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

misidentified or perhaps an early form of Barnum-style hucksterism. In any case, we have to put ourselves in ancient shoes to remember that the Greeks had only recently, relatively speaking, come into contact with elephants and rhinoceroses. With these discoveries still somewhat fresh, it was hard to rule out fantastic creatures. The safest bet was credulity.
    Credulity and incredulity are highly relative frames of mind and indigenous to
all
eras. Pliny tells a story about a monstrous octopus weighing more than seven hundred pounds and with thirty-foot tentacles that used to swim into the uncovered tanks of a fish farm in Cartiea. When the farmers realized that the creature was foraging for food in the fish farm, they sealed off the inlet with fences. At night the beast returned and finding no way to swim to the food, actually scaled a large tree and thereby crossed over the fence barrier. Pliny explains that the octopus could be caught only by employing hunting dogs.
These surrounded the octopus as it was returning at night and roused the overseers, who were terrified by its strange appearance. Its size was unheard of, and likewise its color; it was smeared with brine and had a dreadful smell. Who would have expected to find an octopus there, or to recognize it against such a background? They seemed to be locked in a struggle with something out of this world, for it nauseated the dogs with its terrible breath, lashed them with its tentacles, round which one could scarcely put both arms, which it used in the manner of clubs. After great trouble it was dispatched with the aid of many tridents. 20
     
    When I read Pliny’s description of a tree-climbing octopus, I laughed smugly for half an hour. Gosh, I thought, Pliny cracks me up. Then a nagging thought occurred to me, and after some research into cephalopod biology, I discovered to my embarrassment that octopi do indeed occasionally crawl on land, especially in pursuit of turtles or to get from one tide pool to another. The size of the creature may have been exaggerated by Pliny, but probably not the incredible behavior. I, like Pliny,cannot be sure what creatures are capable of, because they keep surprising me.
    Skepticism gives one a certain sense of pleasure, perhaps the pleasure of feeling superior, of not being had. But
belief
, especially in the fantastic, is also very pleasurable. Indeed, with its emotional abandonment of improbability, it seems to trump the cool satisfactions of doubt. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) reminds us that the passions of “surprise and wonder” are very “agreeable emotions,” and when they are triggered by anecdotes or reports these passions actually lend a sheen of credibility to those reports. “With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travelers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men and uncouth manners?” 21
MONSTROUS RACES
     
    “Strange men and uncouth manners” were important topics for ancient writers who wished to explore the “monstrous races” of the human species. The interest in monstrous animals such as the griffin was outdone only by these early anthropological impulses. And again India, which was shorthand for the entire East, was the assumed habitat of these exotic beings.
    Most ancient Greeks and Romans considered all human ethnic groups other than their own to be barbarians, but another group of humanoid creatures fell outside the usual bounds of cultural and ethnic difference. The literature of the ancients reveals a continuum of degrees, whereby races of men decline further and further away from their ethnocentric starting place. Some of these humans are monstrous because their culture is considered odious, like Pliny’s Scythian tribes who feed on human bodies. But some of these humans strain the category itself and exist somewhere between man and animal, as shown in a report by Megasthenes (350–290 BCE ) of