User:Levana Taylor/True account of the life, death, and of the bones of the giant Teutobocus

''A true account of the life, death, and of the bones of the giant Teutobocus, king of the Teutones, Cimbri, and Ambrones, who was defeated 105 years before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He was defeated with his army, which numbered four hundred thousand combatants, by Marius, the Roman consul, and buried near a castle named Chaumont, now Langon, near the town of Romans, in the Dauphiné.  There his tomb was found, thirty feet long, on which his name was written in Roman letters, and the bones taken from it exceed 25 feet, there being one of the teeth of the same weighing 11 pounds, as in truth you will be shown them in that town, entirely monstrous in both height and thickness.'' ''At Lyon, Jean Poyet, 1613. With permission.''

Among all the effects which Nature, that great mother and maker of all things, has ever produced under Heaven, the enormous size of certain persons, vulgarly called giants, has always held the first rank in the theater of marvels; to which is witness the Holy Scriptures, in the description of the destruction of that tower of confusion, namely the tower of Babel; witness are the poets in their gigantomachies, witness is the wonder with which the historians describe these strange colossi, witness finally is the etymology of their name "giant", which means nothing other than son of the earth; as if it would not have been in the power of men to engender them; which caused Juvenal to say:

Unde fit ut malim fraterculus esse gigantum. [Hence it is, that I had rather be a little brother of the giants. (trans. Martin Madan)]

Meaning, of a race as obscure and unknown as if produced by the earth alone; and, what is more, those who did not wish to creep so low dared to assert that their progenitors were none other than genii and demons, as if that begetting were impossible to men, and as if Nature had no other recourse to raise so high these strange colossi. Is it not very probable that that great architecture could provide them with an extreme heat and humor together, true instruments and true causes of that enormous size, and by that means put into practice the axiom: Operatur natura quantum, et quandiu potest [Nature works as largely and as far as she can], without, however, making any leap ab extremis ad extrema : natura enim in suis operationibus non facit saltum. [from extremes to extremes: for Nature in her works does not make leaps].

It is thus true, both that there could have been giants on earth, and that they could have had men for their progenitors, not only before the deluge, but likewise long after; and in that connection, before passing to profane sources, the learned St. Augustine argues for me, when he recounts that a little before the ruin of Rome by the Goths, there was in that city a woman of the size of a giant, whose parents did not surpass the common measure of the stature of other men. And indeed, whence would have been engendered Goliath, from what heaven would Og, king of Basan, have fallen; the first being six cubits and a span in height, according to Samuel, and the bed of the second, which was of iron, being nine cubits long, the cubit, according to the reckoning of the Greeks, being two feet, and according to the Romans, a foot and a half? Furthermore, do I not see the Israelites seem like grasshoppers in the sight of the sons of Anak? Do I not hear all antiquity pronounce against those who, by a more than earthly arrogance, dare to deny that men of such size have ever walked the earth? In the first instance, Plutarch, in the heart of antiquity, relates that Sertorius, having entered the town of Tingis, in which the Libyans had told him the body of Antaeus was, which he could not believe because of the size of the grave, had it opened, and finding the body of a man thirty cubits long, was greatly astonished, and after making sacrifice on it, had the grave reclosed. Pliny will give us the second, saying that in Crete, now named Candia, a great earthquake having occurred, and a mountain having been thrown down, the body of an upright man was found, being forty-six cubits, which some thought was that of Orion, and others that of Otus. Philostratus, in his Heroicus, describes for us three of at least the like size, with no less wonder, the skull roof of one of which he recounts not being able to fill up with 72 Cretan pints of wine. [Here follows another page and a half of citations from classical sources, which are all discussed in Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. L.T.]

But why do I take such pains to represent before your eyes those great bodies as if by an image, since M. Langon, a gentleman from the Dauphiné, has discovered a real and natural one on his lands, which all France has before its eyes; one, I say, which, if not sixty cubits high, like Antaeus; if not forty-six, like Orion and others, nonetheless cannot fail to seize with great wonder those who have the fortune to see it, at the very least the principal bones, whose size give us the measure of his height, causing the eye to judge him at least twenty feet tall; the thigh and shin bone, joined together before they were broken, now come to nine feet, although denuded of the foot joints and like things. But let us not merely inquire what his size is, let us seek what his name may be. Besides that the name Teutobocus was found on his grave, Florus will inform you of it in his Book III, chapter 3, on the war with the Cimbri, Teutones, and Tigurini, describing his extraordinary height, in which he much surpassed the trophies, and that he passed over four and six horses.

Certe Rex ipse Theutobocus quaternos senosque equos transilire solitus, vix unum cum fugeret ascendit, proximoque in saltu comprehensus insigne spectaculum triumphi fuit, quippe vir proceritatis eximia super trophea ipsa eminebat. [Their king himself, Teutobochus, who was accustomed to vault over four or six horses at once, could scarcely mount one when he fled, and being taken prisoner in the neighboring forest, was a remarkable object in the triumph, for, being a man of extraordinary stature, he towered above the trophies themselves. (trans. John Selby Watson.)]

But with the aim of searching history a bit more closely, it can be discovered that in the 652nd year of the founding of Rome, and the 105th before the incarnation of our Savior, the Cimbri, Teutones, Tigurini, and Ambrones, leaving their country, either because of the ravages which the ocean had made flooding their lands, as Florus says, or with the resolution to overthrow and destroy the entire Roman empire, as Orosius says, or with some other intention and goal, having built up a great and numerous army, came to attack the camp of Marius, placed not far from the confluence of the Rhone and the Isère, and, after having fought for several days, and forming three companies, some of them took the road for Italy and gave Marius the leisure to change his camp and locate it in a more advantageous place, establishing it on a little hill above the enemies; this having been done, and combat being joined, the victory having remained undecided until mid-day, finally luck turned against the Tigurini and the Ambrones, in such fashion that three thousand having saved themselves with great difficulty, two hundred thousand remained on the field and eighty thousand were made prisoner, among whom their king Teutobocus glorified the trophies by his death. The women, incidentally, not having been able to obtain the freedom which they requested from Marius, and in order to serve their gods, after having dashed their children against the walls, some of them mutually killed each other and some hanged themselves with ropes made from their own hair. And this is what Orosius says in the above-mentioned account. I know well that some, under the authority of Plutarch and Florus, will object that Marius defeated these troops at Aix and Marseilles, and that the citizens of Marseilles even enclosed their vineyards with hedges built of the bones of the dead, so great was the destruction. But in response, the great number of people of which that army was composed demonstrates that Marius did not defeat them all at once; besides that, since we have already said that they divided themselves into three companies, one taking the road for Italy, one closely pressing Marius, it is probable that the third was that which Plutarch says was defeated at Aix and Marseilles; and although Florus confuses the death of Teutobocus with the defeat which Marius caused at Aix, nonetheless, both because they were truly his people, and by the authority of Orosius, and also because we find the size specified by Florus, no one can fail to concede that our giant is the true Teutobocus. And even if we did not have that proof that they were defeated near the castle of Chaumont, now called Langon; by the medals which were found in his tomb, which, besides that the name of Marius is shown on them in the figure, resemble those said to be Marius’ at the amphitheater of Orange, all occasion for doubt is taken away from those who are so obstinate as to not wish to believe that there could still be such giants in our times, those whose hearts and minds are so earthbound. Now, because his name is sufficiently certain, let us speak more particularly of certain other parts of his body, and fulfil the prophecy of Virgil,

Grandiaq’ effossis mirabitur ossa sepulchris. [They will wonder at the great bones dug up from their graves.]

Among the rest, let us not let the teeth escape us; so far from being able to say what the learned Saint Augustine did about the tooth he saw beside the sea in Utica, that it could be judged to be a hundred times larger than any tooth of our age, on the contrary I would dare to double that number in speaking of the least of those of our Teutobocus, each of which entirely resembles, both in shape and in size, the foot of a bull of twenty months; if one may judge of the lion by its claw, I leave you to imagine what sort of mouth like a furnace he must have had; and, in order to shorten my account, leaving aside parts of a rib and a shoulder, similar to other bones which may be easily seen, I will speak only of the thickness of the vertebrae of the backbone, by the dimensions of which you may truly know how high this great body was raised; and I believe that there is no one with any experience in such matters who would not judge him to have surpassed twenty-five feet, each of the vertebrae being much more than a third of a foot thick, even approaching half a foot before being broken. I leave it to the reader to carry out the calculation, there being twenty-eight vertebrae besides the three of the tail, all similar, and I am certain and dare to say that he in no way gives the lie to his tomb, which was found to be thirty feet long.

This much is what I, with my little ability, have been able to tell you of Teutobocus, king, if not of all, at least of a part of the Cimbri, Tigurini, Teutones and Ambrones, found this present year 1613, about seventeen or eighteen feet underground, very close to the castle formerly called Chaumont, now Langon, near a little mound and hill, for the greater glory of God, and after Him in honor of the sieur de Langon.

By his very humble servant, Jacques.

 This piece relates to a singular event which, as we shall see, is more a matter for paleontology than for history; a strange problem, which had to wait more than two centuries for a solution, from 1613 to 1835, and which resulted, in the end, in bones being restored to a mastodon which had been, for two hundred years, given to an imaginary giant! — The discovery took place on January 11, 1613, in the Dauphiné, four leagues from Romans. Men working in a sandpit near the château de Chaumont, property of the marquis de Langon, found, at a depth of 17 or 18 feet, a certain number of bones of great size: the neck of the scapula, two vertebrae, the head of the humerus, a fragment of rib, the thick tibia, the astragalus, the calcaneum, and finally two mandibles, one with a single tooth, the other with an entire tooth, the roots of two others anteriorly, and the fragments of two broken teeth. The discovery, already important, would have been more so if some of the bones had not been broken by the workers or had not fallen to dust as soon as they were exposed to the air. Nowadays science would make no delay in seizing upon such remains; then it was ignorance and charlatanism which appropriated them to themselves. Stories began to circulate; there was talk of a tomb where the bones had been discovered, but of which no trace was ever found again; of medals of Marius found among the bones, and finally of a an inscription in stone consisting of these words: Theutobocus rex. Who was it who chiefly helped to propagate such tales? Two individuals who had taken an interest in the matter right from the start: Mazuyer, a surgeon from Beaurepaire (a nearby town), and David Bertrand or Chenevier, who exercised the function of notary there. The surgeon believed he had the authority to attribute the bones to whomever it suited him, and the notary to legally formalize the certificate of this fine attribution. Mazuyer took part in the creation of a deposition on the subject of the discovery, which, according to M. de Blainville (Echo du monde savant, 1835, p. 234), "itself bears marks of fraud". This document is signed by Mazuyer and by one Guillaume Asselin, sieur de la Gardette, overseer of the manor, as well as by Juvenet, his clerk. Since advertisement was necessary to acquaint the world with the important find on which the surgeon and the notary had placed such fine hopes of fortune, they saw to it. M. de Blainville (id., ibid.) is of the opinion that it was they who forged the details contained in the brochure here reproduced, "the first published on the subject". The brochure had its effect: order came from the king to have the bones of King Teutobocus transported to Paris, and they were sent in all haste, except for "part of the thigh and two teeth", which remained in the hands of the marquis de Langon. This detail, which we find in the Life of Peiresc, by Requier (1770, p. 144), was not known to M. de Blainville. On July 20th, the mysterious reliquary arrived in Paris, and the superintendent of medals and antiquities hastened to give a receipt to Mazuyer and Bertrand (as Chenevier), who had engaged themselves to return the deposit to M. de Langon within eighteen months, unless, to be sure, the king should decide otherwise. The Court was then at Fontainebleau; the bones were taken there, and were the great curiosity of the day: "A few months ago," we read in a letter from Father Millepied to Father Louis Richeome, dated October 8th 1613, "there were brought here from Paris, and placed in the queen’s chamber, the bones of a giant, which were said to be those of Teutobotus (sic), king of the Cimbri, described by Florus. The bone of the shin or the thigh was more than five or six feet high, or thereabouts, and thick in proportion. The king, on seeing them, asked whether there had ever been such large men. He being answered yes : ‘Many such subjects would make a fine army,’ said someone. ‘Yes,’ said the king, ‘but they would soon be the ruin of a country.’" A fragment of this letter, whose interesting testimony has not yet been, as far as I know, invoked as a proof of this story, is found in the Dictionnaire historique of M. de Bonnegarde, in the article on Louis XIII (T. III, p. 227–228). Those who had answered yes, in reference to the possibility of the existence of the giant, were not taken at their word by everyone. In the letter, dated from the offices of the king, which was written to M. de Langon to thank him for sending the bones, the writer did not seem entirely convinced that these fragments were to be identified with the remains of King Teutobocus. He did not positively deny it, but wished to see the medals which had been, so it was said, found in the grave, and also requested the part of the skeleton which had remained at Langon. All this, in our opinion, implies an indirect doubt. The surgeon Habicot did not share it. He took up the cause of his colleague the surgeon from Beaurepaire, and published, with a dedication to the king, Gigantosteology, or the Possibility of Giants. Riolan, who, as a doctor, was obliged not to share an opinion supported by the enemy corporation [the surgeons — L.T.], retorted at once, but without naming himself, with his brochure The Gigantomachy. Riposte of the contrary party: Habicot, or one of his associates, anonymously published the Monomachy; Riolan, piqued, contested more boldly. Just by the title, Revelation of the Fraud of the Human Bones Supposed Those of a Giant, it’s apparent that his second brochure is much sharper and more categorical than his first. Habicot, running short on arguments, then wrote to Mazuyer, who had returned to Beaurepaire, and asked him for the certificates of the discovery, but Mazuyer did not comply. By June of 1618, he had not yet fulfilled Habicot’s request. However, a new champion entered the lists: this was a surgeon named Guillemeau, who published, in 1615, A Discourse in Defense of the Giant. Riolan, staying in the fight, brought forth three years later the central publication in the debate, which time had only served to embitter. With the appearance of the new brochure Gigantology, or a Discourse on Giants, Habicot should have had no choice but to admit defeat, especially since the documentation he was expecting from Mazuyer had not arrived. This he did not do: his Antigigantology, or Counter-Discourse on the Size of Giants proved that he believed more than ever in the infallibility of the cause he was defending. Riolan nonetheless deserved to convince everyone. When he had said, in his latest work, that the bones did not belong to a giant, but rather to an elephant or a whale, he had been very close to the truth. Peiresc had also been of that opinion. (See his Life by Requier, p. 148.) These bones, according to him, were those of an elephant, and he thought that in these sorts of discoveries it was necessary to repeat what Suetonius had said about similar remains found in his own time: "Esse Capreis immanium belluarum, ferarumque praegrandia membra, quae dicuntur gigantum ossa et arma heroum." [At Capri, there were the huge limbs of whales and wild beasts, which some call the bones of giants and the weapons of heroes.] (August., ch. 72.) Silence finally fell on this great dispute; no one spoke again of King Teutobocus and his bones until more than a hundred years later. The matter arises in a letter addressed to the abbé Desfontaines on January 22, 1744, and published in Volume V of his Jugements sur les ouvrages nouveaux. There, half of a leg bone and a tooth are mentioned, still owned by the grandson of the marquis de Langon. It was that part of the bones which had not been sent to Paris, and which Requier has spoken of in the Life of Peiresc. What had become of the rest? We shall find out. In 1832, a naturalist, M. Audoin, being in Bordeaux, learned from one of his colleagues, M. Jouannet, that the bones attributed to King Teutobocus had been in the attic of a house in that town for a very long time. According to tradition, they had been brought there by Mazuyer to be publicly exhibited, but the poor devil, not having made enough to cover his expenses, had left them on account. It was added that what did him the most harm was the competition of a troupe of actors then passing through Bordeaux, whose farces the public had preferred to the show of old bones. The tradition further stated that the troupe had been that of Molière; however, it should have said Bejard’s troupe, which we know went to Bordeaux under the patronage of the duc d’Épernon. However that may be, when the Museum learned of the existence of these remains, they asked M. Jouannet to send them to Paris, which was done. Thanks to the progress which had been made in the science of paleontology, it was easy to recognize that they were neither the bones of a giant, nor even those of an elephant, as Riolan and Peiresc had said, and as Cuvier had repeated in an error which is very pardonable because he had not seen them; but the bones of a true mastodon, "like that of Ohio, in North America", says M. de Blainville. This discovery, which been two hundred years in coming, was of the most precious. There is not even any parallel to be cited in Europe, "because," says the same learned man, "among European remains of mastodons, there can hardly be adduced more than some fragments of jaw, adhering to the teeth collected in great number in the south of France." The question remains whether the bones found in Bordeaux are really those dug up at Chaumont. M. de Blainville never doubted it. There were, to be sure, some additional pieces among them, but "that may proceed", he says, "from the pieces having been poorly named in the original deposition." As for the missing items: the astragalus, the calcaneum, and a vertebra, their absence can be even more easily explained, because (something which M. de Blainville does not mention) Peiresc, towards the end of his life, according to Requier (p. 148), had "obtained some pieces of the supposed bones of the giant". M. de Blainville concludes thus : "It is therefore almost undoubtable that these bones are really those attributed to King Teutobocus, because it would be very difficult to believe that a second stroke of luck brought to light six or seven major pieces exactly the same as in the first." — In 1726, Scheutzer committed an error of the same sort as the one whose story we have just recounted. The supposed fossil man found in the quarries of Oeningen, of which he published a description in the Transactions philosophiques, was nothing but a giant salamander, as Cuvier demonstrated.  This is indeed what Florus says. "King Teutobocus was taller than the trophies; but that does not signify," says Peiresc, "that he was twenty-five feet tall, as the authors of this discovery assert. The trophies that the raised arms of their bearers held up in triumphs and ovations did not surpass twelve feet."  Here is found in the original the rough figure of a medal where we could not distinguish anything, but where, it seems, an M and an A should have been seen. Our author, because of these two letters, considers them to be medals of Marius. Peiresc disagreed, and with excellent reason, according to what we read in his Life by Requier, page 146: "As to the letters M A found on the reverse of the medals, they do not designate Marius, whose given name Caius would not have been omitted. They do not stand for the entire word, the Roman usage being to abbreviate only with the first letter. They rather mark Marseilles, a republic at that time, which that form of silver medal was characteristic of, as of a Greek town, but not characteristic of a Roman one."  The author means the triumphal arch of Orange, which for a long time was thought to have been built in honor of Marius and his victory over the Cimbri. It is nearly certain nowadays, according to a recent memoir by M. Ch. Lenormant, that this monument dates from the reign of Tiberius, and therefore recalls the victory during that period over Sacrovir, chief of the rebellious Gauls. (See Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des Inscript., by Ern. Desjardins, 1858.)  It was not the size of the teeth, but their structure, that the members of the Académie des sciences most concerned themselves with when the remains were in their hands. Their shape allowed the scientists to confirm with certainty what sort of animal theses bones must belong to: "The structure of the teeth," says M. de Blainville, "forming a crown bristling with several ranks of nipple-shaped tubercles, and carried by true roots, cannot leave any doubt as to the type of mammal which these bones belonged to: it was a mastodon, and not an elephant, as M. Cuvier wrongly thought, not having, to be sure, anything to base his judgment on but the weight and a general appreciation of the size of the chief tooth. However," M. de Blainville adds, "the carefully reported fact of the existence of the roots might have put him on the right path, and one can understand how Habicot and his partisans could have been led to support Mazuyer’s fraud, in noticing that these teeth, being provided with roots and with tubercles on the crown, really had some resemblance to human teeth, especially for anatomists who did not possess at that time any basis of comparison."  Riolan, in his Gigantology, was far from agreeing with all this: "In order to demonstrate," says M. de Blainville, "that this was not a giant of thirty feet as Habicot maintained, he had calculated, based on the length of the bones which he had examined, among others the femur, which was a most rational way of proceeding, that the animal could not be more than twelve feet long, and he concluded that, since there would be no need of a thirty-foot tomb in which to place a body of no more than twelve or thirteen feet, the supposed tomb was an invention of Mazuyer’s. Habicot, on the contrary, considered this fact to be definitely established; he maintained that the contents must be in proportion to the container; now, this tomb was thirty feet long, thus the bones it contained must have belonged to an animal of that size."  As we have said, it was at the bottom of a sandpit, in alluvial terrain, says M. de Blainville. Requier (Life of Peiresc, p. 143) further remarks that it is in the part of the Dauphiné situated between the Rhone and the Isère, and not far from their confluence. "It is not there," said Peiresc (id., p. 145) "that one would place a tomb; one would choose a spot, if not elevated or rocky, at least not with so little solidity, for fear that the monument would be easily buried or knocked down."