On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma Read Free Book Online Page A

spleen by touch. The story goes that when he was cremated his big toe would not burn along with the rest of his body; it was put in a chest in a temple.” 16 To the long list of amazing descriptions Pliny adds a monster called the manticore, from the Greek for “man-eater.” This beast is first described by Ctesias, and Aristotle cites the same description in his
History of Animals;
they all believe the creature to live in India. Pliny says it has “a triple row of teeth like a comb, the face and ears of a man, grey eyes, a blood-red color, a lion’s body, and inflicts stings with its tail like a scorpion. The manticore has a voice that sounds like a pan-pipe combined with a trumpet, achieves great speed and is especially keen on human flesh.” 17
    It’s hard to imagine something that Pliny would
not
assent to in his considerations of nature, but then, rather surprisingly, he suddenly draws a line. “I am obliged to consider,” he informs us “and with confidence— that the assertion that men are turned into wolves and back to themselves again is false, otherwise we must also believe in all the other things that over so many generations we have discovered to be fabulous.” Apparently werewolves cross the line of credibility for Pliny.
    In his explanation of the werewolf story, which comes from Arcadia, Pliny unwittingly reveals an interesting criterion for accepting or rejecting a fabulous narrative. Arcadian legend has it that someone chosen by lotteryis led to a marsh. He hangs his clothes on an oak tree and swims naked through the swamp to a deserted territory. “There he is turned into a wolf and associates with other wolves for nine years. If he has avoided contact with a human during that period, he returns to the same marsh, swims across it and regains his shape with nine years’ age added to his former appearance.” 18 The story so far is dubious, but not more so than the griffin or the three-hundred-foot eel or the Triton, all of which Pliny reports without editorializing. The giveaway for Pliny is that the werewolf, now returned to human form, actually gets back into the nine-year-old clothes hanging on the oak tree. That really tears it for Pliny, and he sighs, “It is astonishing how far Greek gullibility will go.”

     
    The manticore monster was thought to favor human flesh. Descriptions of the beast appear in the natural history texts of Ctesias, Aristotle, and Pliny. Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a sketch from Edward Topsell’s seventeenth-century bestiary.
    It may seem the height of hypocrisy to accept all manner of monster but then bar the entrance for the poor werewolf. And yet a deeper logic may be at work. The tipping point appears to be the story itself. Something about the narrative of this man—leaving his clothes on a tree, turning into a wolf and back, and dressing again in the same clothes—feels like a joke, both for us and for Pliny apparently. He can’t rule out the werewolf on its own terms; after all, weirder creatures are acceptable to him. It’s the literary conventions of the story itself that seem too much like a comedy to accept. Mimesis, or the imitation of life in the techniques of art and literature, was very well understood by the ancients; Aristotle devotes much of his
Poetics
to the philosophy of mimesis. It is not the monster itself that gives Pliny pause, but the “bad play” quality of the story.
    Why is a werewolf itself
not
a cause for skepticism? For the same reason that a manticore or a race of one-eyed men are not intrinsically doubtful: nature is stranger than fiction. This is a time when strange monsters in the form of exotic animals are really being discovered in far-off lands. During the reign of Claudius Caesar, Pliny claims to have actually seen the corpse of a hippocentaur (half-man, half-horse) preserved in a vat of honey and brought from Egypt. 19 One suspects that the animal was some other exotic species honestly