps, also to give the more expensive victim
another chance. To the right hand, a gladiator who has run his lance
through the neck of a panther, holds up his hand to boast the victory
and claim applause: the dying panther tries vainly to free itself from
the weapon. To the left is a fight between a leopard and an unfortunate
wild ass, which has already received a terrible wound in its side and is
now having its head drawn down between the fore-paws of the leopard. I
hear that in beast-fights organised by Indian princes, these unequal
combatants are still pitted against each other. Lastly, the Nennig
Mosaic depicts a fat lion that has also conquered a wild ass, of which
the head alone seems to remain: it has been inferred, though I think
rashly, that the lion has eaten up all the rest; at any rate he now
seems at peace with the world and is being led back to his cage by a
slave.
Everything is quiet, orderly, and a model of good management. The
custodian of the little museum told me that the (surprisingly few)
visitors to Nennig were in the habit of remarking of this representation
of the Roman Games that it made them understand for the first time how
the cultivated Romans could endure such sights. Unhappily, conventional
propriety joined to the sanction of authority will make the majority of
mankind endure anything that causes no danger or inconvenience to
themselves.
Except with a few, at whom their generation looks askance, the sense of
cruelty more than any other moral sense is governed by habit, by
convention. It is even subject to latitude and longitude; in Spain I was
surprised to find that almost all the English and American women whom I
met had been to, at least, one bull-fight. Insensibility spreads like a
pestilence; new or revived forms of cruelty should be stopped at once or
no one can say how far they will reach or how difficult it will be to
abolish them. One might have supposed that the sublime self-sacrifice of
the monk who threw himself between two combatants—which brought the
tardy end of gladiatorial exhibitions in Christian Rome—would have saved
the world for ever from that particular barbarity; but in the fourteenth
century we actually find gladiatorial shows come to life again and in
full favour at Naples! This little-known fact is attested in Petrarch’s
letters. Writing to Cardinal Colonna on December 1, 1343, the truly
civilised poet denounces with burning indignation an “infernal
spectacle” of which he had been the involuntary witness. His gay friends
(there has been always a singular identity between fashion and
barbarism) seem to have entrapped him into going to a place called
Carbonaria, where he found the queen, the boy-king, and a large audience
assembled in a sort of amphitheatre. Petrarch imagined that there was to
be some splendid entertainment, but he had hardly got inside when a
tall, handsome young man fell dead just below where he was standing,
while the audience raised a shout of applause. He escaped from the place
as fast as he could, horror-struck by the brutality of spectacle and
spectators, and spurring his horse, he turned his back on the “accursed
spot” with the determination to leave Naples as soon as possible. How
can we wonder, he asks, that there are murders in the streets at night
when in broad daylight, in the presence of the king, wretched parents
see their sons stabbed and killed, and when it is considered
dishonourable to be unwilling to present one’s throat to the knife just
as if it were a struggle for fatherland or for the joys of Heaven?
Very curious was the action of the Vatican in this matter; Pope John
XXII. excommunicated every one who took part in the games as actor or
spectator, but since nobody obeyed the prohibition, it was rescinded by
his successor, Benedict XII., to prevent the scandal of a perpetual
disregard of a Papal ordinance. So they went on cutting each other’s
throats with the tacit permission of the Church until King Charles of
the Peace succeeded in abolishing the “sport.”
The action of the Church in respect to bull-fights has been much the
same; local opinion is generally recognised as too strong for
opposition. The French bishops, however, did their best to prevent their
introduction into the South of France, but they failed completely.
I have strayed rather far from the Roman shows, but the savagery of
Christians in the fourteenth century (and after) should make us wonder
less at Roman callousness. All our admiration is due to the few finer
spirits who were repelled by the slaughter of man or beast to make a
Roman’s holiday. Cicero said that he could never see what there was
pleasurable in the spectacle of a noble beast struck to the heart by its
merciless hunter or pitted against one of our weaker species! For a
single expression of censure such as this which has come down to us,
there must have been many of which we have no record. Of out-spoken
censure there was doubtless little because violent condemnation of the
arena would have savoured of treason to the State which patronised and
supported the games just as Queen Elizabeth’s ministers supported
bull-baiting.
Rome must have been one vast zoological garden, and viewing the strange
animals was the first duty of the tourist. Pausanias was deeply
impressed by the “Ethiopian bulls which they call rhinoceroses” and also
by Indian camels in colour like leopards. He saw an all-white deer, and
very much surprised he was to see it, but, to his subsequent regret, he
forgot to ask where it came from. He was reminded of this white deer
when he saw white blackbirds on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. I remember a
white blackbird which stayed in the garden of my old English home for
more than two years: a wretched “sportsman” lay in wait for it when it
wandered into a neighbouring field and shot it.
The feasibility of the transport of the hosts of animals destined to the
arena will always remain a mystery. At the inauguration of the
Colosseum, five thousand wild beasts and six thousand tame ones were
butchered, nor was this the highest figure on a single occasion.
Probably a great portion of the animals was sent by the Governors of
distant provinces who wished to stand well with the home authorities.
But large numbers were also brought over by speculators who sold them to
the highest or the most influential bidder. One reason why Cassius
murdered Julius Cæsar was that Cæsar had secured some lions which
Cassius wished to present to the public. Every one who aimed at
political power or even simply at being thought one of the “smart set”
(the odious word suits the case) spent king’s ransoms on the public
games. For vulgar ostentation the wealthy Roman world eclipsed the
exploits of the modern millionaire. If any one deem this impossible, let
him read, in the _Satyricon_ of Petronius, the account of the fêtes to
be given by a leader of fashion of the name of Titus. Not merely
gladiators, but a great number of freedmen would take part in them: it
would be no wretched mock combat but a real carnage! Titus was so rich
that he could afford such liberality. Contempt is poured upon the head
of a certain Nobarnus who offered a spectacle of gladiators hired at a
low price and so old and decrepit that a breath threw them over. They
all ended by wounding themselves to stop the contest. You might as well
have witnessed a mere cock-fight!
I should think that not more than one animal in three survived the
voyage. This would vastly increase the total number. The survivors often
arrived in such a pitiable state that they could not be presented in the
arena, or that they had to be presented immediately to prevent them from
dying too soon. Symmachus, last of the great nobles of Rome, who,
blinded by tradition, thought to revive the glories of his beloved city
by reviving its shame, graphically describes the anxieties of the
preparations for one of these colossal shows on which he is said to have
spent what would be about £80,000 of our money. He began a year in
advance: horses, bears, lions, Scotch dogs, crocodiles, chariot-drivers,
hunters, actors, and the best gladiators were recruited from all parts.
But when the time drew near, nothing were ready. Only a few of the
animals had come, and these were half dead of hunger and fatigue. The
bears had not arrived and there was no news of the lions. At the
eleventh hour the crocodiles reached Rome, but they refused to eat and
had to be killed all at once in order that they might not die of hunger.
It was even worse with the gladiators, who were intended to provide, as
in all these beast shows, the crowning entertainment. Twenty-nine of the
Saxon captives whom Symmachus had chosen on account of the well-known
valour of their race, strangled one another in prison rather than fight
to the death for the amusement of their conquerors. And Symmachus, with
all his real elevation of mind, was moved to nothing but disgust by
their sublime choice! Rome in her greatest days had gloried in these
shows: how could a man be a patriot who set his face against customs
which followed the Roman eagles round the world? How many times since
then has patriotism been held to require the extinction of moral sense!