Sea Monsters of the Roman Empire

 

This blog has occasionally diverted off into the dim and distant ages to look at tales of aquatic creatures not only in Loch Ness but around the Highlands of Scotland and beyond. Now someone claimed last year that men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. My trip to Rome and Naples late last year certainly has had me thinking about that Empire as I considered the fabulous animals said to inhabit the seafaring routes of the Roman Emperors. But others would question whether those beasts merely inhabited their ancient minds?

I had seen these various artforms from 1600 years back or more when I was previously in Rome, but this time I took more care in searching out such images. They basically took three forms. They were either mosaics made from thousands of tiny coloured stones or were frescoes quickly painted onto wet plaster walls or, on rarer occasions, were statues sculpted from marble or other materials.

The mosaics were certainly the best preserved and as a consequence the more abundant. They would tend to be found on the floors of villas owned by the rich, perhaps located some miles away from Rome or other bustling centres of activity. Such places would also have frescoes, but these have not fared so well when exposed to the environment over long periods of time.

Most of these items were in the National Museum of Rome, the Vatican Museum and finally the Naples Archeological Museum which derived most of its objects from the nearby ruin of Pompeii. In an attempt to ascertain what these creatures may or may not have represented in the real world of the Romans, one should try and understand them in what is left today. The mosaic pictured below best summarizes the creatures under consideration and was retrieved from the villa of a man named Severus dated to the 2nd and 3rd century AD.

This striking mosaic would have appropriately been situated in the bath complex and is structured at three levels. At the centre is the face or mask of a god being circled by four hybrid creatures beyond which at the corners are more familiar dolphins and fish. The images are interspersed with lines indicating the flow and currents of their underwater world. The four fabulous creatures are hybrid because they comprise a front half reminiscent of land animals and a rear half that is decidedly aquatic.

I initially thought the god in the centre was Neptune, the god of the seas, but the museum display said it was another deity called Oceanus. This figure was said to be the father of the innumerable river gods (potomai) and spring water goddesses (oceanids) as well as being the great river said to encircle the world. With that in mind, we rotate through each creature in turn, coming first to the Hippocampus.

This is the first and most familiar of these crypto-creatures, also called a Sea-Horse or Mer-Horse. They predate the Roman Empire by centuries and have made their way into diverse cultures right up to the modern day. As you can see, the front part is all equine and the rear is a serpentine body ending in a fluke tail. The rear was often displayed in this coiled manner and its equine function on land progressed into the water as it became a steed for supernatural beings.

That being the case, they are often depicted as pulling the chariots of various aquatic deities as well as being ridden in horseback fashion by lesser beings such as the mermen Tritons and the female Nereids. The most familiar representation of this is the world famous Trevi Fountain in Rome which depicts Oceanus with the help of two tritons breaking in two hippocampi attached to his shell chariot.

The next creature shown below is the Taurocampus or Mer-Bull which is easily identified by its two horns on opposite sides of the head. Like the Water Horse, this reminds us of the water bull legends that pervaded the Scottish Highlands and to which Loch Ness was said to have its own specimen. The role of this creature is less certain but it has been depicted as also being ridden in horseback-fashion by lesser deities. 

The last two beasts take on a carnivorous form and are described as "marine tigers and panthers" by the museum. Instead of front hooves, we now see front paws and claws and heads reminiscent of the big cats. The first picture below looks like a spotted leopard and it is a fact that there was a Pardalocampus or Mer-Leopard described in other works. These are also depicted as harnessed to chariots and one imagines they were the fierce and fleet footed animals which sped their owners through the waters. I suppose the supernatural Ferraris of their day.

The next is the Leocampus or Mer-Lion which presumably had similar Ferrari-like capabilities. The Hippocampus and others also had their representation in other artforms such as statues and frescoes, but for various reasons, the floor mosaics have endured the most. In fresco form, I came across these works. The first rather faded image has one of those feminine nereids riding the beast.

And we have the marble statues as well, the first below is of a Hippocampus and the next perhaps a Pardalocampus. Note that the front hooves of this Hippocampus have taken on a more webbed form as one would expect from a sea faring creature. This is zoomed in further down and we see four front digits and one at the rear. How did the sculptor conceive of this morphology? 

Five forelimb digits is the general pattern for land and sea animals, but they tend to be forward facing. So the sculptor has the correct count but what animal has four forward and one rear finger?  Animals such as dogs, lions and deer have a small digit separate to the rest but to the side and rear called the dewclaw which never touches the ground when standing. Horses do not have dewclaws and I am not aware of aquatic animals with a dewclaw, but I await anyone coming forward with possible candidates. 

So we currently have a minor mystery there, but when one looks at these varied images, one wonders how much of the form is mythological precision. biological accuracy (such as those webbed hooves) or  artistic license.

Another impressive floor mosaic was in the Sala Rotonda room of the Vatican Museum. Sitting on top of it was a large bath made of porphyry marble which was a material highly prized by Roman Emperors for its royal colour of purple plus its rarity and durability. However, the mosaic below was of more interest to me. As you can see from the battling centaurs in the foreground, the theme is decidedly mythological.

Moving round the large mosaic, an assortment of Mer-men and Mer-creatures came into view. In the first image below, the familiar Hippocampus on the right looks on at a Triton perhaps subduing the other beast with a rope. The second image presents a similar scene but with no Hippocampus and more of these creatures which do not look like any horse, bull, lion or leopard.

Zooming in on five of these creatures around the mosaic, they have their similarities, but also their differences. The feature that may strike cryptozoological readers are the necks of these beasts which are longer and thinner than the previous creatures. Certainly, these are more in line with reports of sea serpents and lake cryptids. All of them have manes which suggests the Romans regarded them as more more mammalian than reptilian (as far as the Romans understood modern taxonomies). They also all possess the usual coiled hind parts.

Note the last image contains another Hippocampus alongside another of those longer necked animal. In fact, these five non-Hippocamp creatures can be divided into three types:

• Creature 1 (images 1 and 5 (right)) - creature with extended fin-like forelimbs.
• Creature 2 (images 2 and 4) - creature with webbed claws and wings on back.
• Creature 3 - (image 3) - creature with webbed claws and finned upper limb.

Of course, we are not going to use these images to classify them zoologically as there are elements of mythology. biology and artistic license in all of them. Can we say that these three creatures are aquatic representations of land animals as per the first mosaic we examined? It is not clear what land animals they may simulate. Creature 2 has the horns of a Capricorn in image 2 but is winged in image 4, while creature 3 has a Griffin-like look with its beaked head but no wings. One cannot presume there was a standard to which they all held, but neither would one presume it was a chaotic free for all.

CRYPTID ASSESSMENT

But did these creatures have any basis in biological reality? Taking the sceptical view, one may argue that they are no more real than the hybrid-humans in the form of tritons and nereids that rode them. Very few believe that mermaids are real animals, so why should these hybrids be any different? The conclusion would be that Greek and Roman mythology took a symmetric view of creation where similar animals inhabited the seas as the familiar ones that inhabited dry land.

Moreover, of necessity, these gods of the seas and rivers were going to need some form of animal to provide them with transport, whether it was on the animal's back or hooked up to a sea chariot. Sceptical interpretations will take things further by attaching psychological and figurative interpretations to the given creature such as making it a symbolic expression of some aspect of human nature, society or the sea's chaotic nature. It is not clear whether the Romans would recognise these more abstract interpretations.

In that light, one has to ask what the Romans (and Greeks) thought of these marine creatures? Looking back at the first mosaic, the four creatures move between their water god on one side and the dolphins and fish on the other side. This gives the impression of a set of creatures moving between the natural and supernatural. But were these hybrids ever detached from the supernatural and depicted in more natural settings?

The Romans would produce artwork showing sea life in more familiar surroundings. The mosaic below from the Naples Archaeological Museum shows the diverse lifeforms that Romans would capture in their fishing nets. Would you anticipate seeing a Hippocampus in this depiction? I don't think they were expecting to capture one in their nets and neither would they want to unless they wanted their boat smashed to pieces.

Looking at other images, The first below is a fresco from Naples showing the previously mentioned Mer-Griffin swimming between dolphins with no gods in sight. The second fresco (from the same villa) shows a Hippocamp in a similar situation. In the third image below, the Vatican Museum had a striking sculpture of a dolphin being attacked by another Mer-Griffin as we see it biting into the dolphin's dorsal fin. So we could deduce from these that the owners and artists regarded these creatures as being as natural as the dolphins beside them.

 

Moving to the classical writers of that period, we see these animals mentioned in the epic poems such as the Iliad and the Argonautica (from which the film "Jason and the Argonauts" was based). If one reads more historical documents such as the works of Pliny the Elder (c.AD 23-79), we get some idea on how they viewed sea life. In Pliny's "Naturalis Historia" is a chapter entitled "The names of all the animals that exist in the sea" (XXXII:53). He enumerates one hundred and seventy six types of creature found in that environment. In fact, he asserts:

And yet, by Hercules! in the sea and in the Ocean, vast as it is, there exists nothing that is unknown to us, and, a truly marvellous fact, it is with those things which Nature has concealed in the deep that we are the best acquainted! To begin then with the monsters that are found in this element. We here find sea-trees, physeters, balænæ, pistrices, tritons, nereids, elephants, the creatures known as seamen, sea-wheels, oreæ, sea-rams, musculi, other fish too with the form of rams, dolphins, sea-calves, ...

It is a bold man that declares that everything has been discovered. The fact that the sequence of names that followed is still not fully translated leaves what they did know as unknown to us. Pliny makes no mention of the Hippocampus here yet does mention the tritons and nereids. Indeed, in an earlier chapter (IX:4), he recounts a tale of one seen:

A deputation of persons from Olisipo, that had been sent for the purpose, brought word to the Emperor Tiberius that a triton had been both seen and heard in a certain cavern, blowing a conch-shell, and of the form under which they are usually represented. Nor yet is the figure generally attributed to the nereids at all a fiction; only in them, the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales.

The French naturalist, Georges Cuvier, once the number of potential marine candidates had been exhausted, dismissed such a story as fraudulent. Whatever creature was reported to Tiberius, it was not the type of triton represented in mosaics and statues as it had full body scales. Another creature mentioned is the sea-calf or the vitulus. This can also be translated as the bull-calf and is identified as a species of seal by commentators. Did the ancients regard its fully grown male version as the Taurocampus? The fish that is described as like a ram also sounds interesting, but again Cuvier says such instances may be a species of dolphin (despite the dolphin having its own Latin word, delphinus).

Pliny does mention the word hippocampus elsewhere when being used as an ingredient in various remedies for illness, though one concludes the familiar little seahorse is in view there. All in all, the vagaries of what the Latin words may mean adds some difficulties, but if Pliny admitted to tritons swimming the seas of the Empire, how much more their steeds, the Hippocampi?

As we have seen already, researchers like Cuvier came along centuries later with their interpretations. Back in 1965, Bernard Heuvelmans published "Le Grand Serpent-de-Mer" with an examination of Sea Serpent reports that he grouped into nine categories, one of which was the Merhorse and so the Hippocampus was reborn. Heuvelmans' depiction of this category in his book is depicted below.

He describes it as possessing "a long floating mane", having a "slender medium length or long neck" plus "only one dorsal curve". To this he adds "very big eyes" and "long hairs or whiskers on the face". Of the 358 cases he analysed, Heuvelmans states that 37 were of this category of creature which puts it at 10.3% of all sightings, second only to the other category of generic long-neckers at 13.4%. He further thought it to rarely exceed sixty feet in length and mainly inhabited the depths between 50 and 100 fathoms (90-180m).

When one looks at Heuvelmans' global map of how these cases are distributed, it became apparent that the majority of the Merhorse cases occur in a cluster off the coast of Western Canada where the famous "Cadbororsaurus" is reputed to inhabit. The other reports cluster off North East Australia and the Atlantic coasts of Norway, Scotland and Ireland. The Romans may have engaged with some of these northern cultures, but the Hippocamp genre was long established closer to Rome as evidenced by images of them in the Eastern Mediterranean civilizations going back to at least the 6th century BC.

So people have claimed to have seen Hippocamp-type creatures in modern times, but not near their Mediterranean birthplace. We should not be expecting much in eyewitness reports on papyrus or tablets two thousand years later, but I am not sure how many there are from that region in recent years? However, the Hippocamp comes across as a universal creature and like the water horse stories from Scotland which preceded the modern reports of strange creatures in some Loch Ness and others, I suspect there is or was a kernel of biological truth to those old statues depicting webbed hooves creatures of the deep.

I include those strange long necked animals from the Vatican Museum in this view and certainly we have more instances of reports of Heuvelmans' generic long necked sea serpent from around the Mediterranean. So were and are these mainly mythological or biological? Did they inhabit the seas or the mind? I'll leave everyone to form their own opinion.

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The Rise of the AI Generated Nessie Book

 

In my review of 2024 a few days back, I mentioned only one book of note that was published that year and that was Adrian Shine's book on Sea Serpents. However, I had also ordered two books published towards the end of the year which I wanted to take a closer look at.

In fact, if one looks at the 2024 titles on Amazon, I estimated that 20 books had been published that related to the Loch Ness Monster. I would say that these sub-divided into three categories. The first is the majority market aimed at children which I reckoned was 9 titles. Then there was the second category of fiction aimed at a wider audience which came in at 6 titles. That left 5 titles which would be described as non-fiction as they aimed to talk about the monster itself and the places and persons associated with it.

The two titles reviewed here are by Gary Ogden and Thomas Shelton. The other three were skipped mainly due to cost, but also a feeling based on the first two that I would be wasting my money on them. If you are interested in them, the authors are Bezaire, Jensen and Summers. I maintain a list of Nessie books which can be found at this link, the question was whether these would make it onto that list?

LEGENDS OF LOCH NESS

Let me look first at "Legends of Loch Ness" by Thomas Shelton. It is a small sized paperback of 120 pages with no pictures whose Amazon description says:

Journey into the heart of Scotland's most enduring mystery with Legends of Loch Ness: Folklore and the Monster that Captivates. Author Thomas Shelton masterfully unravels the stories, myths, and scientific pursuits that have surrounded the Loch Ness Monster for centuries. From ancient Celtic tales of water spirits to modern-day sonar expeditions, this captivating exploration delves into how Nessie has become a global phenomenon, symbolizing humanity's fascination with the unknown.

Shelton combines historical records, eyewitness accounts, and cultural analysis to paint a vivid picture of how the legend has evolved over time. Whether you're a skeptic or a true believer, this book invites you to explore the intersection of myth, mystery, and science in one of the world's most enigmatic natural landscapes.

Perfect for folklore enthusiasts, cryptid hunters, and those curious about the stories that shape our world, Legends of Loch Ness reveals why the legend of Nessie continues to inspire and intrigue us all.

Reading through this book was a bit of a strange experience as it did not feel like a book I would normally look at on this subject. For starters, despite mentioning eyewitness reports, films, photographs, people and organisations, it was very light on naming any of them. In fact, with one exception which I shall come back to later, only three people were mentioned. These were St. Columba and the first tale of a monster, Neil Gemmell with his recent eDNA survey and Kenneth Wilson of the famous Surgeon's Photograph.

In terms of any discussion on an eyewitness event, only the Surgeon's Photograph got any extended text which was all focused on how it was a hoax. As the book moved in and out of the subjects of cryptozoology, scepticism, folklore, culture, ecology and tourism, there was a lot of general statements and little of the specific. Indeed, as one read through the twelve chapters, there was a good deal of repetition - as if each chapter was written by separate individuals without any cross-referencing to other chapters. 

There was a lot of talk about conservation and ecology around the loch with the claim that even guided tours were now beginning to emphasise this subject more to paying tourists. I can't say I have been aware of such a ramp up. In that light, we read that the Loch Ness Centre exhibition is focused on such matters with ecology and science. This was sounding more like the previously curated exhibition than the current one!

This is where the book began to state things which were simply not true. For example, it mentioned that the locals celebrate the culture of the monster with the annual "Loch Ness Monster Festival". I have no idea what this festival is!

It then surveys the various documentaries made on the subject and mentions one called "The Loch Ness Monster: A 50-year Mystery" which allegedly informs us of "modern scientific exploration" and also the inevitable Surgeon's Photo hoax. However the title clearly implies it was made 50 years after the Nessie phenomenon began in 1933, in other words 1983! I doubt a 41-year old documentary will bring us up to date with modern scientific exploration and the Surgeon's Photo would not be exposed as a hoax until ten years after this alleged documentary was made.

The fabrications continued with a reference to another documentary entitled "Nessie: The Environmental Impact". I am aware of no such documentary and I doubt any such production would be made as it looks like a surefire loss making project. The confusion was exacerbated when the late great racer John Cobb, who was killed at Loch Ness in 1952, was referred to as an artist when discussing Loch Ness culture!

Furthermore, I am still trying to understand what the book means by the interplays between ecology and folklore? The errors continue down to minor levels when the book states that the loch attracts millions of visitors each year. The press releases I see from tourist agencies puts the annual maximum at about half a million.

I did mention one eyewitness report that is mentioned on page 106 of the book. This allegedly involved a fisherman by the name of Alastair D. McNab in 1975 when a "long, serpentine" Nessie surfaced near his boat. We are told this was such a "life-altering moment" for Gray that he became a noted researcher and advocate for the monster. Let me say that there was no such person or sighting!

The format and errors in the book could only lead me to one conclusion. This was a book whose text was largely generated by an Artificial Intelligence program such as ChatGPT but had not been properly fact checked afterwards by a human. The repetitive nature of each chapter suggested each one was the result of a separate chat session with the AI program. 

As for the blatant untruths, one can only put these down to the textual equivalent of AI art programs that draw hands with six fingers or people with three legs. In other words, these technologies are still developing and not at the accuracy and finesse to make them indistinguishable from an exclusively human production.

Is the human author actually called Thomas Shelton? There are two long dead authors called Thomas Shelton. One was a famed stenographer who died around 1650. The other was a contemporary who translated Cervantes' "Don Quixote" into English.  One can only describe this Nessie book as quixotic and I note Shelton has also published a short work on the Cadborosaurus under the same publisher "Revitalized Occult and Strange".

THE TIMELESS MYSTERY OF LOCH NESS

With all this in mind, I approached the second book by a Gary Ogden with some caution. The title is "Nessie: The Timeless Mystery of Loch Ness" and is shorter than the former book, though this is reflected in the price. The Amazon page does feature a photograph of the author who is listed as having over a dozen titles to his name, so perhaps this book was more human than the other?

This book does come with pictures, but every one looks AI-generated. There are no pictures of a historical or contemporary nature displaying the history of the mystery. However, I am glad to say that this book looks a lot more homo sapiens. Given the 64 pages of text and its lowish word count per page, it is not going to go into great detail and is very much an introductory text that I later found out was aimed at a more teenage audience.

Nevertheless, the text flows much better in this book, though it contains errors of varying degrees, such as the claim that there were further medieval references to the monster after St Columba. Sadly, no further references to the monster between the 5th and 15th centuries are known. 

Ogden's handling of the Spicer land sighting has some errors. He says it occurred on the north side A82 road whereas it actually happened on the quieter southern side road. He further states the creature appeared as they rounded a bend. It actually came into view as the Spicers were on a straight stretch of road. Apart from that, he is right in stating that this was the event that propelled the monster from a local to national and international sensation.

The author continues to take us through the later decades as the familiar names of Dinsdale, the LNIPB, Robert Rines and Operation Deepscan are mentioned. However, I was somewhat disappointed that not much was said beyond the Spicers about specific eyewitness reports. Not surprisingly, the hoax of the Surgeon's Photograph got its usual large section.

As would be expected, chapters on the various theories about the creature and the culture surrounding it are discussed. That was where my knowledge failed me when it was stated that Genesis and Taylor Swift had mentioned Nessie in their lyrics. Perhaps someone could enlighten me on that. The author's explanation of how the creature and the national identity of Scotland are intertwined is interesting but debatable. How much does the mythos of Nessie reflect the national psyche? 

The main problem with this book is chapters 10 and 11 which are both titled "The Future of Nessie: Will the Legend endure?". This is because they are practically the same text with the same sub-headings but worded in a different manner. One of these chapters is redundant, making 10% of the book redundant. How could such a basic error in proof reading be made? Was it because AI tools were used and were not up to the job? I don't believe a freelance author would allow this to pass on a human inspection.

It was a pity, because the book as an introduction to a younger audience stood up fairly well, which brings me to a time almost fifty years ago.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

In terms of publications on the Loch Ness Monster for a younger audience, Tim Dinsdale's "The Story of the Loch Ness Monster" remains the archetypal book. It was first published in 1973 and had at least one other run in 1974. How do you compare two types of books from two different generations? They have their pros and cons, but the current world of self-publishing suffers from the lack of resources that Tim enjoyed. The errors highlighted today would not have got past a professional publishing house like Target.

Likewise, the cover shows that publishers could call upon talented artists to render eye candy covers that still remain with us to this day. Can the same be said of the plethora of AI-generated images today? Dinsdale's book is multiple times bigger and came with its glossy photo sections and a lot of sketches inserted between paragraphs. Likewise, it was not shy to get into the material that matters as he recounted various eyewitness reports, photos and films as well as the people who pursued the creature.

Of course, the book is fifty years out of date. We now know about the Surgeon's Photo (although Dinsdale did not devote multiple pages to it like modern authors do), we know about the problems with other items of claimed evidence but what more do you expect from a sceptic-dominated field? Books today would be updated concerning sonar, webcams, drones, digital imagery and psychology. However, these are all a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. The main engine has always been the corpus of eyewitness testimonies and will remain so.

So by all means find a well written modern book for today's youth, but I suggest you also give them Dinsdale's book for balance.

WHAT ABOUT AI?

But today, AI-based tools present a problem. Maybe it's just my Facebook feed, but the flood of AI generated images now makes me doubt a lot of the pictures I see - and I am referring to such things as normal wildlife images, not ones allegedly of Nessie! The vast majority of AI Nessie images come straight out of the Dragon category and make no attempt (yet) to look like a convincing tourist snap or video. 

The main factors driving the AI industry are profit-driven and that means creating tools which replace humans from the entry-level job up. In that they are succeeding to the point where they will almost match everything people do. The publication errors mentioned here will eventually be ironed out. What will come last is genuine artificial but creative thinking rather than just vast number of texts scraped from the Internet and stitched together in a legible manner.

Back in the 1970s, we also had a lot of publications which in some way mimic these modern books. They were called "boilerplate" books which referred to their unoriginality or cliched texts. By that we mean they tended to be written by authors who had no real experience of the given subject and just regurgitated that which had been said by those in the field. The ultimate motive was to cash in on a hot subject where almost any kind of book would generate worthwhile revenues,

The blocker to such books into the 1980s and onwards was a lack of interest by publishers in a no longer hot topic. The advent of self-publishing changed that and the boilerplate book was back, albeit with little chance of making the same kind of money as fifty years earlier. The ease of publishing now allied with an artificially intelligent companion to speed up the generation of words is a potent mix that leads to books which largely have nothing of substance.

So why produce them? The answer may well lie in the economy of scale. Self-publishing and AI gives the human author the scope to push out many more books across a wide range of topics they have little expertise in. Why try to produce and sell a book for £20 when you can produce 20 smaller ones which sell for £1? Even if the text is not 100% AI-generated, the AI tools at the author's disposal can still produce a lot of raw material for final assembly and editing.

So, if you were not aware already, tread a bit more warily in the world of modern cryptozoological literature. Check the reviews, check the author's pedigree and solicit the opinions of others on the usual well-known discussion forums. But the best approach is to give truthful reviews, be they positive or negative so that the author will respond accordingly.

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com