62 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



moreover, but that he succeeded in accomplishing exactly what he 

 set out to do and that, in the doing of it, he carried the early Chris- 

 tian world along with him for a number of centuries. 



He starts off with the axiom that the greatest beasts are in the 

 sea. This would seem to be irrefutable. He then goes on to say, "But 

 the most numerous and largest of all these animals are those found 

 in the Indian Seas; among which are balenae [whales] four jugera in 

 extent, and the Pristis, 200 cubits long." This is all very well but for 

 the fact that the Roman measure, the jugerum, happens to be one of 

 area for measuring towns and encompassed a space of 240 by 120 

 feet. Not content with this little flight, however, the worthy Pliny 

 then goes on to state that there were in the Ganges River in India 

 eels 300 feet in length and, perhaps worked up by this statement, 

 he proceeds to give a most convincing account of a large peninsula 

 in the Red Sea which projects "into the deep and forms a vast gulf. 

 In the recesses of this becalmed spot the sea monsters attain so vast 

 a size they are quite unable to move." There then follows a more 

 or less word-for-word quote from Arrian regarding some people 

 called the Godrosi who dwell on the Makran coast and who make 

 "the doors of their houses with the jaw-bones of fishes, and rafter 

 and roofs with their bones many of which were found as much as 

 forty cubits [73 feet] in length." Here we see a rather shrewd elabo- 

 ration of the original description of the Ichthyophagi, the novel 

 points of which must have been taken from some other authors now 

 lost to us, but Pliny cannot resist the temptation to go into the 

 matter of size, like certain modern guidebooks. 



For all this, Pliny is full of topical information; in fact, he was 

 really a newspaperman at heart and is much better when he is doing 

 a straightforward job of reporting. He tells us of a sudden land sub- 

 sidence during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius that left a school 

 of some three hundred whales, or "sea monsters," on the mud flats 

 by the island of Lagdunum. These, he says, had white marks in the 

 place where horns should have been. They were probably a school 

 of killer whales, which have white marks on either side of the head 

 that were mistaken for horns in earlier times and may have given rise 

 to the belief in the aries marinus, or "sea ram." PHny also remarks, 

 in passing, and in a delightfully chatty manner, that "Turranus 

 speaks of a monster that was thrown up on the shore at Gades, the 



