CHAPTER XII

AELIAN, SOLINUS AND HORAPOLLO Aelian _On the Nature of Animals_—General character of the work—Its hodge-podge of unclassified detail—Solinus in the middle ages—His date—General character of his work; its relation to Pliny—Animals and gems—Occult medicine—Democritus and Zoroaster not regarded as magicians—Some bits of astrology—Alexander the Great—The _Hieroglyphics_ of Horapollo—Marvels of animals—Animals and astrology—The cynocephalus—Horapollo the cosmopolitan. [Sidenote: Aelian _On the Nature of Animals_.] From mystic and theurgic compositions we return to works of the declining Roman Empire which deal more directly with nature but, it must be confessed, in a manner somewhat fantastic. About the beginning of the third century, Aelian of Praeneste, who is included by Philostratus in his _Lives of the Sophists_, wrote _On the Nature of Animals_.[1439] Its seventeen books, written in Greek, which Aelian used fluently despite his Latin birth, are believed to have reached us partly in interpolated form through two families of manuscripts, of which the older and less interpolated text is found in a thirteenth century manuscript at Paris and a somewhat earlier Vatican codex.[1440] A number of its chapters are similar to and perhaps borrowed from Pliny’s _Natural History_; at any rate they are commonplaces of ancient science; but the work also has a marked individuality. Parallels have also been noted between this work and the later _Hexaemeron_ of the church father Basil. Aelian was much cited in Byzantine literature and learning, and if he was not directly used in the Latin west, at least the attitude toward animals which he displays and his selection of material concerning them are as apt precursors of medieval Latin as of medieval Greek scientific literature. [Sidenote: General character of the work.] In preface and epilogue Aelian himself adequately indicates the character of his work. He is impressed by the customs and characteristics of animals, and marvels at their wisdom and native shrewdness, their justice and modesty, their affection and piety, which should put human beings to blush. Thus Aelian’s work is marked by that tendency which runs through ancient and medieval literature to admire actions in the irrational brutes which seem to indicate almost human intelligence and virtue on their part, and to moralize therefrom at the expense of human beings. Another striking feature of his work is its utterly whimsical and haphazard order. He mentions things simply as they happen to occur to him. This fact, too, he recognizes, but refuses to apologize for, stating that it suits him, if it does not suit anyone else, and that he regards a mixed-up order as more motley, variegated, and pleasing. Not only does he attempt no classification whatever of his animals and mention snakes and quadrupeds and birds in the same breath; he also does not complete the treatment of a given animal in one passage but may scatter detached items about it throughout his work. There is, for instance, probably at least one chapter concerning elephants in each of his seventeen books. [Sidenote: Its hodge-podge of unclassified detail.] It would therefore be absurd for us to attempt any logical arrangement in discussing his contents; we may do justice to him most adequately by adopting his own lack of method and noting a few items and topics taken more or less at random from his work. Ants never go out in the new moon. Yet they neither gaze at the sky, nor count the number of days on their fingers, like the learned Babylonians and Chaldeans, but have this marvelous gift from nature.[1441] In sexual intercourse the female viper conceives through the mouth and bites off the head of the male; afterwards her young gnaw their way out of her vitals. “What have your Oresteses and Alcmaeons to say to that, my dear tragedians?”[1442] Doves put laurel boughs in their nests to guard against fascination and the evil eye, and the hoopoe similarly employs ἀδίαvτον or καλλίτριχον as an amulet;[1443] and other unreasoning animals guard against sorcery by some mystic and marvelous natural power. Another chapter treats of divinations from the crow and how hairs are dyed black with its eggs.[1444] Others tell us of the generation of serpents from the marrow of a dead man’s spine,[1445] and of venomous women like Medea and Circe who are worse than the asp with its incurable sting, since they kill by mere touch.[1446] We go on to read of swift little beasts called _Pyrigoni_ who are generated from fire and live in it, of salamanders who extinguish flames, of the remedies used by the tortoise against snakes, of the chastity of doves whose marriages never result in divorce, and of the incontinence of the partridge.[1447] Also of the jealousies of certain animals like the stag which hides its right horn, the lizard who devours its cast-off skin, and the mare who eats the hippomanes from its colt, lest men obtain these precious substances.[1448] Of the care taken by storks, herons, and pelicans of their aged parents.[1449] How the swallow by the virtue of an herb gives sight to its young who are born blind, and how a hoopoe found an herb whose virtue dissolved the mud with which the caretaker of a building had plugged up the hole in the wall which it used for its nest.[1450] How the lion and basilisk fear the cock, and of a lake without fish in a place where the cocks do not crow.[1451] How elephants venerate the waxing moon; how the weasel eats rue when about to fight the snake; and of the jealousy of the hedgehog and lynx, the latter concealing his precious urine, the other watering his own hide when he is captured in order to spoil it.[1452] How the Indians fight griffins when collecting gold.[1453] How the presence of a cock aids a woman’s delivery.[1454] Of unnamed beasts in Libya who know how to count and leave an eleventh part of their prey untouched.[1455] That the sea dragon is easily captured with the left hand but not with the right.[1456] Dragons know the force of herbs and cure themselves with some and increase their venom with others.[1457] How dogs, cows, and other animals sense a famine or plague beforehand.[1458] How the Egyptians by their magic charm birds from the sky and snakes from their holes.[1459] When it rains in Egypt, mice are born from the small drops and plague the country. Traps and fences and ditches are of no avail against them, as they can leap over trenches and walls. Consequently the Egyptians are forced to pray God to end the calamity,[1460]—an interesting variant on the Old Testament account of the plagues of Egypt. In dogs there exists a certain dialectical faculty of ratiocination.[1461] The weather may be predicted from birds, quadrupeds, and flies.[1462] The she-goat can cure suffusion of its eyes.[1463] Eagles drop tortoises on rocks to break their shells and the bald-headed poet Aeschylus met his death by having his pate mistaken thus for a smooth round stone.[1464] Some predict the future by birds, others by entrails, or by grains, sieves, and cheeses; the Lycians practice divination by fish.[1465] A stork whom a widow of Tarentum helped when it was too young to fly brought her a luminous precious stone the following year.[1466] Solon did not have to enact a law ordering children to support their aged parents in the case of lions, whose cubs are taught by nature filial piety toward their elders.[1467] Only the horn of the Scythian ass can hold the water of the Arcadian river Styx; Alexander the Great sent a sample of it to Delphi with some accompanying verses which Aelian quotes.[1468] In Epirus dragons sacred to Apollo are employed in divination, and in the Lavinian Grove dragons spit out again the frumenty offered them by unchaste virgins.[1469] By flying beneath it an eagle saved the life of its young one who had been thrown down from a tower.[1470] Different fish eat different sea herbs.[1471] There are fish who live in boiling water.[1472] There are scattered mentions of the marvels of India throughout Aelian’s work, and in his sixteenth book the first fourteen chapters are almost exclusively concerned with the animals of that land. [Sidenote: Solinus in the middle ages.] A well-known work in the middle ages dating from the period of the Roman Empire was the _Collectanea rerum memorabilium_ or _Polyhistor_ of Solinus. Mommsen’s edition lists 153 manuscripts from 32 places,[1473] and we shall find many citations of Solinus in our later medieval authors. Martianus Capella and Isidore were the first to make extensive use of his work. In the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus had little respect for Solinus as an authority and expressed more than once the quite accurate opinion that his work was full of lies. Nevertheless copies of it continued to abound in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and by 1554 five printed editions had appeared. “From it directly come most of the fables in works of object so different as those of Dicuil, Isidore, Capella, and Priscian.”[1474] [Sidenote: His date.] The first extant author to make use of Solinus is Augustine in _The City of God_, while he is first named in the _Genealogus_ of 455 A. D. None of the manuscripts of the work antedate the ninth century, but many of them have copied an earlier subscription from a manuscript written “by the zeal and diligence of our lord Theodosius, the unconquered prince.” This is taken to refer to the emperor Theodosius II, 401-450. The work itself, however, has no Christian characteristics; on the contrary it is very fond of mentioning places famed in pagan religion and Greek mythology and of recounting miracles and marvels connected with heathen shrines and rites. Indeed, Solinus seldom, if ever, mentions anything later than the first century of our era. He speaks of Byzantium, not of Constantinople, and makes no mention of the Roman provinces as divided in the system of Diocletian. His book, however, is a compilation from earlier writings so that we need not expect allusions to his own age. The Latin style and general literary make-up of the work are characteristic of the declining empire and early medieval period. Mommsen was inclined to date Solinus in the third rather than the fourth century, but the work seems to have been revised about the sixth century, after which date it became customary to call it the _Polyhistor_ rather than the _Collectanea rerum memorabilium_. It is also referred to, however, as _De mirabilibus mundi_, or _Wonders of the World_. [Sidenote: General character of his work: its relation to Pliny.] The work is primarily a geography and is arranged by countries and places, beginning with Rome and Italy. As each locality is considered, Solinus sometimes tells a little of its history, but is especially inclined to recount miraculous religious events or natural marvels associated with that particular region. Thus in describing two lakes he rather apologizes for mentioning the first at all because it can scarcely be called miraculous, but assures us that the second “is regarded as very extraordinary.”[1475] Sometimes he digresses to other topics such as calendar reform.[1476] Solinus draws both his geographical data and further details very largely from Pliny’s _Natural History_; but inasmuch as Pliny treated of these matters in separate books, Solinus has to re-organize the material. He also selects simply a few particulars from Pliny’s wealth of detail on any given subject, and furthermore considerably alters Pliny’s wording, sometimes condensing the thought, sometimes amplifying the phraseology—apparently in an effort to make the point clearer and easier reading. Of Pliny’s thirty-seven books only those from the third to the thirteenth inclusive and the last book are used to any extent by Solinus. That is to say, he either was acquainted with only, or confined himself to, those books dealing with geography, man and other animals, and gems, omitting almost entirely, except for the twelfth and thirteenth books, Pliny’s elaborate treatment of vegetation and of medicinal simples[1477] and discussion of metals and the fine arts. Solinus does not acknowledge his great debt to Pliny in particular, although he keeps alluding to the fulness with which everything has already been discussed by past authors, and although he cites other writers who are almost unknown to us. Of his known sources Pomponius Mela is the chief after Pliny but is used much less. On the other hand, the number of passages for which Mommsen was unable to give any source is not inconsiderable. As may have been already inferred, the work of Solinus is brief; the text alone would scarcely fill one hundred pages.[1478] [Sidenote: Animals and gems.] It would perhaps be rash to conjecture which quality commended the book most to the following period: its handy size, or its easy style and fairly systematic arrangement, or its emphasis upon marvels. The last characteristic is at least the most germane to our investigation. Solinus rendered the service, if we may so term it, of reducing Pliny’s treatment of animals and precious stones in particular to a few common examples, which either were already the best known or became so as a result of his selection. Indeed, King was of the opinion that the descriptions of gems in Solinus were more precise, technical, and systematic than those in Pliny, and found his notices “often extremely useful.”[1479] Solinus describes such animals as the wolf, lynx, bear, lion, hyena, _onager_ or wild ass, basilisk, crocodile, hippopotamus, phoenix, dolphin, and chameleon; and recounts the marvelous properties of such gems as _achates_ or agate, _galactites_, _catochites_, crystal, _gagates_, adamant, heliotrope, hyacinth, and _paeanites_. The dragons of India and Ethiopia also occupy his attention, as they did that of Philostratus in the _Life of Apollonius of Tyana_; indeed, he repeats in different words the statement found in Philostratus that they swim far out to sea.[1480] In Sardinia, on the contrary, there are no snakes, but a poisonous ant exists there. Fortunately there are also healing waters there with which to counteract its venom, but there is also native to Sardinia an herb called _Sardonia_ which causes those who eat it to die of laughter.[1481] [Sidenote: Occult medicine.] Although Solinus makes no use of Pliny’s medical books, he shows considerable interest in the healing properties of simples and in medicine. He tells us that those who slept in the shrine of Aesculapius at Epidaurus were warned in dreams how to heal their diseases,[1482] and that the third daughter of Aeetes, named Angitia, devoted herself “to resisting disease by the salubrious science” of medicine.[1483] According to Solinus Circe as well as Medea was a daughter of Aeetes, but usually in Greek mythology she is represented as his sister. [Sidenote: Democritus and Zoroaster not regarded as magicians.] This allusion to Circe and Medea shows that magic, to which medicine and pharmacy are apparently akin, does not pass unnoticed in Solinus’s page. He copies from Mela the account of the periodical transformation of the _Neuri_ into wolves.[1484] But instead of accusing Democritus of having employed magic, as Pliny does, Solinus represents him as engaging in contests with the _Magi_, in which he made frequent use of the stone _catochites_ in order to demonstrate the occult power of nature.[1485] That is to say, Democritus was apparently opposing science to magic and showing that all the latter’s feats could be duplicated or improved upon by employing natural forces. In two other passages[1486] Solinus calls Democritus _physicus_, or scientist, and affirms that his birth in Abdera did more to make that town famous than any other thing connected with it, despite the fact that it was founded by and named after the sister of Diomedes. Zoroaster, too, whom Pliny called the founder of the magic art, is not spoken of as a magician by Solinus, although he is mentioned three times and is described as “most skilled in the best arts,” and is cited concerning the power of coral and of the gem _aetites_.[1487] [Sidenote: Some bits of astrology.] It is not part of Solinus’s plan to describe the heavens, but he occasionally alludes to “the discipline of the stars,”[1488] as he calls astronomy or astrology. On the authority of L. Tarrutius, “most renowned of astrologers,”[1489] he tells us that the foundations of the walls of Rome were laid by Romulus in his twenty-second year on the eleventh day of the kalends of May between the second and third hours, when Jupiter was in Pisces, the sun in Taurus, the moon in Libra, and the other four planets in the sign of the scorpion. He also speaks of the star Arcturus destroying the Argive fleet off Euboea on its return from Ilium.[1490] [Sidenote: Alexander the Great.] Alexander the Great figures prominently in the pages of Alexander Solinus, being mentioned a score of times, and this too corresponds to the medieval interest in the Macedonian conqueror. Stories concerning him are repeated from Pliny, but Solinus also displays further information. He insists that Philip was truly his father, although he adds that Olympias strove to acquire a nobler father for him, when she affirmed that she had had intercourse with a dragon, and that Alexander tried to have himself considered of divine descent.[1491] The statement concerning Olympias suggests the story of Nectanebus, of which a later chapter will treat, but that individual is not mentioned, although Aristotle and Callisthenes are spoken of as Alexander’s tutors, so that it is doubtful if Solinus was acquainted with the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_. He describes Alexander’s line of march with fair accuracy and not in the totally incorrect manner of the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_. [Sidenote: The _Hieroglyphics_ of Horapollo.] In seeking a third text and author of the same type as Aelian and Solinus to round out the present chapter, our choice unhesitatingly falls upon the _Hieroglyphics_ of Horapollo, a work which pretends to explain the meaning of the written symbols employed by the ancient Egyptian priests, but which is really principally concerned with the same marvelous habits and properties of animals of which Aelian treated. In brief the idea is that these characteristics of animals must be known in order to comprehend the significance of the animal figures in the ancient hieroglyphic writing. Horapollo is supposed to have written in the Egyptian language in perhaps the fourth or fifth century of our era,[1492] but his work is extant only in the Greek translation of it made by a Philip who lived a century or two later and who seems to have made some additions of his own.[1493] [Sidenote: Marvels of animals.] The zoology of Horapollo is for the most part not novel, but repeats the same erroneous notions that may be found in Aristotle’s _History of Animals_, Pliny’s _Natural History_, Aelian, and other ancient authors. Again we hear of the basilisk’s fatal breath, of the beaver’s discarded testicles, of the unnatural methods of conception of the weasel and viper, of the bear’s licking its cubs into shape, of the kindness of storks to their parents, of wasps generated from a dead horse, of the phoenix, of the swan’s song, of the sick lion’s eating an ape to cure himself, of the bull tamed by tying it to the branch of a wild fig tree, of the elephant’s fear of a ram or a dog and how it buries its tusks.[1494] Less familiar perhaps are the assertions that the mare miscarries, if she merely treads on a wolf’s tracks;[1495] that the pigeon cures itself by placing laurel in its nest;[1496] that putting the wings of a bat on an ant-hill will prevent the ants from coming out.[1497] The statement that if the hyena, when hunted, turns to the right, it will slay its pursuer, while if it turns to the left, it will be slain by him, is also found in Pliny.[1498] But his long enumeration of virtues ascribed to parts of the hyena by the _Magi_ does not include the assertion in Horapollo’s next chapter[1499] that a man girded with a hyena skin can pass through the ranks of his enemies without injury, although it ascribes somewhat similar virtues to the animal’s skin. In Horapollo it is the hawk rather than the eagle which surpasses other winged creatures in its ability to gaze at the sun; hence physicians use the hawkweed in eye-cures.[1500] [Sidenote: Animals and astrology.] Animals also serve as astronomical or astrological symbols in the system of hieroglyphic writing as interpreted by Horapollo. Not only does a palm tree represent the year because it puts forth a new branch every new moon,[1501] but the phoenix denotes the _magnus annus_ in the course of which the heavenly bodies complete their revolutions.[1502] The scarab rolls his ball of dung from east to west and gives it the shape of the universe.[1503] He buries it for twenty-eight days conformably to the course of the moon through the zodiac, but he has thirty toes to correspond to the days of the month. As there is no female scarab, so there is no male vulture. The female vulture symbolizes the Egyptian year by spending five days in conceiving by the wind, one hundred and twenty in pregnancy, the same period in rearing its young, and the remaining one hundred and twenty days in preparing itself to repeat the process.[1504] The vulture also visits battlefields seven days in advance and by the direction of its glance indicates which army will be defeated. [Sidenote: The cynocephalus.] The cynocephalus, dog-headed ape, or baboon, was mentioned several times by Pliny, but Horapollo gives more specific information concerning it, chiefly of an astrological character. It is born circumcised and is reared in temples in order to learn from it the exact hour of lunar eclipses, at which times it neither sees nor eats, while the female _ex genitalibus sanguinem emittit_. The cynocephalus represents the inhabitable world which has seventy-two primitive parts, because the animal dies and is buried piecemeal by the priests during a period of as many days, until at the end of the seventy-second day life has entirely departed from the last remnant of its carcass.[1505] The cynocephalus not only marks the time of eclipses but at the equinoxes makes water twelve times by day and by night, marking off the hours; hence a figure of it is carved by the Egyptians on their water-clocks.[1506] Horapollo associates together the god of the universe and fate and the stars which are five in number, for he believes that five planets carry out the economy of the universe and that they are subject to God’s government.[1507] [Sidenote: Horapollo the cosmopolitan.] Horapollo cannot be given high rank either as a zoologist and astronomer, or a philologer and archaeologist; but at least he was no narrow nationalist and had some respect for history. The Egyptians, he says, “denote a man who has never left his own country by a human figure with the head of an ass, because he neither hears any history nor knows of what is going on abroad.”[1508]