Part 3

Among the Greeks, sensitive and meditative minds which did not place faith in the Pythagorean system of life were attracted, nevertheless, by its speculative possibilities which they bent to their own purposes. Thus Socrates borrowed from Pythagoras when he suggested that imperfect and earth-bound spirits might be re-incorporated in animals whose conventionally ascribed characteristics corresponded with their own moral natures. Unjust, tyrannical, and violent men would become wolves, hawks, and kites, while good commonplace people—virtuous Philistines—would take better forms, such as ants, bees, and wasps, all of which live harmoniously in communities. It is pleasant to find that Socrates did justice to that intelligent insect, the undeservedly aspersed wasp. Men who are good in all respects save the highest, may re-assume human forms. Socrates does not explain why it is that humanity progresses so slowly if it is always being recruited from such good material? He passes on from these righteous men to the super-excellent man to whom alone he allots translation into a divine and wholly immaterial sphere; he it is who departs from this world completely pure of earthly dross; who cannot be moved by ill-fortune, poverty, disgrace; who has “overcome the world” in the Pauline sense, who has died while living, in the Indian sense. Though Socrates does not say so, it is this super-excellent man who really convinces him of the immortality of the soul according to the meaning which we attach to these words.

That the more tender and poetic aspects of Pythagorean speculations had deeply impressed Socrates can be seen by the fact that they recurred to his mind in the most solemn hour of his life. From these he drew the lovely parable with which he gently reproved the friends who were come to take leave of him for their surprise at finding him no wise depressed. He asks if he appears to them inferior in divination to the swans, who, when they perceive that they must die, though given to song before, then sing the most of all, delighted at the prospect of their departure to the deity whose ministers they are. Mankind has said falsely of the swans that they sing through dread of death and from grief. Those who say this do not reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or afflicted with any other pain, not even the nightingale or swallow or hoopoe, which are said to sing a dirge-like strain, “but neither do they appear to me to sing for grief nor do the swans, but as pertaining to Apollo they are skilled in the divining art, and having a foreknowledge of the bliss in Hades, they express their joy in song on that day rather than at any previous time. But I believe myself to be a fellow-servant of the swans and consecrated to the same divinity, and that I am no less gifted by my master in the art of divination, nor am I departing with less good grace than they.”

Socrates would not have been “the wisest of men” if he had dogmatised about the unknowable; to insist, he says, that things were just as he described them, would not become an intelligent being; he only claimed an approximate approach to the truth. In appearance Plato went nearer to dogmatic acceptance of the theory of the transmigration of souls, but probably it was in appearance only. Like his master, he thought it reasonable to suppose that the human soul ascended if it had done well, and descended if it had done ill, and of this ascent and descent he took as symbol its attirement in higher or lower corporeal forms till, freed from the corruptible, it joined the incorruptible.

The Greeks were the first people to have an insatiable thirst for exact knowledge; they showed themselves true precursors of the modern world by their researches into scientific zoology, which were carried on with zeal long before Aristotle took the subject in hand. We cannot judge of these early researches because they are nearly all lost; but Aristotle’s “History of Animals,” even after the revival of learning, was still consulted as a text-book, and perhaps nothing that he wrote contributed more to win for him the fame of

“... maestro di color che sanno.”

The story goes that this work was written by desire of Alexander the Great or, as some say, Philip of Macedon, and that the writer was given a sum which sounds fabulous in order that he might obtain the best available information. What interest most the modern reader are the “sayings by the way” on the moral qualities or the intelligence of animals. “Man and the mule,” says Aristotle, “are always tame”—a classification not very complimentary to man. The ox is gentle, the wild boar is violent, crafty the serpent, noble and generous the lion. Except in the senses of touch and taste, man is far surpassed by the other animals—a remark that was endorsed by St. Thomas Aquinas, who inferred from the limitation of man’s senses that he would have made bad use of them if they had been more acute. Aristotle laid down the axiom that man alone can reason, though other animals can remember and learn, but he never pursued this theory as far as it was pushed by Descartes, much less by Malebranche. He believed that the soul of infants differed in no respect from that of animals. All animals present traces of their moral disposition, though these distinctions are more marked in man. Animals understand signs and sounds, and can be taught. The females are less ready to help the males in distress than the males are to help the females. Bears carry off their cubs with them if they are pursued. The dolphin is remarkable for the love of its young ones; two dolphins were seen supporting a small dead dolphin on their backs, that was about to sink, as if in pity for it, to keep it from being devoured by wild creatures. In herds of horses, if a mare dies, other mares will bring up the foal, and mares without foals have been known to entice foals to follow them and to show much affection to them, though they die for want of their natural sustenance.

Aristotle says that music attracts some animals; for instance, deer can be captured by singing and playing on the pipe. Animals sometimes show fore-thought, as the ichneumon, which does not attack the asp till it has called others to help it—which reminds one of the dog whose master took him to Exeter, where he was badly treated by the yard-dog of the inn; on this, he escaped and went to London, whence he returned with a powerful dog-friend who gave the yard-dog a lesson which he must have long remembered. Hedgehogs are said by Aristotle and other ancient authors to change the entrance of their burrows according as the wind blows from north or south; a man in Byzantium got no small fame as a weather prophet by observing this habit. He thinks that small animals are generally cleverer than larger ones. A tame woodpecker placed an almond in a crevice of wood so as to be able to break it, which it succeeded in doing with three blows. Aristotle does not mention the similar ingenuity of the thrush which I have noticed myself; it brings snails to a good flat stone on which it breaks the shell by knocking it up and down. He admired the skill of the swallow in making her nest. Although he knew of the migrations of birds, and declared that cranes go in winter to the sources of the Nile, “where there is a race of pigmies—no fable, but a fact,” he was not free from the erroneous idea (which is to be found in modern folk-lore) that some birds hybernate in caves, out of which they emerge, almost featherless, in the spring. Of the nightingale, he says that it sings ceaselessly for fifteen days and nights when the mountains are thick with leaves.

The spider’s art and graceful movements receive due praise, as do the cleanly habits of bees, which are said to sting people who use unguents because they dislike bad smells. “Bright and shiny bees” Aristotle asserts to be idle, “like women.”

Of all animals his favourites are the lion and the elephant. The lion is gentle when he is not hungry and he is not jealous or suspicious. He is fond of playing with animals that are brought up with him, and he gets to have a real affection for them. If a blow aimed at a lion fails, he only shakes and frightens his attacker, and then leaves him without hurting him. He never shows fear or turns his back on a foe. But old lions that are unable to hunt sometimes enter villages and attack mankind. This is the first observation of the “man-eating” lion or tiger, and the reason given for his perverse conduct is still believed to be the right one.

Aristotle assigned the palm of wisdom to the elephant, a creature abounding in intellect, tame, gentle, teachable, and one which can even learn how to “worship the king”—which is what many of us saw the elephants do at the Delhi Durbar.

In a later age, Apollonius of Tyana confirmed from personal observation all Aristotle’s praise; he watched with admiration the crossing of the Indus by a herd of thirty elephants which were being pursued by huntsmen; the light and small ones went first, then the mothers, who held up their cubs with tusk and trunk, and lastly the old and large elephants. Pliny gave a similar account of the way in which elephants cross rivers, and it is, I believe, still noticed as a fact that the old ones send the young ones before them. The officer whose duty it was to superintend the embarcation of Indian elephants for Abyssinia during the campaign of Sir Robert Napier told me how a very fine old elephant, who perfectly understood the business in hand, drove all the others on board, but after performing this useful service, when it came to be his turn, he refused resolutely to move an inch, and had to be left behind. The sympathy with animals for which Apollonius was remarkable made him feel for these great beasts brought into subjection; he declares that at night they mourn over their lost liberty with peculiar piteous sounds unlike those which they make usually; if a man approaches, however, they cease their wailing out of respect for him. He speaks of their attachment to their keeper, how they eat bread from his hand like a dog and caress him with their trunks. He saw an elephant at Taxila which was said to have fought against Alexander the Great three hundred and fifty years before. Alexander named it Ajax, and it bore golden bracelets on its trunk with the words: “Ajax. To the Sun from Alexander son of Jove.” The people decked it with garlands and anointed it with precious salves. Several classical writers bore witness to the pleasure which elephants took in music; they could be made to dance to the pipe. It was also said that they could write. Their crowning merit—that of helping away wounded comrades, which is vouched for by no less an authority than Mr. F. C. Selous—does not seem to have been observed in ancient times.

In Greek mythology the familiar animals of the gods occupy a place half-way between legend and natural history. Viewed by one school as totems, as the earlier god of which the later is only an appendix, to more conservative students they may appear to be, in the main, the outgrowth of the same fondness for coupling man and beast and fitting man with a beast-companion suited to his character, which gave St. Mark his lion and St. John his eagle. The panther of Bacchus is the most attractive of the divine _menagerie_, because Bacchus, in this connexion, is generally shown as a child and the friendships of beasts and children are always pleasing.

The affection of Bacchus for panthers has been attributed to the fact that he wore a panther-skin, but there seems no motive for deciding that the one tradition was earlier than the other; the rationale of a myth is often evolved long after the myth itself. Perhaps, after all, the stories of gods and animals often originated in the simple belief that gods, like men, had a weakness for pets!

In the Pompeian collections at Naples there are several designs of Bacchus and his panther; one of them shows the panther and the ass of Silenus lying down together; in another, a very fine mosaic, the winged genius of Bacchus careers along astride of his favourite beast; in a third, a chubby little boy, with no signs of godhead about him, clambers on to the back of a patient panther, which has the long-suffering look of animals that are accustomed to be teased by children. It may be noticed that children and animals, both somewhat neglected in the older art, attained the highest popularity with the artists of the age of Pompeii. Children were represented in all sorts of attitudes, and all known animals, from the cat to the octopus and the elephant to the grasshopper, were drawn not only with general correctness but with a keen insight into their humours and temperaments.

It is said that a panther was once caught in Pamphylia which had a gold chain round its neck with the inscription in Armenian letters: “Arsaces the king to the Nysæan god.” Oriental nations called Bacchus after Nysa, his supposed birthplace. It was concluded that the king of Armenia had given its freedom to this splendid specimen to do honour to the god. The panther became very tame and was fondled by every one, but when the spring came it ran away, chain and all, to seek a mate in the mountains and never more came back.

III

ANIMALS AT ROME

ROME, the eternal, begins with a Beast-story. However much deeper in the past the spade may dig than the reputed date of the humanitarian She-wolf, her descendant will not be expelled from the grotto on the Capitol, nor will it cease to be the belief of children (the only trustworthy authorities when legends are concerned) that the grandeur that was Rome would have never existed but for the opportune intervention of a friendly beast!

The fame of the She-wolf shows how eagerly mankind seizes on some touch of nature, fact or fable, that seems to make all creatures kin. Rome was as proud of her She-wolf as she was of ruling the world. It was the “luck” of Rome; even now, something of the old sentiment exists, for I remember that during King Edward’s visit old-fashioned Romans were angry because this emblem was not to be seen in the decorations.

The story did not make such large demands on credulity as sceptics pretend. The wolf is not so much the natural enemy of man as the cat is of the mouse: yet cats have been known to bring up families of mice or rats which they treated with affection. In recent times a Russian bear was stated to have carried away to the woods a little girl whom it fed with nuts and fruits. The evidence seemed good, though the story did sound a little as if it were suggested by Victor Hugo’s “Épopée du Lion.” But in India there are stories of the same sort—stories actually of She-wolves—which appear to be impossible to set aside. In a paper read before the Bombay Natural History Society, the well-known Parsi scholar, Jivanji Jamsedji Modi, described how he had seen one such “wolf-boy” at the Secundra Orphanage: the boy had remained with wolves up to six years old when he was discovered and captured, not without vigorous opposition from his vulpine protectors.

The historical record of Rome as regards animals is not a bright one. The cruelty of the arena does not stain the first Roman annals; the earliest certified instance of wild-beast baiting belongs to 186 B.C., and after the practice was introduced it did not reach at once the monstrous proportions of later times. Still, one does not imagine that the Roman of republican times was very tender-hearted towards animals. Cato related, as if he took a pride in it, that when he was Consul he left his war-horse in Spain to spare the public the cost of its conveyance to Rome. “Whether such things as these,” says Plutarch, who tells the story, “are instances of greatness or littleness of soul, let the reader judge for himself!” When the infatuation for the shows in the arena was at its height, the Romans felt an enormous interest in animals: indeed, there were moments when they thought of nothing else. It was an interest which went along with indifference to their sufferings; it may be said to have been worse than no interest at all, but it existed and to ignore it, as most writers have done, is to make the explicable inexplicable. If the only attraction of these shows had been their cruelty we should have to conclude that the Romans were all afflicted with a rare though not unknown form of insanity. Much the same was true of the gladiatorial shows. Up to a certain point, what led people to them was what leads people to a football match or an assault-at-arms. Beyond that point—well, beyond it there entered the element that makes the tiger in man, but for the most part it was inconscient.

When we see Pola or Verona or Nîmes; when we tread the crowded streets to the Roman Colosseum or traverse the deserted high-road to Spanish Italica; most of all, when we watch coming nearer and nearer across the wilderness between Kairouan and El Djem the magnificent pile that stands outlined against the African sky—we all say the same thing: “What a wonderful race the Romans were!” It is an exclamation that forces itself to the lips of the most ignorant as to those of the scholar or historical student. At such moments, it may be true, that the less we think of the games of the arena the better; the remembrance of them forms a disturbing element in the majesty of the scene. But they cannot be put out of mind entirely, and if we do think of them, it is desirable that we should think of them correctly. It so happens that it is possible to reconstruct them into a lifelike picture. There exists one, though, as far as I know, only one, faithful, vivid, and complete contemporary representation of the Roman Games. This is the superb mosaic pavement which was discovered in the middle of the last century by a peasant striking on the hard surface with his spade, at the village of Nennig, not far from the Imperial city of Treves. The observer of this mosaic perceives at once that the games were of the nature of a “variety” entertainment. There was the music which picturesque-looking performers played on a large horn and on a sort of organ. (The horn closely resembles the pre-historic horns which are preserved in the National Museum at Copenhagen, where they were blown with inspiring effect before the members of the Congress of Orientalists in 1908.) There was the bloodless contest between a short and tall athlete, armed differently with stick and whip. In the central division, because the most important, is shown the mortal earnest of the gladiatorial fight, strictly controlled by the Games-master. In the sexagion above this is a hardly less deadly struggle between a man and a bear: the bear has got the man under him but is being whipped off so that the “turn” may not end too quickly, and, perhaps, also to give the more expensive victim another chance. To the right hand, a gladiator who has run his lance through the neck of a panther, holds up his hand to boast the victory and claim applause: the dying panther tries vainly to free itself from the weapon. To the left is a fight between a leopard and an unfortunate wild ass, which has already received a terrible wound in its side and is now having its head drawn down between the fore-paws of the leopard. I hear that in beast-fights organised by Indian princes, these unequal combatants are still pitted against each other. Lastly, the Nennig Mosaic depicts a fat lion that has also conquered a wild ass, of which the head alone seems to remain: it has been inferred, though I think rashly, that the lion has eaten up all the rest; at any rate he now seems at peace with the world and is being led back to his cage by a slave.

Everything is quiet, orderly, and a model of good management. The custodian of the little museum told me that the (surprisingly few) visitors to Nennig were in the habit of remarking of this representation of the Roman Games that it made them understand for the first time how the cultivated Romans could endure such sights. Unhappily, conventional propriety joined to the sanction of authority will make the majority of mankind endure anything that causes no danger or inconvenience to themselves.

Except with a few, at whom their generation looks askance, the sense of cruelty more than any other moral sense is governed by habit, by convention. It is even subject to latitude and longitude; in Spain I was surprised to find that almost all the English and American women whom I met had been to, at least, one bull-fight. Insensibility spreads like a pestilence; new or revived forms of cruelty should be stopped at once or no one can say how far they will reach or how difficult it will be to abolish them. One might have supposed that the sublime self-sacrifice of the monk who threw himself between two combatants—which brought the tardy end of gladiatorial exhibitions in Christian Rome—would have saved the world for ever from that particular barbarity; but in the fourteenth century we actually find gladiatorial shows come to life again and in full favour at Naples! This little-known fact is attested in Petrarch’s letters. Writing to Cardinal Colonna on December 1, 1343, the truly civilised poet denounces with burning indignation an “infernal spectacle” of which he had been the involuntary witness. His gay friends (there has been always a singular identity between fashion and barbarism) seem to have entrapped him into going to a place called Carbonaria, where he found the queen, the boy-king, and a large audience assembled in a sort of amphitheatre. Petrarch imagined that there was to be some splendid entertainment, but he had hardly got inside when a tall, handsome young man fell dead just below where he was standing, while the audience raised a shout of applause. He escaped from the place as fast as he could, horror-struck by the brutality of spectacle and spectators, and spurring his horse, he turned his back on the “accursed spot” with the determination to leave Naples as soon as possible. How can we wonder, he asks, that there are murders in the streets at night when in broad daylight, in the presence of the king, wretched parents see their sons stabbed and killed, and when it is considered dishonourable to be unwilling to present one’s throat to the knife just as if it were a struggle for fatherland or for the joys of Heaven?

Very curious was the action of the Vatican in this matter; Pope John XXII. excommunicated every one who took part in the games as actor or spectator, but since nobody obeyed the prohibition, it was rescinded by his successor, Benedict XII., to prevent the scandal of a perpetual disregard of a Papal ordinance. So they went on cutting each other’s throats with the tacit permission of the Church until King Charles of the Peace succeeded in abolishing the “sport.”

The action of the Church in respect to bull-fights has been much the same; local opinion is generally recognised as too strong for opposition. The French bishops, however, did their best to prevent their introduction into the South of France, but they failed completely.