This is the outline view of the slides for my July 2021 Academus talk, for which the script is here.
Horrors of the Deep
Gideon Nisbet
University of Birmingham
g.nisbet@bham.ac.uk
My talk this afternoon – main points
Content warning: references to violence; briefly, slavery
1. Introducing epigram
‘The Anthology may from some points of view be regarded as the most valuable relic of antique literature which we possess. Composed of several thousand short poems, written for the most part in the elegiac metre, at different times and by a multitude of authors, it is coextensive with the whole current of Greek history, from the splendid period of the Persian war to the decadence of Christianized Byzantium...
‘Even the Graffiti of Pompeii have scarcely more power to reconstruct the past and summon as in dreams the voices and the forms of long-since-buried men.’
- J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1873)
Kinds of epigram
Inscriptional, and then (also) literary (epi-gramma)
Main literary source: the Greek Anthology (‘AP’)
New discoveries on papyrus (e.g. Milan Posidippus)
Main kinds of literary epigram:
Also Rhetorical (‘Epideictic’), Sympotic, Satirical...
Three by Simonides: 7.248-9, 254a
From Pelops’ Isle four thousand battled here
Against three million in a bygone year.
Go tell the Spartans, friend, that here we lie:
We heard what they were telling, and comply.
I, Brotachus of Gortyn, man of Crete,
Came not to lie here; I just came to trade.
Wayfarer, pause: Heraclitus 7.465
The earth is freshly dug, and on the tomb
Rustle the leaves of half-green coronets;
Read its inscription, wayfarer, and see
Whose polished bones it claims to keep within.
Friend, I am Aretēmias. My land
Was Cnidus...
Sending it up: Paul the Usher 7.307
My name is — Should I care? And my home land —
Can I be bothered? And my family
Was famous — Would it matter, if they weren’t?
I lived respectably, and — What’s your point?
And now I lie here — Who were you again?
Do you imagine someone’s listening?
2. The missing-body problem
Washed ashore: ‘Plato’ 7.269
Sailors, keep safe at sea and on the shore;
This tomb you pass is of a shipwrecked man.
Cf. Antipater of Sidon AP 7.6, on Homer:
...Stranger, the sea-beat strand inters him here.
Denied closure: Damagetus 7.497
Thymōdes too, one time, piled up this tomb;
Wept as he did so for the ruined hope
Of his son, Lycus. No-one lies within:
Not even far away is he interred;
But some Bithynian shore or Pontic isle
Has claimed him. There unwept he bares his bones,
And naked lies upon a friendless shore.
No body: Leonidas of Tarentum 7.273
The hard and hasty squall from out the East;
The dark of night; the swell Orion sent
As he descended darkly out of view:
These did for me, Callaeschrus. Off I slipped,
Dead as I cleaved across the Libyan main.
Spun in the sea as food for fish I roam;
‘Here lies’ is lies. Nobody is at home.
Cf., from Eliot’s The Waste Land
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Find ‘their’ translation on https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus/
Half a body: Leonidas 7.506
... But as I came back up from the abyss
And was already reaching out my hands
Toward my shipmates, I was gobbled up.
A monster of the deep attacked — so big! —
And gulped me from my bellybutton down.
My shipmates pulled one-half of me aboard,
A chilly catch; the shark bit off the rest.
The sad remains of Tharsys they interred,
Good stranger, on this shore: I went not home.
3. Mysterious nature
The provident hedgehog: anon 6.45
Bristly with spines that gather up the grapes,
This hedgehog, terror of the drying-floor,
Cōmaulus hung alive as offering
To Bacchus, when he caught it rolling through.
Hedgehogs also lay up food for the winter; rolling themselves on apples as they lie on the ground, they pierce one with their quills, and then take up another in the mouth, and so carry them into the hollows of trees... If it were not for the quills which it produces, the soft fleece of the sheep would have been given in vain to mankind; for it is by means of its skin, that our woollen cloth is dressed.
- Pliny, NH 8.56
Death on the Nile: anon 9.252
The wayfarer leapt swiftly from the bank
Into the depths of Nile: he saw the wolves,
A greedy pack. But they pursued him on,
Across the water. Each bit onto each,
Latching upon the tail of the next.
A bridge of wolves stretched far across the stream:
The self-taught tactic of the swimming beasts
Bloodily overtook the traveller.
God-haunted shores: Theodoridas 6.224
You spiral seashell, whisper in my ear —
Who set you here, who was the beachcomber
That took you trophy from the surging sea?
‘I am a toy for Nymphs within the cave,
And it was Dionysius set me here,
A gift from holy Cape Pelorias.
He is Prōtarchus’ son. The winding strait
Spat me upon the shore, that I might be
A toy for glistening spirits of the cave.’
Swamped by cranes: anon 7.543
Well might one pray to shun all voyaging,
Since you, Theogenes, did make your grave
At sea off Libya, when a deadly cloud
Of cranes innumerable took their rest,
Alighting on your laden merchantman.
The quail is a small bird and when it has come to us remains on the ground more than it soars aloft; but they too get here by flying in the same way as the cranes, not without danger to seafarers when they have come near to land: for they often perch on the sails, and they always do this at night, and sink the vessels.
– Pliny, NH 10.33
Back to our shark
A monster of the deep attacked — so big! —
And gulped me from my bellybutton down.
My shipmates pulled one-half of me aboard,
A chilly catch; the shark bit off the rest.
Cf. Antipater of Thessalonica 9.269, a sailor eaten by a kuōn halos
‘A monster of the deep’ kētos (root of our ‘cetacean’)
‘The shark’ pristis, literally a sawfish
Modern Greek word for shark is karkharias; rare in ancient sources
Kuōn karkharias steaks a Macedonian speciality, Archestratus 23)
Karkharos (saw-like, jagged) used of, e.g., the teeth of wolves
[image] Pristis antiquorum, the small-toothed sawfish
4. A lost sea-monster
Antipater of Sidon 6.223
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.
Aelian, On the Nature of Animals 13.23
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 (kētos), 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...
Nature’s battleship
...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.
Triremes were about 37m (120’) long
Leonidas’ fragment of a scolopendra is c.15m (8 fathoms = 48’)
Standard swimming pool = 25m, Routemaster bus – 8.38m
The common scolopendra: Pliny NH 9.67 (trick), 20.53 (sting)
Pieces and parts: Theodoridas 6.222
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.
‘if cast up on the shore no one would have the courage to look at it’
Orion (July/November) the harbinger of storms: V. Aen. 1.534-8
Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found...
But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus... [An English scientist] rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it... one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.
Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590)
Eftsoones they saw an hideous hoast arrayd
Of huge Sea monsters, such as liuing sence dismayd.
Most vgly shapes, and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see...
All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee:
Spring-headed Hydraes, and sea-shouldring Whales,
Great whirlpooles, which all fishes make to flee.
Bright Scolopendraes, arm’d with siluer scales...
Image of Aldrovandi's scolopendra from De Cetis, 1613
Contrast the ephemeral blue whale
Fossil evidence now extends dating to 1.5-1.25m years
Assigned balaenoptera musculus by Linnaeus, 1735
‘Sulphur bottom’ in Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
Norway accepts blåhval as common name, 1874
It’s been a species for less than three centuries,
And been called the ‘blue whale’ for less than two.
So let’s not write off the scolopendra just yet...
Thank you for your time
Gideon Nisbet, University of Birmingham
g.nisbet@bham.ac.uk
