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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