Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 / A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.

The following remarks are supplementary to a note on the hippopotamus in Vol. ii, p. 35. In that note the exhibition of the hippopotamus at the Roman games is not traced lower than the time of the Emperor Commodus. Helagabalus, however, 218-22 A.D., had hippopotami among the various rare animals which he displayed in public as a part of his state. (Lamprid. c. 28) A hippopotamus was likewise in the vast collection of animals which were prepared for the Persian triumph of Gordian III., but were exhibited at the secular games celebrated by the Emperor Philip in the 1000th year of Rome, 248 A.D. ( Capitol. in Gordian. Tert ., c. 33.) In the seventh eclogue of Calpurnius, a countryman describes the animals which he saw in the Roman amphitheatre, among which is the hippopotamus:
Non solum nobis silvestria cernere monstra
Contigit; æquoreos ego cum certantibus ursis
Spectavi vitulos, et equorum nomine dignum,
Sed deforme genus, quod in illo nascitur amni
Qui sata riparum venientibus irrigat undis.
VII. 64—8.
Calpurnius is generally referred to the time of Carus and Numerian, about 283 A.D.; but his date is not determined by any satisfactory proof. (See Dr. Smith's Dict. of Ancient Biog. and Myth . in v.)
There is no trace of a live hippopotamus having been brought to Europe between the time specified in the last of these testimonies and the middle of the sixteenth century. When Belon visited Constantinople, he saw there a living hippopotamus, which had been brought from the Nile:
L'animal que j'ai veu vivant à Constantinople (he says), apporté du Nil, convenoit en toutes marques avec ceulx qu'on voit gravez en diverses medales des Empereurs. — Observations , liv. ii. c. 32. fol. 103. b. ed. 1564.
Belon returned to Paris from the Levant in the year 1550. In his work on fishes, p. 17., he speaks of another Frenchman, lately returned from Constantinople, who had seen the same animal. (See Schneider on Artedi Synonym. Piscium , p. 267.) P. Gillius likewise, who visited Constantinople in 1550, saw there the same hippopotamus, as he states in his description of the elephant, Hamburg, 114. (Schneider, Ib. p. 316.)