A lost sea-monster

Book 6 is the Anthology's collection of dedicatory epigrams: real or imaginary inscriptions to accompany offerings hung up in temples and sanctuaries. All sorts of things can be offered to gods -- a retiring craft worker can hang up the tools of their trade, for instance -- making Book 6 a whole ancient world in miniature.

These two poems are immediate neighbours and concern the same subject, a colossal, millipede-like sea-monster called the scolopendra. The modern genus scolopendra includes various large tropical centipedes, but none nearly so large as their ancient namesake. 6.223 is in the book, but 6.222 is newly done for this blog post.

A note on weather: the constellation Orion rises in July and sets in November, and was anciently associated with storms in both seasons. Virgil in Aeneid 1 has Orion stir up a sudden storm that drives the refugee Trojans' ships onto reefs, just as the storm of Theodoridas' epigram casts the scolopendra onto the reefs of southern Italy:

Hic cursus fuit,

cum subito adsurgens fluctu nimbosus Orion 

in uada caeca tulit penitusque procacibus Austris 

perque undas superante sala perque inuia saxa 

dispulit; huc pauci uestris adnauimus oris. (1.534-8)

Theodoridas (3rd century BC) was a poet of Syracuse, so Apulia ('Iapygia' in the Greek) was fairly local. Antipater was writing about a century later.

I reproduce Aelian's account of the scolopendra below the translations. He was a rhetorician writing in the third century AD, so the many-legged sea-monster had a good run, but it is not found in the modern Mediterranean; at some point it went away, to where all the good stories eventually go.

6.222

THEODORIDAS

The scolopendra with a thousand feet,

That depths of sea stirred by Orion’s storm

Cast on the reefs of the Apulians:

The masters of the deep-hulled merchantmen,

Ten oars a side, hung up this giant rib

Of cartilage from off that bristling beast,

Nailed in a temple to divinities.

6.223

ANTIPATER <OF SIDON?>

This ragged remnant of an ocean beast,

The scolopendra, twice four fathoms long,

Tossed in the surf upon a sandy shore,

All mangled by the reef, Hermōnax found

When he with netsman’s art was drawing in

His haul of sea-fish. What he found, he hung

As offering to Ino and her son,

Palaemon — a sea-monster, for sea-gods.

‘Now in the course of examining and investigating these subjects and what bears upon them, to the utmost limit, with all the zeal that I could command, I have ascertained that the Scolopendra is a sea-monster, and of sea-monsters it is the biggest, and if cast up on the shore no one would have the courage to look at it. And those who are expert in marine matters say that they have seen them floating and that they extend the whole of their head above the sea, exposing hairs of immense length protruding from their nostrils, and that the tail is flat and resembles that of a crayfish. And at times the rest of their body is to be seen floating on the surface, and its bulk is comparable to a full-sized trireme. And they swim with numerous feet in line on either side as though they were rowing themselves (though the expression is somewhat harsh) with thole-pins hung alongside. So those who have experience in these matters say that the surge responds with a gentle murmur, and their statement convinces me.’

--Aelian, On the Nature of Animals 13.23, tr. A. F. Scholfield for the Loeb Classical Library (1958)