8o Wild Beasts 



banks of the Orontes to the cities of Africa. He im- 

 pressed antiquity as he has done the modern world, and 

 so far as disposition and personal qualities are concerned, 

 most of what was known or thought then might have 

 been condensed into the modern statement of his traits 

 given in the French "CyclopMie" ; namely, that he was 

 "si fort et si courageux, qu'on I' a appelli le roi des 

 animaux." 



What amount of truth there is in this view we shall 

 see; in the mean time it is natural enough to regret 

 that those who might have accomplished so much, have 

 in fact done so little. Varro, Columella, Aulus Gellius, and 

 others wrote on game and hunting, but classic notices of 

 a venatio in the amphitheatre are as terse and colorless as 

 entries in a log-book. Marsian boars, or wolves from the 

 Apennines were the most formidable creatures an ancient 

 Italian could find in his own country, and Virgil congrat- 

 ulates himself that such was the case. " Rabida tigres 

 absunt et saeva leonum semina." But the scribblers in 

 prose and verse who expatiated upon fish-ponds, nets, gins, 

 snares, Celtic, Lycaonian, and Umbrian hounds, with all 

 the appliances of petty sport, where were they while the 

 Ludi Circenses were going on? How was it that these 

 men, who gossiped about everything, never chatted with 

 the keepers of that great Vivarium near the Praenestine 

 gate, where there were often wild beasts enough to stock 

 the menageries of the modern world .■' Why did they not 

 tell of the fleets laden with such cargoes that came to 

 Ostia, interview the men who brought them as they drank 

 rough Massic together in the taverns under the Janiculura, 



