Giraffes and Barnacles: Pliny's Monstrous Zoology
Dunstan Lowe
University of Cambridge
dl285@cam.ac.uk
What did the Romans make of outlandish creatures like nautiluses and chameleons? This paper draws together the evidence, to argue that the ancient zoological imagination (epitomized by Pliny the Elder's attempt to inventory the world comprehensively) is essentially conservative, and that its centripetal habits of thought - analogy and simile - reflect the world-views of the Empire and of ancient science itself. The Natural History has long been a treasury of fact and anecdote, but recently critics have begun analyzing how the author, and his culture, imagined and appropriated the exotic. James Romm has touched on the parallel between ancient imperializing expeditions and their texts (1992: 84) and Gian Biagio Conte has described how Pliny's project privileges humanity as the center and model of the natural world (1994). I bring this out using examples of Plinian zoology and biology, applying theories of imagining the unfamiliar developed in scholarship on 'the grotesque' (e.g. Harpham 1982).
As Trevor Murphy (2004) demonstrates, Pliny's world is founded on tactics of analogy and simile. In mysterious territories this strategy is most evident and, even more revealingly, sometimes breaks down. I analyze his maneuvers in three regions: in the alien East, under the Ocean, and inside the female body. In the first, he treats strange creatures (particularly the giraffe and chameleon: Book 8); in the second, a subaqueous parallel world (with its own vegetables, sheep, wolves, and people: Book 9); and in the third, the 'blob' (i.e. fetuses, molae and other shapeless life-forms). In these realms, Pliny applies similes and analogies to 'think', and therefore annex, the monstrous and incomprehensible. His accounts of freakish life-forms reveal a conservative, centripetal mentality, both as a natural historian, and an elite male Roman of a universal Empire. Fitting gorillas and sea-monsters to conceptual 'templates' is the procedure for 'colonizing' the unfamiliar.