MARGINAL COMMENT
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By HAROLD NICOLSON FORTNIGHT ago upon this page 'I made a passing but A friendly reference to the Maltese poodle possessed by Publius and elegantly lauded in one of Martial's more delicate poems. Any mention of animals is sure to stir the finest feelings in the British breast. My allusion to little Issa (who slept so gently on Publius's pillow) induced some kind person to send me a book which describes with careful detail how, in fact, the ancients treated their animals. The book is called Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome, is written by Mr. George Jennison, and was published in 1937 by the Manchester University Press. Mr. Jennison, who has spent a life-time " in practical contact with wild animals," and who was at one time connected with the Manchester Zoo, contends that there are many points which are obvious to the trained naturalist but which might escape the attention or the understanding of the classical scholar. I am sure that Mr. Jennison is right. What Newcastle scholar, for instance, would know that one of the most difficult feats of animal-training is to induce stags to wear harness ? A man might have spent many years in editing Tertullian, and yet be ignorant of the methods employed for transporting leopards or the precautions taken when these savage beasts reached Rome. Mr. Jennison knows all about these matters, and is able to combine wide reading of the classical authors with specialised knowledge of how animals behave. He assures us, for instance, that all wild animals much enjoy foreign travel ; that in the course of their journey they are so entertained by observing new sights and sounds that 'they do not really mind having an uncomfortable cage, and that the truly boring time only comes when they reach the capital and are housed in a great gaunt cage which never moves. I am obliged to Mr. Jennison for telling methat lions attached to travelling circuses are happier than those who are allotted spacious residential quarters in Regent's Park. It is nice being given new ideas.
* * * * Mr. Jennison's studious work is mainly concerned with the Romans, and his references to the Greeks are few and slight. He tells us, however (a fact which I did not know), that Seleucus the First presented a tiger to the city of Athens. No Athenian had ever seen a tiger before, and there must have been much excitement and a perfect fountain of chatter when the beast first appeared in the agora. Thereafter, as the novelty wore off, the Athenians would have neglected their tiger, not from inhumanity, but from utter ignorance of the manner in which such animals should be housed and fed. Starved and mangy, the tiger must have lingered on, and at night, when the little lights came out on the hill, his growls of discontent must have echoed from the precipices of the Acropolis. Greek cruelty was seldom deliberate, whereas Roman cruelty was planned at great expense. This book should not be read by those who have been taught to admire the Roman virtues, since it con- stitutes one of the most damning indictments of that repugnant race that I have ever read. But the Greeks were, and still are, the most charming people that have ever graced this earth. What they enjoyed doing with the few wild animals which their poverty enabled them to acquire was to put garlands around their necks and take them in pomp and procession through the streets. The Alexandrians, as always, exaggerated and vulgarised this pretty process (we hear of Ptolemy II organising a procession which took all day .to pass the Stadium, and which contained such items as eight pairs of ostriches in harness), but the Athenians decorated their animals tastefully before they cut their throats.
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Then came the Romans and their brutish ways. I should be well prepared to admire the old republican gravitas had they been a little less self-satisfied about it ; but austerity, which in the best conditions is the least defensible of virtues, becomes wholly in- tolerable when accompanied by pompous self-esteem. The moment
a Roman forgot about his gravitas he became a swine from the stable of Epicurus, and there were no limits to the obscene vulgarity in which he would indulge. Even those who are impressed by the manliness of. the Romans, by their beastly efficiency and their high juridical gifts ; even those who forgive them their dull, drab minds, their vulgar ostentation, or the atrocious gluttony in which those bloated bodies would indulge; even those who revere the Capitol as a symbol of pacification and power ; even the most fervent defender of the Romans cannot excuse their cruelty to man and beast. Mr. Jennison, in the book I am describing, has made a very careful and detailed list of all the horrible things the Romans did. In the first place, they delighted in performing animals, always a sign of a low-grade sensibility. People were paid high prices to teach elephants to go through the motions of a comic and often revolting dance (lasciviente pyrrhice conludere). They derived pleasure from watching dancing bears being led through the streets by a man with a tambourine, who from time to time would bang the bear upon his tender nose. Experts devoted many patient but dangerous years to teaching lions to hold hares in their mouths without munching them. And baboons were instructed how to play the flute. It is wholly impossible to respect a nation which derives amusement from the sad artificial antics of animals or which fattens dormice in little boxes for the stew.
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Some of the processions in which, with their clumsy imitation of the Greeks, the Romans indulged were shaming in their lavish- ness. Different, indeed, were the simple pomps of the Athenians when the virgins would pass through the Propylaea carrying gar- lands and the boys would dance in front of the temple with wreaths of crocus and hyacinth in their black hair. The spectacle of Marcus Antonius riding with his mistress in a chariot drawn by lions is typical of the crude over-statement, of the utter lack of taste, which even the most confirmed admirers of the Romans find it difficult to deny. But it is when one gets the Roman to the Colosseum that one finds him at his worst. It was bad enough to tie prisoners to crosses and to sit there under the awning watching these victims being mauled by savage beasts. What rendered these performances all the more disgusting were the elaborate devices to which the Romans resorted in order to vary the theme of slaughter. A miser- able prisoner was forced to disguise himself as Orpheus and was rolled into the centre of the arena on a stage decorated with trees and vegetation and also bearing two bears. As Orpheus, tied invisibly to the stage, went through the movements of twanging his lyre, the bears began to feed on him and the audience laughed until they cried. Another device was to wheel in a stage which was formed of two tiers ; on the upper platform the victims, clad in pretty clothes, were forced to dance with each other ; at a signal, the trap-door opened and the dancers fell, amid shrieks of laughter, among the hungry lions waiting in the cage below. No nation which could enjoy this mixture of the savage and the jocose can expect to be revered by posterity.
* * * * Mr. Jennison has been at pains to collect material regarding the mass massacre of animals, the venationes, which the Romans so much enjoyed. Even Augustus, who was a cold but comparatively humane man, boasted in his memoirs that he had given to the Roman populace the pleasure of seeing as many as 3,500 African animals slaughtered in the circus. Trajan celebrated his Dacian conquest by killing 11,000 beasts in the Colosseum. When Pompey staged the killing of twenty elephants, the stench, the trumpeting and the blood was such that even the Romans felt he had gone rather far. But, on the whole, their nerves could stand any amount of blood and pain, nor did the shrieks which rose from the victims strike the Romans as anything but exquisitely ludicrous. Such were the beastly• diversions of a beastly race.
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