Horrors of the Deep (script)

This is a talk I gave at the recent online summer school run by Academus, an inspiring team of young scholars doing great work in classical outreach. I've put up the accompanying PowerPoint as an accompanying post, here.

Horrors of the Deep

SLIDE 2 — MAIN POINTS

[thanks to chair and audience]
My talk this afternoon is about the strangeness and occasional terror of the natural world as ancient people knew it.
We’re going to explore that world through Greek epigram, the type of ancient literature I know best,
And the one that best represents everyday, lived experience, especially how people interacted with their fellow species.
You’ll meet quite a lot of these little poems as we go along; all the translations are mine, and most of them are in a paperback collection published last year by OUP World’s Classics.
If you’d like to read some more for free, I put up new translations on my academic blog every couple of weeks. You can find it easily enough online because there aren’t any other Gideon Nisbets out there.
I like taking epigram online because these little poems were the social media of the ancient world. People wrote epigrams about practically anything,
Though their origin in inscriptions made them an especially good format for epitaphs on tombs.
But what if something so terrible happened that there was little or nothing left to bury?
This talk will use epigram to explore the occasional weirdness and horror of the ancient ecosystem,
Especially at sea, where you could never know what might be going on beneath the surface.
You will encounter sharks, and, finally, a gigantic sea monster.
It is fair to warn you there will be violence.
One man will be eaten by wolves, several will drown, and one will be bitten in half. If time permits, something terrible will happen to a hedgehog.
There will also be a brief reference to slavery, not ancient, but relatively modern.
A final clarification before we begin: all dates are BC unless I tell you otherwise.

SLIDE 4 — INTRODUCING EPIGRAM

I’ll begin by introducing epigram, or rather, I’ll let a friend do it for me.
This is John Addington Symonds, who introduced Greek epigram to a previously unsuspecting English reading public in his bestseller of 1873, Studies of the Greek Poets.
Symonds was a very good classicist — he might have turned professional if his prospects hadn’t been blighted by scandal —
And this book made him a celebrity. He went on to write further bestsellers about travel and art history, and became one of the favourite authors of the Victorian age.
You’ve probably never heard of him; if you have, it’s probably because he was a pioneer of what would later be called gay liberation, and he used classics to promote it, through subtext.
Epigram was especially useful for him that way, and I’ve written a big book about it, which you can Google if you’re interested.
If you wanted to read a good introduction to ancient epigram, you could do a lot worse than search online for Studies of the Greek Poets and read what Symonds says. He's still basically accurate and he really draws you in.
In particular, he does a great job here of selling the uniquely long timespan of Greek epigram — the poems we have span at least a thousand years —
And its unique ability to open windows into ancient lives.
The comparison to Pompeii was calculated to hook his audience — the Victorians were crazy about the place. Thomas Cook was running tours, there were bestselling novels and shows, and the recently developed technique of making plaster casts of the victims of Vesuvius was bringing visitors face to face with ancient people who looked just like them. It was easy to imagine trading places.

SLIDE 5 — KINDS OF EPIGRAM

Epigram, as I’ve said, began as inscriptions. Ever since the Greeks rediscovered writing at the end of their Dark Age, they had been scratching messages on things — here lies so-and-so, I won this race, we won this battle, this cup belongs to me.
Some of these inscriptions had always been in verse, because poetry sticks in the mind much better than prose, and if you’ve paid money to have an inscription carved, you want people to remember what it says.
In the Hellenistic Age that followed the death of Alexander the Great, many of these epigrams were collected into books at the Museum and Library of Alexandria in Egypt, and the scholars who went out and gathered them also began imitating them.
Epigrams became a popular entertainment at the ancient Greek drinking-parties called symposia, because everyone was expected to deliver a party turn as part of the evening’s entertainment, and a short poem is easy to remember even when you’ve had a few.
Our main source for these poems now is a collection from the tenth century AD, called the Greek Anthology and built out of the wreckage of several older collections. It contains about four thousand epigrams, some of them genuine inscriptions, but most of them probably composed as literary texts and published in books of poetry, with the potential to be recited at symposia.
In recent years our understanding of Hellenistic epigram in particular has been improved by discoveries on papyrus, notably the so-called Milan Posidippus, but the Greek Anthology is by far our most important source.
There are all sorts of poems in it — jokes and riddles, poems about symposia, the erotic poems that got Symonds so excited, and lots of rhetorical showing-off.
But the oldest categories were the ones with inscriptional roots: dedications, and epitaphs.

SLIDE 6 — THREE BY SIMONIDES

Here are three epitaphs by the most famous epigrammatist of all, Simonides.
They're all genuine inscriptions, and the first two come into the Anthology by way of Herodotus,
Whose researches for his Histories took him to the battlefield of Thermopylae. Herodotus noted down the inscriptions he saw on the monuments to the Peloponnesian and Spartan dead.
If you’ve seen 300 you’ll recognise the second of these poems as a version of what’s said over Leonidas and his fellow Spartans at the end of the film. It genuinely was their epitaph, written by Simonides and carved on the stone that marked their mass grave:
[recite it]
In the first line, ‘friend’ is closer to the original Greek, but ‘passer-by’ isn’t really wrong, because these inscriptions were always trying to grab the attention of someone passing by along a road,
And often competing with other inscriptions for their attention.
Simonides was kept very busy with state commissions in the year of the Persian invasion (480-79( — he also wrote epigrams for monuments that celebrated the decisive victories of Salamis and Plataea.
But he also took on private commissions. We can imagine Brotachus’s grave on a more ordinary monument, a tomb along a road outside a city, perhaps paid for by his business associates since he died so far from his family.

SLIDE 7 — APPIAN WAY

For Romans too, it was much the same — burials were always outside the city, as here, on the Appian Way. People travelling, for much the same reasons we might travel, might skim the epitaphs as they passed by, on foot or horse or cart — much as we glance at billboards while driving the equivalent roads today, but with a more personal and human connection, and a little more time to take it in.

SLIDE 8 —WAYFARER, PAUSE

Here’s part of a literary epitaph that dramatises the kinds of message those inscriptions needed to get across, to a reader who would soon be on their way down the road. Who is buried here? Where are they from? What made them interesting? How did they die, perhaps?
The Aretemias of this poem died giving birth to twins; one was born successfully and lived, the other was lost with her. Childbirth was very dangerous in antiquity.
This, by the way, is the only surviving poem of Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, whom we’d otherwise only know about because his friend Callimachus wrote a famous literary epitaph for him: ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead…’, etc.

SLIDE 9 — SENDING IT UP

You can see from this poem by Paul in the sixth century AD that these conventions became very familiar — so familiar they could be sent up.
The inscription keeps trying to tell its story, but the passer-by keeps interrupting.
Even in Paul's day, literary and indeed inscribed epigram were still going strong. Paul was an important official in the imperial court at Constantinople, and epigram was where he went to unwind from the day job and indulge his inner pagan.

SLIDE 11 — THE MISSING-BODY PROBLEM

So, if inscriptional epigram faithfully records burials, literary epigram often plays around with them. This isn’t to say it’s trying to be funny, rather that authors are testing its limits and exploring its possibilities. Above all, they experiment with the idea of the tomb that has no reason to exist because there’s nothing much to bury, typically because of disaster at sea.
Here’s an epigram by a so-called ‘Plato’. Quite possibly his real name was Plato but he’s not the Plato you’ve heard of. This body at least was recovered, and we could imagine this tomb perhaps on a road down to the harbour, say, from Athens to Piraeus.
The tomb’s occupant has been decently buried, which was hugely important to the ancient Greeks, but there are no personal details because nobody knows who he was or where he came from.
But a person could be well known and still have a sketchy epitaph because of the sea. The second epigram I quote from here, by a second-century poet from what is now the Lebanon, is notionally written for a tomb set up beside a beach for the most famous epic poet of all.
In ancient legend Homer died when some fisher boys set him a riddle; he got so angry trying to solve it, he starved himself to death. But epigrams bear witness to a variant in which he walked into the sea and drowned himself.
And now he’s under that beach; somewhere; probably.

SLIDE 12 — DENIED CLOSURE

More often in real life there’d be either an unidentified body, or no body at all. This poem by Damagetus is for a cenotaph, which is the Greek for empty tomb; it’s all Thymodes can do, knowing the whole time that the missing remains will never be recovered and identified. His boy will never come home.
The presumed scene of Lycus’s death is the Black Sea, which was was notoriously deadly to ancient mariners: they called it the Euxeinos, the Friendly Sea, in much the same way we might nervously address a huge growling pit bull as ‘Good Dog’.
As I’ve said, proper burial and mourning were hugely important — some of you may know Sophocles’s play Antigone, which is all about that.

SLIDE 13 — NO BODY

This poem by a third-century poet from Southern Italy is supposedly for another cenotaph, and brings out the bitterness for families and friends left without closure. I’m particularly happy with my version of the last two lines.
Like the Black Sea, the north African coast was another famous danger zone — lots of sandbanks — but Callaeschrus is the victim of nothing more exotic than bad weather.
Ancient merchant ships were un-decked and typically small, so they swamped easily, especially when heavily loaded.
There’s also a strong hint that Callaeschrus was pushing his luck, carrying cargo so late in the season, with winter coming on — I’ll come back to that briefly later.

SLIDE 14 — FROM ELIOT

It was epigrams like the ones we’ve just seen that inspired T. S. Eliot, H.D., and Ezra Pound in the early twentieth century — their poetic movement, Imagism, was rooted in the Greek Anthology, which they were able to read in the new English translation published by the Loeb Classical Library.
There’d been nothing like this in English poetry before.
It's been influential stuff. Science fiction fans will recognise here a couple of titles of very good books by Iain M. Banks.
The Loeb series seems as if it's been around forever, but back then, it was a sensation — for the first time readers who’d had no chance at a classical education, for instance women, could access a wide range of ancient authors in affordable translations. They might even even pick up a bit of Greek or Latin as they went along.
If you’d like to read the versions that Eliot and the rest were discovering, those old Loebs are long out of copyright, and you can access them online for free.

SLIDE 15 — HALF A BODY

Unwept, unburied: having no body to bury is traumatic. But at least the family knows where it stands.
The sailors in this next epigram have a difficult call to make. I told you someone was going to get bitten in half.
Tharsys is an expert swimmer, so when the ship’s anchor gets stuck on the sea floor, he dives down and frees it,
Only to be attacked on the way back up, leaving nothing that could be easily transported or that the family would want to see.
In the first part of the epigram, which I’ve not included here, Tharsys remarks on how remarkable his fate is: he gets a grave ashore, and burial at sea. We’ll come back to this poem in a while.

SLIDE 16 - MYSTERIOUS NATURE TITLE SLIDE

For the finale of my talk, we’re going to need a bigger boat,
But before we get to the big monster, we’ll step back a while and see just how weird and threatening the natural world is to the people of Greek epigram,
Because there’s something odd about that shark as well.

SLIDE 17 - THE PROVIDENT HEDGEHOG

And here’s where something terrible happens to a hedgehog.
But why is it ‘the terror of the drying-floor’, and why does the farmer hang it up ‘alive’?
Well, people in antiquity knew that hedgehogs were very good parents. They carefully stored up food in their burrows so their babies would have plenty to eat, all through the winter.
And how did they harvest all that food?
Picture the scene. You are a clever hedgehog, determined to provide for your young family in the months ahead. You find a flat open space where the farmer has laid out grapes or plums to dry in the sun. You take a run up, and at the last minute curl yourself into a ball, and roll at speed across the drying fruit, picking it up on your spines as you go. Then you uncurl and scurry off to your underground larder to unload it.
None of this is true according to modern science. Hedgehogs are not in fact especially good parents. The fruit thing doesn't happen.
But the myth of the provident hedgehog persisted into the Middle Ages as Christian allegory. For hundreds of years, everyone knew hedgehogs did this.
Pliny the Elder, who was one of the sharpest and best informed people that ever lived, knew it to be true, and remembered seeing it happen when he was a boy. This is the Pliny who died trying to save civilians when Vesuvius erupted, by the way, not his whiny nephew. Even the brightest people saw what they expected to see — as we still do.
In the meantime this knowledge about hedgehogs worked out well for everyone, except for hedgehogs,
Because as Pliny says, their skins were vital to the clothing trade. When you shear a sheep the fleece is dirty and tangled, and the wool needs to be teased and combed out before you can spin it into a thread and start weaving cloth.
The English word for this is carding, from the Latin word for thistle, but Greeks and Romans had something better than thistles — they had hedgehog skins.
So farmers had two good reasons for killing them, and one good reason for not breaking the skin, because the cloth industry would pay more for whole ones.
That’s why Comaulus does what he does, rather than stick a fork through it. He’s offering the hedgehog to the god for now, but he has plans for it later.
His world is weird for us, but it works for him.

SLIDE 18 — DEATH ON THE NILE

So, the ancient natural world is strange — and it tends to get stranger the further we move away from dry land. I promised you someone being eaten alive by wolves but I didn’t tell you the context would be aquatic. If it’s any comfort, I seriously doubt it happened for real.
This poem reminds me of a game I used to have as a kid called ‘Pick Up Monkeys’.
To be fair, Egypt was a place of ancient mysteries and Greeks and Romans always expected weird stuff to happen there. But there or elsewhere, Nature could get at you in nasty and unexpected ways.

SLIDE 19 — GOD-HAUNTED SHORES

It’s when we go down to the sea, though, that the knowability of the world, such as it is, starts to fizzle out.
Here’s a third-century Syracusan poet giving us an unlikely inscription on a seashell, in a cave in the cliffs where Sicily faces the toe of Italy.
The meeting of land and sea is where you might still encounter divine power in more or less human shape; these are alien forces that must be appeased, and we might not survive meeting them.
I love here how the the poem morphs part-way through from a notional inscription into the voices of the nymphs themselves, voices you might hear if you risked entering that cave, picked up that seashell, and held it to your ear: you would never be the same, after.
That’s not to say the seaside couldn’t be fun. Nobody sunbathed, but we know from the Anthology that some people liked to swim in the sea for exercise. Still, the water kept its secrets.

SLIDE 20 — SWAMPED BY CRANES

We move now from the rocky and haunted coastline to the open Mediterranean. Again, we are off the north African coast, but Theogenes’s ship sinks for a more exotic reason than simple bad weather.
A migrating bird lands upon it, then another, then another, and soon so many that the overburdened ship sinks with all hands lost.
As with so many of these poems, there’s no way this is a real epitaph — it’s missing crucial details, and besides, how would anyone know what made the ship sink?
Or did people just assume it must have been birds, when a ship on that run didn’t come back?
We can again turn to ‘Volcano Man’ Pliny for authoritative endorsement, though he says it’s quails that do it, not cranes.
Pliny is a man of science and he’s thought it through properly. Quails are much smaller than cranes; it stands to reason they can’t fly as far without stopping for a break.
And he’s on the right track — quails do migrate from Africa to Europe. Some of them get as far as the UK.

SLIDE 21 — BACK TO OUR SHARK

Now that we know how weird the open sea is, let’s circle back to our shark before we meet the big boss. You’ve seen this one before.
In my translation, ‘monster of the deep’ stands in for just one word in Greek — kētos, from which we get our word ‘cetacean’, meaning whales and dolphins and such. It doesn’t mean ‘whale’ to the Greeks, just any kind of sea monster. They loved dolphins, by the way, and there are some good poems about them in the Anthology.
The Greek word I translate as ‘shark’ is pristis, which doesn’t exactly mean a shark. Usually it's a ‘sawfish’. We’ll look at a picture of one of those in a moment, but it’s pretty much what it sounds like. They’re not especially scary.
Instead the regular word for shark was karkharias, same as in modern Greek.
The Mediterranean has plenty of different kinds of sharks, but ancient Greeks and Romans hardly ever discussed them. Only a handful of science nerds even tried to tell different species apart; nobody else was bothered, because people didn’t interact with them.
The one shark species they did specify was the dogfish, because they’re small enough that you can catch one with a regular hook and line, and they make good eating.
Otherwise all that most people know is: sharks are monsters with teeth like the points of a saw blade. That’s all they need to know, and all they can know, because they can’t go down there and look around.
So anything bigger than a dogfish is a mystery, never met directly,
Except by occasional casualties like Tharsys, who swam down into the unknowable and only half came back.

SLIDE 22 — PRISTIS ANTIQUORUM

What did he meet, down there? A sawfish, according to the lexicon, but no ordinary one. Here’s an ordinary one; I suppose at a stretch it could have killed him with cuteness if he’d hung around too long trying to pet it. However, this is not what got him. Instead it was something colossal. The Roman science nerd Aelian, whom we’ll meet again later, includes an identically named pristis in his list of giant sea-monsters, alongside the hammerhead and leopard shark and the terrifying maltha, about which we know absolutely nothing at beyond Aelian’s warning that it was ‘is a terrible antagonist and invincible.’
So perhaps the pristis and the maltha are among the great sharks, in our terms and if they even existed at all — but to the ancient Greeks, they were something else again, something we can never really recapture.

SLIDE 23 — A LOST SEA-MONSTER TITLE SLIDE

So we come at last to my paper’s big bad: the monster they called the scolopendra.
The Greek Anthology includes two poems about it, which makes it one of our few good sources of information, if you can call it that. And I think we should.

SLIDE 24 — ANTIPATER OF SIDON 6.223

This is the same Antipater who wrote about Homer’s body under the beach — he seems to have liked seaborne stuff. His hometown, Sidon, is still there, along the coast from Beirut.
This is an instance of a dedicatory epigram: a poem written to accompany a real or imaginary offering to a god in a temple.
Often when we meet these poems in the Anthology they’re about wonderfully ordinary stuff:
A city puts up a trophy to celebrate some little battle.
An athlete erects a statue to mark his victory at Olympia, or another of the Panhellenic sanctuaries that hosted games.
A weaver or scribe or hunter or mercenary or courtesan or carpenter hangs up their tools as they retire from their trade.
A farmer offers a tithe of his harvest in the hope of another good crop next year.
And there are plenty of humble offerings by coastal fishermen, often to Priapus, the countryside god who keeps an eye on their nets.
But this dedication is of a fragment of a monster.
A fathom is six feet, the biological remains are eight fathoms long — you can do the sums. In metric that’s about 15m. It’s huge.
From the mangled state of it, we might say it could be anything, but Hermonax and Antipater know only one sea monster that big — the scolopendra.

SLIDE 25 — AELIAN, ON THE NATURE OF ANIMALS

What then was known about this scolopendra?
Here is Aelian, a Roman of the second and third centuries AD. We met him briefly earlier. He lived in Italy and was a native Latin speaker but he wrote in Greek, because it was the international language of scholarship, and because Greek is so much cooler.
Aelian’s description is the fullest we have; note again the word for sea-monster, kētos, and I’ll leave you to take it all in for a moment. Remember, everything he says is reliably attested.
[PAUSE]
Now try picturing it in your head. Start with a really big fish and change bits: tail like a crayfish, long hairs coming out of the nostrils…
[PAUSE]
Since when did fish have nostrils, though?
Some of you may be wondering — is this a garbled description of a whale? Could the hairy-nostrils bit be what someone thought they saw, when a whale was spouting from its blowhole?
I wondered that myself, but I think it may be the wrong question.
Besides, the Greeks knew perfectly well what a whale was and how it behaved, and they had a proper word for it, phallaina.
Whales weren’t a threat to them, and weren’t any use to them, so they didn't find them particularly interesting, but they knew what they were.

SLIDE 26 — NATURE’S BATTLESHIP

Here’s the rest of Aelian’s description, and this is no whale.
It has aspects of a marine centipede, and indeed if you do an internet search for ‘scolopendra’, what you’ll find is various species of sea centipede. Be warned, though, if you find bugs icky, they are the ickiest.
Ancient Greeks and Romans knew about these sea centipedes, and called them by the same name.
Pliny, who knows about everything, can tell you about the common scolopendra. It has an unusual trick. If you’re fishing and you hook one, it will get away, because it can vomit up its entire intestine until the hook is dislodged. The common scolopendra also has a nasty sting, and Pliny recommends treating it with crushed mint leaves, which sounds as likely to work as anything else. He goes on to say that crushed mint is also good for treating headaches, a fact you may want to store away in case you turn into a classicist.
So, the ordinary scolopendra was a familiar, minor hazard.
But they’re maybe a foot long, and the giant scolopendra is truly massive — the size of a battleship.
Ancient triremes were around 37m long.
If you want to visualise that, it’s one-and-a-half standard swimming pools;
Or four-and-a-half Routemaster buses, or if you are feeling especially manly, the same in Challenger 2 main battle tanks;
Or if you prefer a smaller unit of measurement, 22 Beyoncés, or 24 Lady Gagas. I personally prefer the Gaga for its superior precision.
Basically, it’s really big. Leonidas’s 15m fragment is less than half the length of an adult scolopendra. No wonder Aelian says a whole one would be too terrifying to look at.

SLIDE 27 — PIECES AND PARTS

Let’s turn now to the Anthology’s other scolopendra poem, by Theodoridas, the poet from Syracuse who gave us that seashell poem earlier.
The ‘thousand feet’ here aren’t a measurement, thank God — this creature just has lots and lots of legs, with which, as we know from Aelian, it rows itself along when it’s on the surface. Remember, the common scolopendra is a kind of centipede.
Again the storm is signalled by the constellation Orion, which rises in November, at the risky tail end of the ancient sailing season. That’s what did for Callaeschrus, and it’s just the time of year a ship or a sea-monster might be swept onto the rocks.
And again, the scolopendra is known only through these occasional found fragments.
This was a close classical equivalent to the ways modern fossil-hunters have reconstructed prehistoric creatures. People fill in the gaps based on what they think they already know, and that creates so much scope for what later turns out to have been creative misinterpretation.
If you go and see the life-size, Victorian dinosaur models from the Crystal Palace exhibition in London, for instance, there’s a lot about them that we now know is wrong.
The models tell us more about the British Empire’s sense of its own manifest destiny than they do about actual dinosaurs.

SLIDE 28 — MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK

Here’s a good bit from Hermann Melville's novel Moby-Dick, a novel made entirely out of good bits. You should all go read it.
It’s a very modern or postmodern book in lots of ways, but Melville was writing before Darwin published Origin of Species, and indeed before the American Civil War, so the plantation of Judge John Creagh was running on African slave labour. Creagh was an Alabama state legislator, and you may imagine my views on him and the regime he enabled.
The extorted labour of these kidnapped and trafficked people turned up fossil bones on Creagh’s plantation over a number of years, eventually yielding a largely complete skeleton.
Local self-declared experts declared it a dinosaur, which they dubbed ‘Basilosaurus’, or King Lizard.
It wasn’t a dinosaur.
The ‘English scientist’ who debunked them, one Richard Owens, realised it was instead an extinct species of whale. So he suggested an alternate name — but the rule in palaeontology is that the original namer calls dibs, so it’s King Lizard to this day. Which you’ve got to admit is a neat name.
In any case, Owens got bits of his whale wrong; he thought it was a herbivore, which it wasn’t.
At least everyone was right about it being properly big. We know from further finds that the ancient Basilosaurus could grow up to 20 metres long, which is pretty good going… though not much more than half the size of the scolopendra.

SLIDE 29 — SPENCER, FAERIE QUEENE

With palaeontology and taxonomy we have entered the age of Science! But the scolopendra hadn’t entirely gone away.
Here it is for instance in the Faerie Queene of Edmund Spencer, the epic propagandist of the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
Spencer was educated in his classical authors, who were still considered authorities: the line ‘such as living sense dismay’d’ is quite like Aelian’s bit about what it might be like to see a whole scolopendra all at once, rather than in bits and pieces.
Likewise, Spenser’s list of nautical perils is mostly classical — ‘Great whirlpooles’ echoes the whirlpool half of Scylla and Charybdis, and whales are in there as a more modern sea-monster, bracketed between what we would consider the mythically ancient Hydra and Scolopendra.
Whales were still pretty mysterious to Spenser’s generation, though it would’t be long before Britain developed a whaling industry in the waters off Greenland, and people started to learn much more at first hand, because there was money to be made.
Again the distinction between the marvellous things we’ve read and shared stories about and imagined, versus the mere material stuff we can harvest and cash in on.

SLIDE 30: IMAGE OF THE SCOLOPENDRA

So here is our monster, in an image made freely available online by the New York Public Library, bless them. You can compare it to your imagined version and see how much they agree.
This is an engraving from a book published 1613 (subsequently republished at least twice) and credited to Ulisse Aldrovandi, though I seriously doubt he drew it.
We can laugh at the picture all we like, but we’ve no business laughing at Aldrovandi. The man was an intellectual giant.
He was the first Professor of Natural History at Bologna, a university older than Oxford.
He pioneered the collection of biological specimens, and was one of the first to see the value of botanical and zoological reference collections, including botanic gardens.
He was the author of dozens of books, many of them published after his death because he was just so damned busy.
These books became foundational to the biological sciences he helped create.
More than a century later, Carl Linnaeus, who created the system of biological taxonomy we still use, still revered Aldrovandi as the father of Natural History.
Admittedly his material on sea-monsters may not be his strongest work, but he is going by the best sources available and, as always, commissioning the best specialist artists to interpret the evidence he has — which in this case of course is mainly Aelian, though I’d also like to think he’s browsed my epigrams.
It’s all there: paddling legs, crayfish tail, nostril hairs, the whole package…
And a token hairy spout, in case Aelian had got it wrong and it was some kind of whale the whole time.

SLIDE 31 - CONTRAST THE EPHEMERAL BLUE WHALE

At this point, and from the perspective of a great early scientist like Aldrovandi, the giant scolopendra had ruled the Mediterranean for a solid two thousand years.
He’d never seen one himself, but I doubt he’d seen a blue whale either. Nor have I for that matter, and I doubt many of you have, in the flesh.
Indeed one could say that in Aldrovandi’s time, the blue whale didn’t exist. It hadn’t been invented yet. It hadn’t been named and described and wondered about, like the scolopendra had. Aldrovandi had evidence for the old sea-monster, but not the new one.
Thanks to the whaling industry, Aldrovandi’s latter-day fanboy Linnaeus was able to put a Latin name to the blue whale, with a joke worked in (musculus means ‘little mouse’),
But it still wasn’t the blue whale. First it was Sibbald’s Rorqual, named for the Scottish doctor who first described it scientifically. For Ishmael and the crew of the Pequod in Moby-Dick, it’s ‘sulphur-bottom’.
The blue whale was blue first in Norwegian in the 1870s, and some time later, became blue for us in translation.
So from one point of view it’s hardly been around long enough to count. The scolopendra had a much longer run.
What’s more, the largest blue whale ever seen was less than thirty metres long, shorter than the giant scolopendra by 4.6 Lady Gagas.
So let’s not write it off entirely. Listen in the right seashell and you, too, might hear the gentle murmur as it rows itself by, nostril-hairs waving, passing in the night like a living battleship.

SLIDE 32 — THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME

Thank you so, so much for your time.

END