STELE WITH CAT AND BIRD.
Athens Museum.
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.