Pausanias Analysis

I also saw another Triton among the marvelous sights of the Romans, smaller in size than the one at Tanagra. Tritons have an appearance as follows: upon their heads is hair resembling that of marsh frogs, similar in color and in that none of the individual hairs can be separated from the others. The rest of their bodies are covered by thin scales, as rough as those found on a shark. Beneath their ears they possess gills, the nose is like that of a human, but the mouth is wider and furnished with teeth like those of a wild beast. Their eyes seem to me to be greenish-grey. They have hands, fingers and nails shaped similarly to the shells of sea-snails. From beneath their chest and belly extends a tail instead of feet, like those of dolphins.

I saw also Ethiopian bulls, which are called rhinoceros from their distinctive feature: each has one horn at the tip of the nose and another smaller one above it, but on the head there are no horns at all. I saw also bulls from Paeonia—these Paeonian bulls are shaggy over their entire body, particularly around the chest and the jaw. I also saw Indian camels colored similarly to leopards.

There is an animal called the elk, shaped somewhat between a deer and a camel, which lives in the land of the Celts. Of all the animals we know, it alone cannot be tracked or seen beforehand by man, though hunters sent out in pursuit of other game are sometimes led by divine fortune to capture the elk as well. For the elk senses the odor of man even from a great distance and, as people say, immediately withdraws into the steepest ravines and caverns. Therefore, whenever hunters, forming a circle around a plain of about a thousand stades or even encircling a mountain, draw very close to one another, they never break their formation, but always continuously narrowing their circle, they capture all animals enclosed inside, including the elk itself. But if it does not happen to dwell within the area thus enclosed, there is no other possible way to take an elk.

The beast described in Ctesias' account of India—called by the Indians a martichora, but by the Greeks, he says, a man-eater—I am convinced was the tiger. As for the claim that it has triple rows of teeth on each jaw and spines on the tip of its tail, with which it strikes nearby targets and shoots at distant ones as accurately as a bowman with an arrow, that story, it seems to me, is an untrue report passed among the Indians themselves out of their great fear of the beast.

They were deceived also regarding its color; when the tiger appeared to them in sunlight, due to the brightness it seemed both red and of uniform color, either because of its swiftness or—if it were not running—due to its continual turning about, especially since their observation was not made at close quarters. I suppose indeed that if someone from Libya, India, or the land of the Arabs went to the farthest extremes with the intent of discovering all the animals found among the Greeks, he would find some not existing at all there, and others appearing to him not quite as they are described.

Indeed, it is not only mankind that acquires a variety of forms according to the differing qualities of air and earth, but other creatures would experience the same effect as well. For even among wild beasts, the snakes in Libya differ from those in Egypt in respect to their coloring; and in Ethiopia the land nurtures snakes that are black, no less than it does humans. Therefore, one should neither adopt a hasty judgment nor display skepticism toward rarer phenomena. Indeed, although I myself have not seen winged serpents, I find it credible that they exist; for I do trust that a Phrygian man brought into Ionia a scorpion having wings closely resembling those of a locust.