Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson
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to those who engaged in the strange hunts for these powerful animals. He spent large sums of money on this hobby, and collected a considerable number of war elephants; moreover he acquainted the Greek world with other strange and unheard of animals.”13 Philadelphus’s giraffe, exhibited before the world that winter’s day in the third decade of the third century before Christ, was one of those “strange and unheard of animals.”
Giraffes, in truth, were so strange and unheard of that neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians knew what to call them, and so the Greeks were forced to invent a name.
The difficulty of choosing a name for this creature was like that of naming anything that appears strikingly outside the usual categories—like, for example, naming an unusual sound or a peculiar smell. Without the guidance of comparative examples or rational categories, one resorts to creative metaphor.
The namers of Philadelphus’s giraffe could have been the leaders of an early capture expedition to the south. Perhaps they were Greek translators chatting casually with Egyptian crew members on an elephant boat transporting the just-captured animal north on the Red Sea. Whoever they were, the namers would have had the same problem—what do you call something that defies the known categories?—and so they named him using the most telling associations they could think of. The creature had a rather camel-like face, and he seemed tall and lanky like a camel. At the same time he had those peculiar spots. Not at all like a camel. More like a leopard.
They called this new animal a camel-leopard—or, as the English translators more often represent it, a camelopard. And since the Greeks, like the rest of us, had trouble distinguishing a figure of speech from a figure of fact, they came to imagine that camelopards were the natural product of a camel mating with a leopard. They were hybrids in name and fact, fantastic chimeras taken from the depths of sub-Saharan Africa.
The Greek historian and geographer Agatharchides of Cnidus, writing around 104 BC, refers to giraffes in his natural history of human tribes and exotic animals living in the harsh regions west of the Red Sea. His original text was lost, but not before later authors extracted passages, such as the reference to giraffes as animals “which the Greeks call camelopardalis, a composite name which describes the double nature of this quadruped. It has the varied coat of a leopard, the shape of a camel and is of a size beyond measure. Its neck is long enough for it to browse in the tops of trees.”14
Strabo of Ephesus, however, writing in the next century (and citing the work of a geographer named Artemidorus, whose work has been lost) insisted that “camelopards . . . are in no respect like leopards”:
for the dappled marking of their skin is more like that of a fawnskin, which latter is flecked with spots, and their hinder parts are so much lower than their front parts that they appear to be seated on their tail parts, which have the height of an ox, although their forelegs are no shorter than those of camels; and their necks rise high and straight up, their heads reaching much higher than those of camels. On account of this lack of symmetry the speed of the animal cannot, I think, be so great as stated by Artemidorus, who says that its speed is not to be surpassed. Furthermore, it is not a wild beast but rather a domesticated animal, for it shows no signs of wildness.15
Strabo was wrong, of course, in insisting that giraffes are domestic animals. But he was right in recognizing their gentleness. And his second error, that they are not especially fast runners, confirms the already obvious fact that he never saw a giraffe running free. Still, the overall precision and self-assurance of Strabo’s description do suggest that he had either seen a live giraffe—albeit one in captivity—or spoken at length with someone who had.
If so, which giraffe might that be?
Strabo traveled widely in the eastern Mediterranean; he came to Rome around 44 BC, and he took part in a Roman expedition up the Nile into southern Egypt in 25–24 BC—just a few years after Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, committed suicide, thereby ending the rule of the Greeks. Egypt became a Roman colony. But Cleopatra, during a happier time and following the fashion that originated with Philadelphus two centuries earlier, probably kept exotic animals on the palace grounds in Alexandria. Perhaps Strabo saw one of Cleopatra’s giraffes, after she was gone and Romans were occupying the palace. . . . Or perhaps Strabo was in some way familiar with the live giraffe Julius Caesar displayed in Rome as part of his 46 BC triumph, which happened while Cleopatra was still alive: Caesar’s guest in Rome while still Egypt’s queen.
Romans had by then become accustomed to seeking live animals for their increasingly grand and fantastically bloody animal spectacles. Exotic live animals thus became part of the normal economic exchange between Rome and her colonial empire. From the colonial wildernesses, then, specimens were routinely captured, caged or otherwise restrained, placed on any available boats, and shipped to Rome.16 Giraffes, though, only came into the Mediterranean from Egypt, taken as ever from far to the south—Ethiopia, for instance—and passed as usual down the Nile, portaged across the cataracts, brought into the country as a prize for the royal collection in Alexandria. To be sure, Caesar’s soldiers could have acquired one directly, from a commercial or diplomatic exchange with people to the south of Egypt. But I agree with biographer Stacy Schiff author of Cleopatra: A Life (2011), who argues that the Egyptian queen herself was probably the original owner of Caesar’s giraffe.17
Cleopatra left for Rome in the summer of 46 BC, transported, along with her and Caesar’s one-year-old son, Ptolemy Caesar, plus essential servants, in a naval galley: likely a swift-running 120-foot trireme powered by square-rigged sails and 170 oarsmen. The royal boat proceeded out of the Alexandrian harbor accompanied by a grand flotilla of supporting vessels, enough to transport the royal retinue and bodyguard and a large personal and institutional staff—astrologers, priests, philosophers, advisors, physicians, secretaries, cooks, and so on—as well as loads of personal effects and opulent gifts of the sort one would expect from the world’s wealthiest person, the great monarch of a great civilization, an official goddess, and Julius Caesar’s lover. Those royal gifts could very well have included a giraffe.
His size was about that of a camel; his skin, like that of a leopard, was decorated with spots in a floral pattern. His hindquarters and belly were low and like a lion’s; the shoulders, forefeet and chest were of a height out of all proportion to the other members. The neck was slender, and tapered from the large body to a swanlike throat. The head was shaped like a camel’s and was almost twice as large as that of a Libyan ostrich. The eyes were brightly outlined and rolled terribly. His heaving walk was unlike the pace of any land or sea animal. He did not move his legs alternatively, one after the other, but first put forward his two right legs by themselves, and then the two left, as if they were yoked together. Thus first one side of the animal was raised, and then the other. Yet so docile was his movement and so gentle his disposition that the keeper could lead him by a light cord looped around his neck, and he obeyed the keeper’s guidance as if the cord were an irresistible chain. The appearance of this creature astonished the entire multitude, and extemporizing a name for it from the dominant traits of his body they called it camelopard. –HELIODORUS, CA. AD 220
Cleopatra should have been satisfactorily ensconced in Caesar’s country estate, just outside the city walls, by the time the Roman dictator opened his eleven days of triumph, on September 21. The festivities consisted of grand parades, enormous feasts, spectacular entertainments, bloody gladiatorial contests, horse races, forty elephants lighting up the night with forty flaming torches held in their trunk tips, lions by the hundreds, leopards, panthers, baboons, monkeys, flamingoes, ostriches, parrots . . . and one giraffe.
The clearest report we have of that tall and undulatory beauty, the first of his or her kind ever to set foot on the European continent, comes from the poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BC), who chided his fellow Romans as “a throng gazing with open mouth” taking foolish pleasure in the spectacle, particularly Caesar’s giraffe, which was “a beast half camel, half panther.”18 Caesar climaxed that memorable presentation, unfortunately, with blood: sacrificing the giraffe to hungry lions in an arena.
Later Roman worthies would parade a few more giraffes before the plebeian masses—ten of them together in the circus of AD 247,