250 PLINY'S NATURAL HISTORY. [Book VIII. 



command. Upon this, the elephant that had been degraded re- 

 fused to take its food, and so preferred death to ignominy. In- 

 deed their sense of shame is wonderful, and when one of them 

 has been conquered, it flies at the voice of the conqueror, and 

 presents him with earth and vervain. 28 



These animals are sensible to feelings of modesty ; they 

 never couple but in secret : 29 the male after it has attained its 

 fifth year, the female after the age of ten. 30 It is said, that 

 their intercourse takes place only every second year, and for 

 five days only, and no more ; on the sixth day they plunge 

 into a river, before doing which they will not rejoin the herd. 

 Adulterous intercourse is unknown to them, and they have none 

 of those deadly combats for the possession of the female, which 

 take place among the other animals. Nor is this because they 

 are uninfluenced by the passion of love. One in Egypt, we 

 are told, fell in love with a woman, who was a seller of gar- 

 lands ; and let no one suppose that he made a vulgar choice, for 

 she was the especial object of the love of Aristophanes, who 

 held the very highest rank as a grammarian. Another became 

 attached to the youth Menander, a native of Syracuse, in the 

 army of Ptolemy; whenever it did not see him, it would manifest 

 the regret which it experienced, by refusing its food. Juba 

 gives an account also of a female who dealt in perfumes, to 

 whom one of these creatures formed an attachment. All 

 these animals manifested their attachment by their signs of joy 

 at the sight of the person, by their awkward caresses, and by 

 keeping for them and throwing into their bosom the pieces 

 of money which the public had given them. 31 Nor, indeed, 



28 Pliny informs us, in B. xxii. c. 4, that this was done by those con- 

 quered in battle. B. 



23 We may conclude, from the account given by Aristotle, Hist. Anim. 

 B. v. c. 2, and by ^Elian, B. viii. c. 17, that this opinion was generally 

 adopted by the ancients. B. We learn from Cuvier, who mentions the 

 results of M. Corse's observations, that there is no such modesty in the 

 elepnant, and that the two at the Museum of Natural History at Paris 

 gave proof of the fact. 



30 This is erroneous ; the males do not arrive at puberty before the 

 females, which takes place about the fourteenth or fifteenth year. In the 

 elephant which was under the inspection of M. Corse, the period of gesta- 

 tion was between twenty and twenty-one months, so that there may be 

 some foundation for the biennial period, but the term of five days is en- 

 tirely imaginary. Aristotle makes the interval three years. B. 



31 There is a passage in Suetonius, in his Life of Augustus, and one in 



