Book 12

Of Myra in Lycia there is a gulf, and it has a spring, and there is a temple of Apollo there, and the priest of this god scatters about the flesh of calves sacrificed to the god, and the orphus-fish swim up in shoals and eat the flesh like invited banqueters. And those who have sacrificed rejoice, and believe that the feasting of these fish is for them a good omen, and they say the god is gracious, because the fish have been filled with the flesh. But if they cast it out upon the land with their tails, as though dishonouring it and judging it abominable, this is believed to be the wrath of the god. And the fish recognize the voice of the priest too, and when they obey, they gladden those by whom they have been summoned, but doing the contrary, they grieve them.

At the old Bambyce (it is now called Hierapolis, since Seleucus named it thus) there are sacred fish, and they swim in troops and have leaders, and these eat first of the food thrown to them. And they keep their friendship toward one another most of all fish, and they are always at peace, either because the goddess breathes concord upon them, or because, being filled with the food thrown to them, they thus remain without taste and without knowledge of devouring one another.

The Egyptians say (and they do not at all persuade me, but they say nevertheless) that a lamb both eight-footed and two-tailed was born in the time of that famous Bocchoris, and that it broke into speech. And they sing that the lamb had two heads, and they say the same was four-horned. Now to Homer, who gave a voice to the horse Xanthus, it is fair to grant pardon, for he is a poet; and Alcman too, imitating Homer in such things, would not bear blame, for he has a sufficient excuse toward respect in being the very first to dare; but how is it possible to give heed to Egyptians boasting such things? Still, the peculiarities of this lamb have been told, even if they are fabulous.

This too I know I have heard about hawks. Before the Nile spreads over Egypt and rises onto the ploughlands, they cast off the feathers that are already growing old, just as the branches of plants cast off their dry leaves, and the hawks grow fresh and fine plumage, as the trees their blossom. There were, it seems, several kinds of hawks, and Aristophanes too seems to hint at this. At any rate he says: "But we sent three thousand hawks, mounted archers. And every one comes with hooked talons, kestrel, buzzard, vulture, owl, eagle." They are distributed and assigned to many gods. The partridge-catcher and the swift-winged is, they say, a servant of Apollo; the sea-eagle and the falcon they assign to Athena; of Hermes they say the dove-slayer is the plaything; of Hera the long-winged, and the so-called buzzard of Artemis. To the mother of the gods the merlin, and another to another god. So the kinds of hawks are very many.

The Egyptians, then, revering and deifying various kinds of animals, incur ridicule among most people; but the Thebans, being Greeks, revere, as I hear, the weasel, and they say it was the nurse of Heracles — or rather not the nurse at all, but that when Alcmene was in labour and unable to give birth, the weasel ran past and loosed the bonds of her travail, and Heracles came forth and was now creeping. And those who inhabit Hamaxitus of the Troad revere the mouse; from this, they say, they also call the Apollo honoured among them Sminthian. For still the Aeolians and the Trojans call the mouse "sminthos," just as Aeschylus too in his Sisyphus: "But there is some field-mouse, sminthos, thus monstrous." And in the Sminthium tame mice are reared, receiving public maintenance, and white mice lurk beneath the altar, and beside the tripod of Apollo a mouse stands. And this fable too I have heard concerning this worship. The crops of the Aeolians and the Trojans were assailed by many myriads of mice which, coming upon them, mowed them down unripe and rendered the harvests unfinished for the sowers. So when they inquired of the god at Delphi, he said that they must sacrifice to Apollo Sminthian, and they, obeying, were freed from the plot of the mice, and their wheat came to the appointed harvest. And they add these things too. When the colonists sent out from home to a settlement of Cretans were overtaken by some misfortune, they begged the Pythian god to show them a good place, profitable for their settlement. An oracle came forth: where the earthborn should make war on them, there they should remain and raise a city. So they come to this Hamaxitus and encamp to rest, and an unspeakable multitude of mice creeping up gnawed through the handles of their shields and ate through the strings of their bows; and they conjectured that these were the earthborn, and indeed, coming to be at a loss for their weapons of defence, they settle this place, and found a temple of Apollo Sminthian. So the mention of the mice has led us to a piece of theology, but we have been no worse for ourselves for having heard such things too.

Dolphins, it seems, are mindful of their dead too, and in no way betrayers of their fellows when they have departed from life. At any rate, having gone beneath one of their own that has died, they then carry it borne up to the land, trusting that men will bury it, and Aristotle bears witness to this; and another multitude follows, as though honouring it, or, by Zeus, even fighting on its behalf, lest some other sea-monster run up and, seizing the corpse, then devour it. So those who are just and have a sense of music bury them out of reverence for the dolphins' love of music; but others say that they neglect them, with no concern from Muses or Graces. And forgive, dear dolphins, the savagery of men, since even the Athenians cast out unburied the good Phocion. And Olympias too lay naked, she who bore the son of Zeus, as she herself boasted and as he too declared. And the Egyptians, having killed the Roman Pompey, surnamed the Great, who had done so much and won most august victories and celebrated three triumphs and saved the father of his murderer and restored him to the kingdom of the Egyptians, left him cast out, deprived of his head, beside the sea — him too, as they often leave you. For this all-devouring creature, man, does not spare even you, but they dare to make even you into salt-fish, and they do not perceive that they are doing this in anger against the Muses, the daughters of Zeus.

Lions they revere in Egypt, and a city is named after them; and it is worth telling the peculiarities of the lions there. They have temples and abundant places of resort, and they have beef every day, and it lies torn in pieces, bare of bones and sinews, and as they eat the Egyptians sing over them in the Egyptian tongue. And the burden of the song is, "Let no one of those looking on bewitch you," and the song is, as one might say, in place of amulets. Many of them are deified among them, and dwellings facing one another are set apart for them. And some windows opening toward the dawn, others toward the evening, make their abode more agreeable to them. They have also gymnasia for the sake of health, and near are wrestling-floors, and the well-fed calf is their adversary. And having exercised against this, if it overthrows it (it does this slowly, from idleness and lack of hunting), it gorges itself and returns to its own den. And the creature is intensely fiery, and from this the Egyptians dedicated it to Hephaestus too; and the fire from outside it shrinks from and flees, they say, owing to the abundance of the fire within. And since it is exceedingly fiery, they say it is the house of the Sun; and when the sun is hottest and most summery in itself, they say it draws near to the Lion. Moreover, those who inhabit the great city of the Sun rear these lions in the gateways of the god's temple, as having a share, the Egyptians say, of a more divine portion. For indeed, standing over those to whom the god is gracious in a dream, they foretell certain things, and those who have sworn falsely they punish, not with delays but at once, the god breathing his just anger upon them through them. And Empedocles too says that the best transmigration of a man is, if his lot should lead him into an animal, to become a lion; if into a plant, a laurel. And what Empedocles says is this: "Among beasts they become mountain-couching, ground-bedded lions, and laurels among the fair-leaved trees." And if one must, of the wisdom of the Egyptians who turn even such things into nature, take account (and one must), they assign the front parts of this animal to fire, but the hinder parts to water. And the double-natured sphinx the Egyptian craftsmen carving and the Theban myths boasting try to show us as of two forms, glorifying it by the mixture of the maiden's face and the lion-like body. This Euripides too hints at, saying: "Curling her tail beneath her lion-footed tread, she sat." And indeed they say the Nemean lion fell from the moon. At any rate the verses of Epimenides say: "For I too am of the race of fair-haired Selene, who, shuddering terribly, shook off the wild beast, the lion, in Nemea, bringing him up at the bidding of revered Hera." But let us assign these things to the myths; the peculiarities of lions have been told both above and now sufficiently.

There is a creature, the moth, which delights in the brightness of fire and flies to lamps when they are at their height, and falling upon them by its rush it is then burnt up. Aeschylus too, the poet of tragedy, mentions it, saying: "I greatly fear the foolish doom of the moth."

The wagtail is a winged creature, weak in its hinder parts, and for this reason they say it is unable to weave a nest privately or by itself, but lays its eggs in those of others. From this the proverbs of the countryfolk called beggars "wagtails." It moves its tail-feathers, like the halcyon in Archilochus. Aristophanes too mentions this bird in his Amphiaraus, saying: "Wag your loins from the tips like a wagtail, of an old man, and you will work a good charm." And in his Old Age: "the wagtail-stepping rhythm of one stooping." And Autocrates in his Drummers: "as the dear maiden daughters of the Lydians play, lightly leaping their hair, and clapping with their hands, before Ephesian Artemis the fairest, and lifting one hip downward and the other again upward, as a wagtail leaps."

Mice that die by themselves and from no plot, their limbs flowing away from them, depart little by little from life. From this the proverb says "according to a mouse's destruction," and Menander mentions it in his Thais. They used to say "more talkative than a turtle-dove"; for the turtle-dove both utters sound unceasingly through its mouth, and already, as they say, very much also from its hinder parts. The same poet mentions this proverb too in his Necklace. And Demetrius in his play Sicily mentions that the turtle-doves talk with their rump too. They say that mice are most lecherous, and they bring forward Cratinus as witness, who says in his Runaway Women: "Come now, let me flash for you, out of a clear sky, the lewdness of Xenophon's mouse." And still more they used to say the female was raging mad for venery. And again in Epicrates' Chorus: "But the accursed bawd quite took me in, swearing by the Maid, by Artemis, by Pherrephatta, that she was like a heifer, like a virgin, like an unbroken filly. But she was a whole mouse-warren." And wishing to call her lecherous to excess, he named her a whole mouse-warren. And Philemon: "a white mouse — when anyone — but I am ashamed to speak — the accursed creature cries out so loudly at once that it is often impossible to escape notice."

The Egyptians revere a black bull too, and they call it Onuphis. And let Egyptian accounts tell us the name of the place where it is reared; for it is harsh. Its hairs grow the contrary way to those of others; for these things too are peculiar to it. And this was the greatest of cattle, beyond even the Chaonian, which the Thesprotians and the Epirotes call "larini," tracing them in their genealogy from the breed of the cattle of Geryon. And this Onuphis feeds on Median grass.

The dolphin was the swiftest and most leaping of fish, and indeed of all land creatures too. At any rate it leaps over even a ship, as Aristotle says, and he tries to add the cause, and it is this. It holds its breath, just as the underwater divers do; for they too, having braced the breath within like a bowstring, then let the body go like an arrow. And what is compressed within, he says, pushes and shoots them forth.

The physa is an Egyptian fish worthy of wonder. For it knows, they say, when the moon wanes, and knows its waxing too. And indeed its liver waxes together with the goddess or wanes together with her, and at one time it is well-nourished, at another thinner.

The catfish is found about the Maeander and the Lycus, the Asian rivers, and in Europe about the Strymon, and it is like the sheatfish in form. And it is by nature the most loving of its young of fish. At any rate, whenever the female has spawned, she is released from care for the young, as a woman in childbed; but the male, appointing himself to the guarding of the offspring, remains, warding off everything that plots against them. And it is able even to swallow a hook, as Aristotle says.

The frog hates the water-snake and fears it strongly. So by its loud croaking it tries to terrify it in return and frighten it back. And there is the malice of the crocodile in hunting man and other animals. The path by which it knows men come down to the river, either for drawing water or for watering a horse or a camel, or, by Zeus, even to board a boat — this path it sprinkles by night with much water, and filling its mouth it pours often over the path, wishing to make it slippery and rendering its prey easier for itself; for those that slip do not keep their footing on the bank, but they are carried down, and it darts up and, catching them, dines. And I shall say a little about crocodiles now too. This beast is not at peace with the whole tribe of trochilus-birds (many are their kinds and names, harsh and grating to hear, and for this reason I leave them out); but only the so-called slack-beak does it have as comrade and friend; for this one can without pain pick out the leeches for it.

Democritus says that the sow and the dog are prolific, and he adds the reason, saying that they have many wombs and the parts receptive of the seed. The semen, then, does not fill them all from a single impulse, but these animals couple twice and three times, so that the continuity may fill the parts receptive of the offspring. And he says that mules do not bear young; for they do not have wombs like those of other animals, but of a different shape, least able to receive the seed; for the mule, he says, is not a work of nature, but a contrivance and theft, as one might say, of human ingenuity and an adulterous daring. "It seems to me," he says, "that an ass forced a mare by chance, and that men, having become learners of this violence, then went on to the habit of breeding them." And especially the asses of the Libyans, being very large, mount mares not maned but shorn; for a mare that has its own splendour through its mane would not, the wise in these matings say, endure such a mate.

Democritus says that embryos are aborted more in southern weather than in northern, and reasonably; for the bodies of pregnant women are made loose by the south wind and gape apart. So, the frame being relaxed and not knit together, the embryos, warmed and heated, slip this way and that and are aborted more easily; but if there be frost and the north wind blows, the embryo is compacted, but is hard to move and is not troubled as by a swell, and being unbuffeted and in calm it is strong and firm and lasts to the natural time of bearing. So in cold, the Abderite says, it holds together, but in warmth for the most part it is cast out. And he says it is a necessity, when the heat abounds, that both the veins and the joints gape apart.

The same man says that the cause of the growth of horns in deer is this. Their belly, he agrees, is very hot, and he says that their veins, which run through the whole body, are very loose, and that the bone enclosing the brain is very thin and membranous and porous, and that veins, very thick, rise up from there even to the top of the head. So the food, and the most fruitful part of it, is distributed very swiftly. And the fat, he says, is poured round them on the outside, but the strength of the food leaps up to the head through the veins. From there, then, the horns grow forth, watered by much moisture. So the moisture, being continuous and flowing on, pushes out the earlier matter. And the part that projects, the moisture outside the body, becomes hard, the air fixing and horn-forming it, but the part still shut up within is soft. And the one hardens by the chill from outside, but the soft part remains so by the warmth within. So the growth of the new horn pushes out the older as something alien, the part within pressing and wishing to thrust this up and swelling and throbbing, as though hastening to be born and come forth. For the moisture, fixing and rising up, is unable to keep still, but itself becomes hard and is thrust upon the earlier matter. And most of the horns are pressed out by the strength within; but some, caught by branches and hindering the swift course, the beast, driven by its rush, has knocked off. And some slip out, and others nature brings forward ready to peep out.

The gelded oxen (Democritus says) grow crooked and thin and long horns, but the entire ones thick at the root and straight and less

drawn out to length. And he says these are broad-browed much more than the others; for the veins being many there, the bones are widened by them. And the growth of the horns, being thicker, leads this same part of the animal toward breadth too; but the geldings, having a small circle at the seat of the horns, are less broadened, he says. And the hornless bulls, not having the honeycomb-like part (so Democritus names it) on the crown (he would mean the spongy part), the whole bone being resistant and not receiving the confluences of the humours, become bare and without a share of their weapons of defence. And the veins along this bone, being less nourished, become thinner and weaker. And the neck of the hornless ones too must be drier; for its veins too are thinner. And so they are less robust. But all the Arabian cattle that are female in kind, yet well grown in their horns, in these the great influx of humours, he says, is the nourishment of the noble growth for the horns. And those too are hornless which have the bone receptive of the moisture more solid and least receptive of the humours. And to speak in sum, the influx is the cause of growth to the horns; and this the veins channel, being very many and very thick and pregnant with as much moisture as they can hold.

Peculiar to animals is kindness toward man too. An eagle, at any rate, reared an infant. And I wish to tell the whole story, that it may be a witness of what I have proposed. When Seuechorus was king of the Babylonians, the Chaldeans said that the child born of his daughter would take away the kingdom from his grandfather. He shuddered at this, and, to put it with a touch of play, he became an Acrisius toward the girl; for he guarded her most bitterly. But secretly the girl (for fate was wiser than the Babylonian) conceived by some obscure man and bore a child. So those guarding her, in fear of the king, threw it from the citadel; for there the aforesaid girl was shut up. The eagle, then, with very keen sight, seeing the child's fall while it was still in the air, before the infant was dashed against the earth, came beneath it and put its back under it, and carries it to a certain garden, and sets it down very carefully. So the keeper of the place, beholding the beautiful little child, loves it and rears it; and it is called Gilgamos, and becomes king of the Babylonians. And if anyone thinks this a myth, I agree, having examined it to the best of my power and found it so; yet Achaemenes the Persian, from whom the nobility of the Persians descends, was, I hear, a nursling of an eagle.

In Crete there is a temple of Artemis so called, "of Rhoccaea." There the dogs go raging mad violently. So whenever they fall into this disease, they then throw themselves headlong from the height into the sea.

In the land of Elymais there is a temple of Anaitis, and there are tame lions there, and they greet and fawn upon those who pass into the temple. And if you call them while you eat, they come like invited banqueters, and taking whatever you hold out, they then depart modestly and orderly.

In the Red Sea there is a fish, they say, and its name is the watery palm, and it has black lines, and between them it is dotted with dark-blue drops.

The horse-mackerel there is equal in length to the one found in our sea, and bands resembling gold run round it, descending from the gills to the tail, and through the middle of them a band resembling silver divides them. Its mouth gapes, and the lower jaw is bent toward the upper; it has green eyes, and gold-like eyelids run round them. And the so-called charax is a nursling of the same sea. It has fins, and as far as the eye can see those on either side resemble gold, and those on the back it has gold-like too. Lower down there are bands purple in colour, and conceive the tail-part of it as gold-like too, and purple spots mark the middle of its eyes to beauty. And the toxotes that is found in the same sea is like the sea-urchin in form, but it has spines firm and long.

The Libyan porcupines prick those who touch them bitterly, and indeed work grievous pains. And even of the dead the wounds from their spines prove troublesome, they say.

There is in the Red Sea also an "ape," not a fish, but a cartilaginous creature, and this too not large. In colour the sea-ape resembles the land one, and its face too is ape-like. Over the rest of its body is thrown a shell, not fish-like, but such as is the tortoise's. It too is somewhat snub-nosed, as indeed is the land one. The rest of the body is flat in shape like the torpedo, so as to be, one might say, a bird with its wings spread; and as it swims it resembles one flying. It differs from the land ape in this too. It is spotted, and the broad parts along the nape are tawny, like gills. And it has a long mouth at the tip of its face, the fish being likened in this too, fittingly, to the form of the land ape.

The nightingale through the summer changes its colour to a different form, and alters its voice; for it does not sing in many tones and variously, but otherwise than through the spring. The blackbird sings in summer, but in winter it chatters and utters a confused sound, and having changed its colour like a garment, from its former black it is somewhat yellow. The thrush in winter is more starling-coloured to look at, but in summer shows a variegated neck. And these fish too change their colour: thrushes and blackbirds and wrasses and sprats. And jackals, as Aristotle says, are bare through the summer, but shaggy through the winter.

In Bubastus of Egypt there is a lake, and it nourishes a very great multitude of sheatfish, and these are tame and the gentlest of fish. And men throw to them fragments of bread, and the fish frisk up and leaping, one before another, pick out the food thrown to them. This fish is found in rivers too, as in the Cydnus of Cilicia; but this one is small in size. The reason is that a transparent and clear stream, and cold besides (such is the Cydnus), does not nourish it abundantly, but it delights more in a turbid one full of mud, and there it grows fat. The Pyramus and the Sarus nourish fatter ones, and these too are Cilician. The same would be reared in the Orontes of the Syrians too, and indeed the river Ptolemaeus nourishes very great ones, and the lake of Apamea.

Tame fish, obedient to a call and gladly receiving food, both are and are reared in many places, as in Epirus, in the city that still stands, which they called of old Stephanepolis, in the temple of Fortune, in the cisterns on either side as one goes up; and in Helorus of Sicily, which was of old a fort of the Syracusans; and in the temple of Labrandean Zeus, in a spring of transparent water, and they have little gold necklaces and earrings, golden too. The temple of this Zeus is seventy stades distant from the city of the Mylasians. The statue has a sword hanging at its side, and he is honoured under the names Carian and Stratian; for the Carians first devised a market of war, and served for silver, and fastened handles to their shields, and fixed crests on their helmets. And they were called by this name from Car the son of Crete and Zeus; and Zeus Labrandeus got this title from raining "labros" and abundant. And in Chios too, in the so-called Harbour of the Old Men, there is a multitude of tame fish, which the Chians rear for the consolation of old age for their elders. And in the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris a spring is celebrated as being transparent to the depth and casting up water white to look at, and there comes from it a river named Aborrhas. And the natives sing over the name a sacred story too, and the story is this: Hera, after her marriage to Zeus, bathed there, as the Syrians say, and to this day the place breathes fragrance, and all the air round about is blended with it there. And there frisk shoals of tame fish.

The peculiarities of animals not even the gods disdain to know. I hear, at any rate, that Eurysthenes and Procles, the sons of Aristodemus the son of Aristomachus the son of Cleodaeus the son of Hyllus the son of Heracles, wishing to take wives, came to Delphi and asked the god with whom of Greeks or barbarians they might form an alliance and then seem to have married well and prudently; and the god answered them to go back to Lacedaemon, and to return by that road by which they had come. And in whatever country there should meet them the most savage animal carrying the gentlest, there they should arrange their marriages; for thus it would be better for them. And they obeyed, and they come to the land of the Cleonaeans, and a wolf meets them carrying a lamb that it had snatched from some flock. They conjectured, then, that these animals were what the oracle meant, and they married the daughters of Thersander the son of Cleonymus, a man of repute. And if the gods know the gentlest animal and the most savage, it is not unfitting for us either to know their natures.

The land of the Indians bears many and various things. And some are evidences of a happy and wondrous productiveness, but others are not enviable nor such as to be worthy of praise or longing. And concerning the profitable or the luxurious and costly things I have said some, and others shall be told, with the help of the gods; but for the present I am set to tell how the land displays a brood of serpents. It bears many and various ones, and what is left over is past counting for the inexperienced. These serpents, then, harm both men and the other animals. But the same land bears also herbs that ward off the bites, and the natives have experience and wisdom of them, and have learned what drug is the antidote to which serpent, and they help one another as quickly as possible, trying to cut short the spreading of the venom over the body, which is very sharp and swift. And these things the country sends up to them for their necessary aid very readily and abundantly. But a serpent that kills a man, as the Indians say (and they bring forward as witnesses many of the Libyans and those of the Egyptians who dwell about Thebes), can no longer go down and creep into its own home, the earth not receiving it, but casting it out of its own bosom, as one might say, an exile. And from then on it goes about a wanderer and a vagabond, and is wretched in the open air both through summer and through winter, and neither does its mate any longer come near it, nor do its own offspring recognize their father. Such a punishment, then, for the slaying of man was shown by nature even to the brute beasts, by the forethought of the divine, according to my recollection; and it has been told for the instruction of him who understands.

Dogs, it seems, are more useless than geese at guarding, and the Romans detected this. The Celts were warring against them, and having very strongly pushed them back, they were in the city itself, and Rome had been taken by them except the Capitoline hill; for it was not easily accessible to them. The places that seemed able to receive an assailant with a plot were fortified. And it was the time when Marcus Mallius, being consul, was guarding the aforesaid hill committed to him. This is the man who both crowned his son with a garland for valour, and yet killed him because he had left his own post. When the Celts saw that all sides were impassable for them, they resolved, in the dead of night, lying in ambush, then to fall upon men sleeping most deeply, and they hoped it would be accessible to them by the unguarded part, where there was quiet, the Romans having believed that the Gauls would not attack from there. And indeed by this both he himself and the citadel of Zeus would have been most ingloriously taken, had not geese chanced to be present; for the dogs kept silent before the food that was thrown them, but it is peculiar to geese to cry out at things thrown to them for food and not to keep still. So they roused Mallius, screaming, and the guard about him. For this the dogs pay penalties among the Romans even now, every year, in memory of that ancient betrayal, but a goose is honoured on appointed days, and goes forth in a litter very ceremoniously.

And these things too about animals are not beside the Muse to tell. The Scythians, from lack of wood, boil whatever they sacrifice with the bones of the animals themselves. And the Phrygians, if anyone among them kills a plough-ox, the penalty for him is death. The Sagaraeans hold a contest of camels for Athena every year with reverence for the goddess, and these camels among them are very fleet and swift. The Saracori have their asses neither as burden-bearers nor as grinders, but as warriors, and on them they endure the dangers of battle, just as the Greeks do on horses. And whichever of their asses seems to be the most braying, this one they bring as a sacred offering to Ares. Clearchus of the Peripatetic school says that the Argives alone of the Peloponnesians do not kill a serpent; and on the days which the same people call "lamb-days," if a dog comes into the marketplace, they kill it. In Thessaly the man about to marry, sacrificing the marriage-feast, brings in a war-horse wearing its bridle and the whole panoply of war; then, when he has finished the rite and poured libation, leading the horse by the rein he hands it over to the bride. What this means, let the Thessalians tell. The people of Tenedos rear a pregnant cow for Dionysus the man-render, and when she has calved they tend her like a woman in childbed. But the new-born calf they sacrifice, having put buskins on it. And the one who has struck it with the axe is pelted with stones by the people, and flees as far as the sea. The Eretrians sacrifice mutilated victims to Artemis at Amarynthus.

I have learned, besides what I have already related, that there were dogs loving their master, those of Xanthippus the son of Ariphron. For when the Athenians were removing to the ships, at the time when the Persian kindled the great war against Greece, and the oracles said it was better for the Athenians to abandon their fatherland and embark on the triremes, the dogs of the aforesaid man were not left behind either, but removed together with Xanthippus, and swimming across to Salamis they expired. And Aristotle and Philochorus tell these things.

The Crathis sends forth water that makes white. At any rate, the sheep that drink of it, and the cattle and all the four-footed herd, as Theophrastus says, become white from black or tawny. And in Euboea too the cattle are born white almost all, from which the poets called Euboea "Argiboeon," land of white cattle.

A cock fell in love with a royal cupbearer (and the king was Nicomedes of the Bithynians), and the cock's name was Centaur, and Philo tells this. And a jackdaw too fell in love with a beautiful boy. And I have learned that certain bees are amorous, even if most are chaste.

They paint and mould the sphinx winged, with all the diligence and labour about the handiwork. And I hear too that at Clazomenae there was a winged sow, which ravaged the land of Clazomenae; and Artemon tells this in his Annals of the Clazomenians. From this a place there is called and celebrated as "of the winged sow." And if this seems to anyone a myth, let it so seem; but for my part what was said about an animal and not left unnoticed has not grieved me by being told.

To Halia, as she passed by Sybaris into a grove of Artemis (the grove was in Phrygia), a divine serpent appeared, very great to look upon, and consorted with her. And from this the so-called Ophiogeneis, the Serpent-born, sprang of the first stock.

The Delphians honour the wolf, the Samians the sheep, and the Ambraciots the lioness; and the reasons for each honour it is not beside this study to tell. For the Delphians a wolf tracked out sacred gold that had been stolen and buried on Parnassus; for the Samians too a sheep found such gold that had been stolen, and from this Mandrobulus the Samian dedicated a sheep as an offering to Hera; and the former Polemon tells, the latter Aristotle. The Ambraciots, since a lioness tore in pieces their tyrant Phaylus, honour the creature as having become for them the cause of freedom. And Miltiades buried in the Ceramicus the mares that thrice won at Olympia, and Euagoras the Laconian too buried magnificently his Olympic-victor horses.

The Ganges that flows among the Indians, taking its beginning from its springs, is twenty fathoms deep and eighty stades broad; for it still goes forward with its native water unmixed with another; but as it goes on, the others falling into it and sharing their water with it, its water reaches a depth of sixty fathoms, and it widens and overflows to four hundred stades. And it has islands greater than Lesbos and Cyrnus, and it nourishes sea-monsters, and from their fat they make an unguent. And there are tortoises in it too, and the shell of these is not less than a cask holding even twenty amphorae. And it breeds two kinds of crocodiles. And some of them harm not at all, but others most voraciously eat flesh and most unsparingly, and they have on the tip of the snout a projection like a horn. These men use as ministers for the punishment of evildoers too; for those convicted of the greatest crimes they throw to them, and they have very little need of an executioner.

The wise in things of the sea let down as bait for the parrot-fish, as Leonides says, coriander and especially leeks, and these are good catching and easiest to take; for the parrot-fish swims toward them, bewitched as by seasonings. And the leaves of beet take the red mullet; for the creature delights in this vegetable, and by it is caught and most easily enslaved.

Of the hunting of water-creatures there are four kinds, they say: net-fishing, harpooning, weel-fishing, and hook-fishing besides. And net-fishing is wealth-bringing, and resembles the taking of an army and the capture of certain prisoners, and it needs varied equipment, such as broom-cord and white flax and another black, and galingale and cork and lead and pine and thongs and sumac and stone and papyrus and horns and a six-oared ship and an axle and pegs and a windlass and a drum and iron and wood and pitch. And various kinds of fish fall into it, and shoals various and many. Harpooning is the most manly of the rest, and needs the most robust hunter. There must be present a straight fir-pole and broom-cord ropes and torches of the most resinous pine; and it needs a small boat and vigorous rowers and good arms. Weel-fishing is the most deceitful hunting and terribly treacherous, and seems least fitting for free men. It needs dry rushes and withy and a stone and bedding-weights and sea-weed and rushes and cypress foliage and corks and wood and bait and a small boat. Hook-fishing is the cleverest and most becoming to free men. It needs horsehair, of colours both white and black and tawny and grizzled; and of the dyed they approve the grey-green and the sea-purple; for all the others are bad, they say. They use also the stiff bristles of wild boars and turpentine, and very much bronze and lead and broom-cord and feathers, especially white and black and variegated. And the fishermen use also crimson and purple wools and corks and wood; and they need iron and other things, among them well-grown and dry reeds and soaked rushes and a polished fennel-stalk and a rod of cornel-wood and goat's horns and hide. And one fish is taken by one of these, another by another, and I have already told their hunting.

By these two accounts an Indian and a Libyan, differing in race, shall speak: the Indian will tell the things of his country, and the Libyan as much as he too knows; and what both accounts sing is this. Among the Indians, if a full-grown elephant is caught, it is hard to tame, and longing for freedom it thirsts for slaughter. And if you grip it with bonds too, it is kindled still more to anger, and will not endure to be a slave and a prisoner. But the Indians coax it with food too, and try to tame it with varied and enticing baits, setting before it whatever fills the belly and charms the spirit. But it is vexed with them and disdains them. What, then, do they devise? They bring against it a native music, and sing over it with a certain instrument familiar too; and the instrument is called the skindapsos. And it lends its ears and is charmed, and its anger is softened, and its spirit draws back and is calmed, and little by little it looks toward the food too. Then it is released from its bonds, but remains bound by the music, and dines eagerly, a dainty banqueter; for from longing for the strain it would no longer stand off. And the mares of the Libyans (for one must hear the other account too) — the flute-playing takes them so far. They are softened and tamed, and cease from their insolence and frisking, and they follow the herdsman wherever the strain leads them away, and when he stops they too stop; and if he raises the strain higher, tears are shed from them for pleasure. The cowherds of the horses, hollowing out a branch of oleander and making a flute and breathing into it, then thus pipe to the aforesaid mares. And Euripides too speaks of certain "shepherd hymenaeals"; and this is a strain which casts the mares into love and amorous frenzy, and maddens the males to mate with them. So horse-marriages are accomplished in this manner, and the strain seems to sing a wedding-hymn.

That the tribe of dolphins is fond of song and of the flute, Arion of Methymna is a sufficient witness, both from the statue at Taenarum and from the epigram written upon it. And the epigram is: "By the escort of the immortals, this conveyance saved Arion the son of Cycleus from the Sicilian sea." And a hymn of thanksgiving to Poseidon, witness to the dolphins' love of music, Arion wrote, paying these too, as it were, a ransom for his life. And this is the hymn: "Highest of gods, lord of the sea, gold-tridented Poseidon, earth-holder, through the teeming brine; round you the swimming beasts dance in a ring with their fins, with light tossings of their feet lightly leaping, snub-nosed, bristle-necked, swift-running whelps, the music-loving dolphins, sea-nurslings of the maiden Nereid goddesses, whom Amphitrite bore; you who brought me to the land of Pelops, to the Taenarian shore, as I wandered in the Sicilian sea, carrying me on your arched backs, cleaving the furrow of the Nereid plain, an untrodden path, when treacherous men cast me from their hollow sea-faring ship into the sea-purple swell of the deep." Peculiar to dolphins, surely, in addition to what has been said above, is their love of music too.

A certain Tyrrhenian account is current that says the wild boars and the deer among them are caught by nets and dogs, as is the law of hunting, but with music fighting on the hunters' side, and the more so. And how, I will now tell. They throw round the nets and the rest of the hunting-gear, all that lies in wait for the animals; and a man stands by skilled in the flute, and tries as much as possible to relax the strain, and lets be whatever is intense in the music, but whatever is sweetest in flute-song, this he plays. Stillness and quiet easily carry it across, and to the heights and the glens and the thickets and, to speak in sum, to all the lairs and beds of the beasts the strain flows in. And at first, as the sound passes into their ears, they are struck and somewhere too filled with fear; then a pure and irresistible pleasure of the music takes hold of them, and enchanted they have forgetfulness even of offspring and homes. And yet the beasts love not to wander from their accustomed places. But the Tyrrhenian creatures, little by little, as though by some persuading spell, are drawn, and as the strain bewitches them they come and fall into the snares, mastered by the music.

The anthias-fish, when they are struck and caught, are the most pitiable of sights, and as they die they seem to lament themselves and in a way to supplicate, like men fallen among pitiless and most murderous robbers. For some of them, trying to escape, are then entangled in the nets, and as they try to leap over the ambush, the spear-point overtakes them; and others, fleeing this death, leap out onto the land that is until then hostile to fish, choosing the end of life apart from the sword, and very gladly.