Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/657

 Musewns and Raree Shows in Antiquity. 347

the shield in those days was certainly regarded as genuine, and could still inspire dread in the hereditary foes of its whilom owner.

A curiosity to be seen in Rome were the tusks of the Calydonian boar which the Emperor Augustus carried off from the Temple of Athena at Tegea. Pausanias tells us : ^ "As to the boar's tusks the keepers of the curiosities say that one of them is broken, but the remaining one is pre- served in the imperial gardens, and is just half a fathom long." He adds that the boar's hide was still exhibited in the temple at Tegea : " It is rotting away with age, and is now quite bare of bristles." He is much more scornful about the tusks of the Erymanthine boar preserved at Cumae, stating flatly : " The assertion is without a shred of probability." ^

In Rome, too, was the skeleton of the sea monster who wished to devour Andromeda : it had been brought from Joppa,^ where the chain which bound the maiden was still preserved.^

The imperial gardens at Rome contained other attractions than the tusks of the Calydonian boar, for they seem to have included a kind of zoological garden where were many rare and curious beasts. Pausanias relates : " I saw white deer at Rome, and very much surprised was I to see them.^ I saw, too, the Ethiopic bulls which they call rhinoceroses, because they have each a horn (keras) on the tip of the nose [rhis], and another smaller horn above the first, but on their heads they have no horns at all. I saw also Paeonian bulls : they are shaggy all over. And I saw Indian camels in colour like leopards." *^ From the name Ethiopian bulls which Pausanias applies to the animal, it

1 Pausanias, viii. 46. i and 5; Callim., Hym. in Dian., 218 ff. ; cf. Procopius, Bell. Goth., i. 15. p. 7713; Lucian, De indoct., 14. - Pausanias, viii. 24. 5. ^ Pliny, N.H., ix. 11.

'' Josephus, Bell. Jud., iii. 420. ^ Pausanias, viii. 17. 4.


 * Pausanias, ix. 21. 2.