Involuntary introductions in the Ancient Mediterranean
p. 117-132
Résumés
This article considers the movements of animal species in Antiquity which took place without intentional human intervention. After establishing the context of limited human control over the many species which exploited the towns and settlements I focus on two groups of animals, rodents and insects. Both the house mouse (Mus musculus) and the black rat (Rattus rattus) were accidentally introduced to the Western Mediterranean, the former as a result of Phoenician and Greek maritime trade in the Iron Age and the black rat as a consequence of trade from Egypt under the Roman Empire, while two of the most damaging grain pests in antiquity, the saw-toothed grain beetle (Oryzaephilus surinamensis) and the grain weevil (Sitophilus granarius), were similarly unwittingly introduced to the Mediterranean and Europe via the movement of infested grain at the end of the 1st millennium BC. These movements offer a salutary reminder that ancient humans were not masters of the zoosphere which they inhabited, but merely one component part of a complex web of relationships.
Cet article analyse les déplacements d’espèces animales qui se sont déroulés sans intervention humaine durant l’Antiquité. Après avoir examiné le contexte d’un contrôle humain limité sur bien des espèces qui profitaient des villes et des établissements humains, je mets l’accent sur deux groupes d’animaux, les rongeurs et les insectes. Aussi bien la souris domestique (Mus musculus) que le rat noir (Rattus rattus) ont été involontairement introduits en Méditerranée occidentale, le premier par le biais du commerce maritime phénicien et grec, à l’âge du Fer, et le rat noir comme une conséquence du commerce entre l’Égypte et l’Empire romain, alors même que deux des nuisibles les plus redoutables pour les céréales dans l’Antiquité, le cucujide dentelé des grains (Oryzaephilus surinamensis) et le charançon du blé (Sitophilus granarius), ont également été introduits en Méditerranée et en Europe par le biais du transport de céréales infestés à la fin du Ier millénaire av. J.-C. Ces déplacements nous montrent que les humains de l’Antiquité n’étaient pas les maîtres de la zoosphère qu’ils habitaient, mais seulement un élément d’un complexe réseau de relations.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : introductions involontaires, rongeurs, insectes, parasites des céréales, agriculture
Keywords : involuntary introductions, rodents, insects, grain pests, agriculture
Remerciements
My thanks to the organisers of the colloquium Circulations animales et zoogéographie en Méditerranée occidentale, and particularly to Christophe Chandezon for his positivity and patience as editor.
Texte intégral
Introduction
1At the Cilician Gates in the Roman Imperial Period stood a statue of Mercury, carrying an inscription:
Mercuri sceptripotens, Argifonta, deorum angele abige lucustarum nubis de his locis sacrosancta virga tua, tuum enim simulacrum hoc in loco stat ponendum ad proventum frugum et ad salutare remedium locorum et nationum harum. Sis propitius et placatus hominibus cunctis et des proventus frugum omnium rerum.1
Mercury of the powerful staff, slayer of Argus, messenger of the gods, ward off the clouds of locusts from these places with your sacrosanct rod: for your image stands in this spot, whose establishment was needful for the increase of the crops and the healthful cure of the region and these nations. Be kind to all people and give increase of crops and all things.
2The placing of the statue is no coincidence: the Cilician Gates are one of the principal routes by which locust swarms move from North Africa into Anatolia. Desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) [pl. VII, 41], normally solitary creatures, will under certain circumstances adopt swarming behaviour, forming dense clouds of insects millions strong which move in search of food: carried on the wind, they are able to cover distances of hundreds of miles and cross the Mediterranean with ease.2
3Locust incursions are well-documented in Antiquity across Greece, Asia Minor and Italy; they even reached territories as far north as Gaul and Germany. Homer’s Iliad offers one of the earliest references to locust swarms, while Roman authors record the arrival of invasive swarms in Italy and Sicily.3 Even today swarming locusts pose a critical threat to agriculture: for the ancients they were an inexplicable and devastating visitation. Educated writers agreed that swarms arrived from over the sea, and Pliny locates their origins in Africa: the siting of the statue at the Cilician Gates implies a knowledge of the insects’ regular patterns of movement.4 In general, though, understanding of locusts’ origins was limited, and for most a swarm was interpreted as an act of the gods and an illustration of random and destructive power of nature.5
4Once a swarm appeared, remedies were few. The Homeric reference suggests attempts to protect crops with firebreaks, though such measures were potentially destructive in themselves, while Roman responses included attempts to gather and destroy the locusts by hand; in general ancient people had to rely on natural conditions of cold to kill the insects or wind to sweep them away.6 Under such circumstances turning to the gods for help was only logical, and deities across Greece and Asia Minor were worshipped in specific aspects for their locust-repelling powers: Pausanias describes a statue on the Athenian Acropolis dedicated to Apollo Parnopion, Apollo of the locusts, while Strabo names Heracles Cornopion in the city of Oeta in Thessaly, and Apollo Pornopion in Aetolia in Asia Minor.7 The statue to Mercury in Cilicia reveals how little changed over time; the siting of the statue and its inscription summon a striking image of ancient farmers anxiously scanning the sky for an ominous approaching cloud, praying that the swarm will pass over and spare them.
5The movement of locusts is obviously nothing like the deliberate introductions of species discussed elsewhere in this book: it is a naturally-occurring behaviour, randomly directed and temporary in nature.8 But, as Nicholas Purcell has observed, to treat the circulation of species solely as an aspect of human activity is to fail to conceive of what he so aptly terms the zoosphere.9 Many movements of animals take place without human intervention, both regular, such as migration, or irregular, as a response to ecological opportunity or pressure, while of those movements which are generated by humans, not all are intentional or even recognised. As Purcell emphasises, any model of the circulation of species in Antiquity must encompass all of these processes if it is to explain the interactions between humans and animals. In this paper, rather than examining only deliberate introductions of animals by humans, whether for practical reasons (food and secondary products, as with the rabbit) or for purposes of status (as with the peacock) or entertainment (as with the fighting cock), I will focus on the movements of a number of smaller species, rodents and insects, which extended their natural range in and beyond the Mediterranean during the period in question, and by doing so aim to offer a broader view of human-animal interactions in the ancient world.
Human-animal entanglements
6Many animal species have, over millennia, moved in with humans of their own accord. Among the first to adapt their habits was the human flea (Pulex irritans), spreading from an original New World host, perhaps the guinea-pig or peccary, more than 10 000 years ago, while the domestic fly (Musca domestica) seems to have become a companion to humans as soon as permanent habitations appeared with their ample supplies of refuse.10 More clearly disadvantageous were the numerous species which extended their range to exploit the resources of human settlements, both the rodents and insects which ate crops in the fields, and those which entered houses and barns to feed on stored goods. Temples, stores and houses were full of animals attracted by the abundance of resources offered by human and animal food and refuse, manufactured goods such as woven cloth, papyrus and cut timber: indeed, Aegean towns provided exceptionally rich pickings thanks to the cultural norm of leaving food offerings in temples or outdoor shrines, attracting birds, mice and snakes. Birds taking offerings from altars are depicted on pottery, while mice are described as particular pests of temples in Batrachomyomachia.
“Ὦ θύγατηρ, μυσὶν ἦ ῥ’ ἀπαλεχήσουσα πορεύσηι; / καὶ γὰρ σοῦ κατὰ νηὸν ἀεὶ σκιρτῶσιν ἄπαντες / κνίσηι τερπόμενοι καὶ ἐδέσμασι παντοδαποῖσιν.” / ὣς ἄρ’ ἔφη Κρονίδης: τὸν δὲ προσέειπεν Ἀθήνη / “ὦ πάτερ, οὐκ ἄν πώ ποτ’ ἐγὼ μυσὶ τειρομένοισιν / ἐλθοίμην ἐπαρωγός. ἐπεὶ κακὰ πολλά μ’ ἔοργαν / στέμματα βλάπτοντες καὶ λύχνους εἵνεκ’ ἐλαίου. / Τοῦτο δὲ μοι λίην ἔδακε ϕρένας, οἷον ἔρεξαν / πέπλον μου κατέτρωξαν, ὃν ἐξύφηνα καμοῦσα / ἐκ ῥοδάνης λεπτῆς καὶ στήμονα μακρὸν ἔνησα / καὶ τρώγλας ἐτέλεσσαν.”11
“Daughter, will you come to the aid of the mice? For they always leap about in your temple, numerous, delighting in the sacrifices and every kind of food.” So spoke the son of Cronos; but Athena answered him: “Father, I would never come to the aid of the mice, hard-pressed though they are, for they do me much harm, nibbling the garlands and drinking the lamp-oil. And this act of theirs grieves me the most: they have chewed my sacred peplos, which I wove with toil from delicate warp and weft, and made it full of holes.”
7For houses we can glimpse in sources as various as treatises on weather forecasting and comic plays geckoes which walked on the walls or roofs, hedgehogs which lived in holes in the wall and snakes which nested close to houses and temples, as well as insects including millipedes and spiders.12 It follows from this that any categorisation of animals into “commensals” and “pests” is also unhelpful, because it tends to conceal the extent to which animals and humans lived alongside one another as a matter of course. Humans, then, existed at the centre of a cloud of creatures in a fashion which has vanished in the course of the 21th c. and can now be difficult for us to imagine, and while they certainly resented the creatures which shared their dwellings and damaged their possessions, they had no choice but to resign themselves to coexistence with them.13
8The extent to which animals were present in ancient life can be difficult for 21th c. urban-dwellers to envisage; certainly people were far more alert to the animals in their environment. The handbook of weather signs compiled by Theophrastus, for instance, assumes both a high level of species identification and a knowledge of behaviour—activity, habitat and vocalisation—which can be read as indicators of rain or storm:
[16] Kόραξ πολλὰς μεταβάλλων ἕωθεν φωνάς, τούτων ἐὰν δὶς ταχὺ φθέγξηται καὶ ἐπιρροιζήσῃ καὶ τινάξῃ τὰ πτερά ὕδωρ σημαίνει.
[42] καὶ κύων τοῖς ποσὶν ὀρύττων ὁμοίως καὶ ὀλολυγων ᾄδουσα μόνη ἀκρωρείας χειμέριον. Γῆς ἔντερα πολλὰ φαινόμενα χειμῶνα σημαίνει.
[53] καὶ ὄρχιλος ἐξ ὀπῆς ἐκπετόμενος καὶ ἐξ ἑρκίων καὶ ἐξ οἰκίας ἔξωθεν εὐδίαν σημαίνει.14
[16] If a raven in the morning producing many different sounds repeats one of these quickly twice over and shakes its wings to make a whirring sound, it signals rain.
[42] And likewise a dog digging with its paws and a treefrog singing alone at the crack of dawn are signs of storm. Many “earth guts” [i.e. worms] appearing signal storm.
[53] And if a wren flies out of its nest, whether from an outside wall or from the house itself, it signals fair weather.
9As the above reference to worms indicates, even the activities of very small creatures which we might consider insignificant were closely observed:
[19] Καὶ ἴουλοι πολλοὶ πρὸς τοῖχον ἕρποντες ὑδατικόν.
[22] μύρμηκες ἐν κοίλῳ χωρίῳ ἐὰν τα ᾠὰ ἐκφέρωσιν ἐκ τῆς μυρμηκιᾶς ἐπὶ τὸ ὑψηλὸν χωρίον ὕδωρ σημαίνουσιν, ἐὰν δὲ καταφέρωσιν εὐδίαν.15
[19] Centipedes in large numbers creeping towards the wall are a sign of rain.
[22] If ants in a depression carry their eggs out of the anthill and move upwards, this is a sign of rain; but if they carry them downwards it is a sign of fair weather.
10And similarly, because animals were omens of divine will, actions which might appear incidental from a modern perspective, such as a bird sitting on a roof or an animal entering a house, would be noted and reacted to.16
11On the other hand, understanding of animal lifecycles and movements in Antiquity was constrained by the limits of observation. The Greeks and Romans understood the seasonality of certain large animal movements; in fact, in a world where civic calendars were often out of synchronisation with the seasons farmers relied on the movements of animals to signal the times to plough or sow. Hesiod’s seasonal indicators include both the snail and the cicada, while more generally the autumn migration of cranes marked the beginning of winter in Greece and the arrival of the cuckoo and swallow the start of spring.17 The habits of large and flocking birds in particular were easily observable, but there remained a striking lack of understanding even on the part of natural history writers of small bird migrations: summer visitors such as the nightingale were simply assumed to hide themselves during the winter months.18 Indeed folk theories accounted for the seasonal absence of many birds by suggesting that they metamorphosed into different forms—the cuckoo into a hawk (based on the similarity of its plumage to the sparrowhawk), the redstart into a robin and the warbler into a blackcap.19 For summering or wintering birds the issue was not particularly meaningful (and in fact many aspects of migration were not fully documented until the early 21th c.), but with even smaller animals the lack of knowledge became more acute.20
12Understanding of insect lifecycles and activity was constrained both by the limits of naked-eye observation and an inability to distinguish clearly between a broad swath of different species in larval and adult forms; in this area bringing modern classification of species to bear can be counterproductive, serving to obscure the ancient experience because these animals were understood in qualitatively different ways. The processes by which insect infestation of food or goods occurred were largely mysterious—scientific writers, beginning with Aristotle, recognised that in some larger species caterpillars might be linked to winged adult forms, as with the cabbage white butterfly (Pieris brassicae) whose larvae ate brassica crops, but even in this case the eggs from which the caterpillars emerged were not recognised as part of the insect’s lifecycle.21 In smaller species—the moths which laid their eggs in textiles, the beetles whose larvae tunnelled in the cut timber of houses and furniture and the insects which infested grain supplies—the link between larval and adult forms was not made, writers universally assuming that pests were spontaneously generated in the material on which they fed, whether textiles, roof timbers and furniture, books and papers or stored foods.22
13It follows from this that the daily experience of animals was qualitatively different from our own—humans lived at the centre of a multiplicity of animal species over whose presence they did not expect to exert control. One might seal one’s granary with clay and amurca, hang a bow made of sinew over the hearth or store grain with aromatic herbs or chalk, but inevitably when a jar or box was opened one would expect to find that mice or insects had appeared.23 It is within this context that the unwitting spread of species must be located.
Rodents
14My first two case studies are of rodents, the house mouse (Mus musculus) and the black rat (Rattus rattus), both of which spread into the Mediterranean basin in the 1st millennium BC. The house mouse became synanthropic with humans in the Near East at the time that sedentary farming first appeared, and spread from here to Cyprus through the process of Neolithisation between the 9th and 6th millennia BC, but it did not reach the western Mediterranean basin until the 1st millennium BC.24 As zooarchaeological evidence demonstrates, the house mouse required a certain level of maritime activity to spread in sufficient numbers to displace native mouse species, and hence it was not until the increase in movement by Phoenician and Greek sailors that the house mouse was brought to the western Mediterranean via sea routes from North Africa to Corsica, Sardinia and the Iberian coast. Here they established themselves and spread to become the primary rodent inhabitant not only of stored crops but of human settlements in general.25
15The story of the black rats entering Europe has attracted considerably more scholarly attention, largely connected with their role in spreading human plague: it is well documented that rats similarly originated in South-East Asia and reached the Mediterranean by sea from the Indian Ocean. Rats are by nature both social and sedentary—an individual rat rarely straying more than 200 m from its original colony—so their rapid spread must therefore be linked to human activity, i.e. the transport of stored grain and other perishable goods.26 Though present in Egypt by the Pharaonic Period, rats failed to establish themselves in Europe until the beginning of large-scale shipment of grain through Alexandria and its dispersal across the Roman Empire in support of the army; the earliest rat colonies in the western Mediterranean are found at the end of the 1st millennium BC at island and coastal sites such as Corsica, Menorca and coastal Italy, while their diffusion in western Europe in the first and 2nd c. AD is strongly linked to Roman communication routes along rivers and roads.27
16These introductions stand at the opposite pole to those discussed elsewhere in this volume, in which a recognisably non-native animal is deliberately introduced in one or more discrete episodes, often documented in written sources as a “first”. The accidental introductions of rodents, in contrast, took place over generations, at multiple widely-dispersed sites, and we should ask how easy they would have been, in contemporary circumstances, to detect.
17Aristotle in his History of animals states that there are many kinds of mice without offering further detail: in separate passages he names the field mouse (arouraios), the shrew (mugale) and the dormouse (eleios) [pl. II, 11], but the other two species he mentions, the spiny mouse and jerboa, are specified as non-native.28 Most discussions of mice in ancient sources, however, comment only on their ubiquity and destructive habits, and for most a mouse was simply a mouse, whether it was a field or harvest mouse, wood mouse or house mouse.29 Furthermore, though Aristotle does not claim as others do that mice could be spontaneously generated in stored crops, the anecdotes which he relates—the mouse trapped in a jar of millet which was found to have produced 120 offspring when the jar was opened, and that mice in Persia were known to become pregnant by licking salt—come very close to the idea, and he states directly that mouse behaviour is difficult to account for rationally:
Ἀπορεῖται δὲ καὶ ἡ τῶν ἐπιπολαζόντων γένεσις μυῶν ἐν ταῖς χώραις καὶ ἡ φθορά. πολλαχοῦ γὰρ εἴωθε γίγνεσθαι πλῆθος ἀμύθητον τῶν ἀρουραίων, ὥστ’ ὀλίγον λείπεσθαι τοῦ σίτου παντός. γίγνεται δ’ οὕτω ταχεῖα ἡ φορά ὥστ’ ἔνιοι τῶν μὴ μεγάλας γεωργίας ἐργαζομένων τῇ προτεραίᾳ ἰδόντες ὅτι θερίζειν ὥρα, τῇ ὑστεραίᾳ ἕωθεν ἄγοντες τοὺς θεριστὰς καταβεβρωμένα ἅπαντα καταλαμβάνουσιν. ὁ δ’ ἀφανισμὸς οὐ κατὰ λόγον ἀποβαίνει: ἐν ὀλίγαις γὰρ ἡμέραις ἀφανεῖς πάμπαν γίγνονται: καίτοι ἐν τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν χρόνοις οὐ κρατοῦσιν οἱ ἄνθρωποι ἀποθυμιῶντες καὶ ἀνορύττοντες, ἔτι δὲ θηρεύοντες καὶ τὰς ὗς ἐμβάλλοντες.30
It is also difficult to explain the appearance and disappearance of mice in the fields; for it often happens that a countless multitude of field mice appears, so great that little is left of the harvest. They appear so quickly that some farmers with small estates, who on the previous day decided that it was time to harvest their grain, on the following day go to the field with the reapers only to find that everything has been eaten. The disappearance of the mice is equally inexplicable: within a few days they are completely gone, and yet in the time before this they cannot be got rid of by smoking them out or uprooting the soil, or even by hunting them or using pigs to dig up their burrows.
18Both Aristotle and Theophrastus note that just as with locusts, the only practical salvation was a change in weather conditions, and other sources tell us that deities such as Apollo Smintheus were invoked to protect against sudden incursions of mice in standing crops; the parallel between incursions of locusts and of mice are clear.31
19In this context, where mice were constant and unwelcome human companions, eating stored food, leather, textiles and lamp oil, their spread on ships would hardly attract a moment’s attention: we should envisage house mice transported not only in sacks or baskets of grain and other foods and in perishable cargoes such as hides, but also in straw bedding and the sailors’ own belongings.32 At the ports of arrival mice would scatter when ships were unloaded or be transported into new stores and stables without attracting notice because their presence was deemed a fact of life against which no serious steps could be taken; in such circumstances the arrival of the house mouse would have been virtually impossible to detect as one species was displaced by another extremely similar in appearance and habits.33
20Could the same be true, however, of the rat? The black rat is significantly larger than the house mouse, equally prone to nest in houses and more indiscriminate in its diet: an established rat colony is difficult to ignore. Yet despite the archaeological testimony, the advent of the rat in classical societies appears to go unremarked. In Egypt this is easier to explain: the Nile grass rat (Arvicanthis niloticus) [pl. III, 15] was native, and a regular agricultural pest; while it was not normally found in houses the periodic flooding of the Nile made its habitat variable and at certain times it would become more visible in towns.34 The gradual introduction of the black rat would thus be difficult to detect—the two species are broadly similar in size, appearance and behaviour.35 In Greece and Italy, on the other hand, no native rat species was present, the black rat displacing instead smaller native rodent species. Yet even so classical Greek never developed a word for the rat, while in Latin the term rattus does not appear in writing until the 13th c. AD in a fable of Odo of Cheriton.36 In the Ist c. BC, however, at the time that the rat had appeared on the shores of Italy a diminutive form of mus appears, musculus, perhaps to distinguish the endemic mouse from the newly-arrived rat.37 The choice of term suggests that the new species was recognised as a larger form of mouse, perhaps aided by natural history writers’ claims that unusually large and fierce mice were to be found outside Greece and Italy, particularly in the Pontic regions.38 The semantic field of mus was thus sufficiently expansive to encompass the larger and more venturesome rat, and since rodents were believed to be both unavoidable and difficult to explain, the idea that mice were becoming larger and more destructive over time may not have seemed so remarkable.
Insects
21A final group of introductions in the 1st millennium BC, of fundamental significance to human survival, unquestionably went completely unnoticed. As noted above, insect pests of household goods were ever-present: a variety of species are referred to in ancient texts by simple generic names such as the thrips or tinea which bored into timber, the ses which ate fabrics and books and the ips which Odysseus feared would eat the sinew of his bow.39 These were obviously originally fauna of woods or fields which had found an extra niche in human habitations, their larvae feeding on cut timber or stored goods, though the ancients regarded them as self-generating. As with locusts, remedies were few and largely ineffective: attempts were made to protect textiles by storing them with scented herbs or cedar oil, while the hanging of weapons above the fireplace represents an attempt to preserve them by fumigation.40
22A similar generic term existed for those insects which infested stored grains and pulses, kis or circulio. Ancient writers recognised only the larval form or skôlêx which appeared in the grain or bean, and understood them as a product of the plant itself:
Γίνεται δὴ φθειρομένοις σπέρμασι ἴδια ζῶα, καθάπερ ἐλέχθη, πλὴν ἐρεβίνθου· μόνος γὰρ οὗτος οὐ ζωογονεῖ. καὶ σηπομένοις μὲν πᾶσι σκῶληξ κοπτομένοις δὲ καθ’ ἕκαστον ἴδιον.41
Particular creatures are engendered in seeds as they spoil, after they are harvested, apart from the chickpea; this plant alone does not produce animals. But as they decay all other seeds are eaten by a worm, each of its own kind.
23Modern archaeozoological study has shown that grain pests included a wide range of species including pea and bean weevils, grain and flour beetles and mealworm beetles.42 Some, such as the Bruchidae, were field pests: the adult beetles lay their eggs on the seeds before harvest and the larvae bore their way inside to feed and grow. Infested seeds are then brought into store at harvest time—the charred remains of a jar of lentils from Pompeii, for instance, include some with larvae still in situ—but the adult insects do not breed in the storeroom.43 Other insects, however, owed their presence to the structures associated with agriculture. The blind weevil, Troglorhynchus anophthalmus, for instance, is native to Europe, but its normal habitat is damp environments such as leaf litter or caves; it is not regularly a field pest, nor would it occur naturally in a constructed storeroom. Yet it appears as a pest of stored grain at Akrotiri in the Late Bronze Age, with the implication that grain had at one time been stored in a cave or pit where it became infested, and the beetles were subsequently transported to the store where they became endemic.44
24Some of the most damaging grain pests in Antiquity, however, were spread, like rabbits and peacocks, by cultural interaction. The two most frequently-identified grain pests in ancient stores, and the most damaging, were the saw-toothed grain beetle (Oryzaephilus surinamensis) [pl. VII, 44] and the grain weevil, Sitophilus granarius [pl. VII, 43]. The association of S. granarius with agriculture is of long standing: the ancestors of the species, naturally flightless, seem to have adapted to living in grain stores as soon as humans living in the Fertile Crescent adopted the practice in the Neolithic Period.45 Since it is not found outside this habitat its spread depended entirely on the shipping of infested grain, and its route has been documented, from Mesopotamia via Palestine and Egypt to the Mediterranean and Europe, then spreading further north with the expansion of the Roman Empire.46 S. granarius is capable of boring into an undamaged grain, but many of the other species found in ancient stores, chiefly O. surinamensis and Cryptolestes ferrugineus, the flat grain beetle, were able to feed only on grain which was already damaged, and it seems likely that the collective of species were exported as a group.47 Nor could such spread have easily been achieved by individual movements of infested grain: instead we should look to the infrastructure of ancient ports, where large-scale consignments of grain were unloaded into warehouses before onward transport. Once the insects had arrived, such temporary stores would provide a reservoir of infestation carried forward by subsequent movements.
25Given the scale of transport of grain in the Hellenistic kingdoms and Roman Empire, the distribution of insect species was, moreover, multidirectional: while S. granarius and its companion species were distributed northwards, the mealworm beetle, Tenebrio sp. [pl. VII, 42], travelled in the opposite direction. Native to Europe, the mealworm beetle has not been detected in Egypt in the Pharaonic Period, but its remains are present in stored grain at the Roman-era site of Mons Claudianus in the Eastern desert mountains.48 A fortress which protected the numerous quarries exploited by the Romans for granite for building, Mons Claudianus depended for its food supply on imports from the Nile Valley, including barley and other grains and pulses.49 The presence of Tenebrio among other grain pests in the remains from the site indicates that it had colonised Egypt from Europe through the port of Alexandria.
Concluding remarks
26With grain pests we reach the furthest possible distance from the deliberate introduction of species which were useful or entertaining: humans unwittingly created a niche in which these insects could thrive and spread them far beyond their natural range, allowing them to damage ancient livelihoods, sometimes catastrophically. It could even be claimed that Oryzaephilus surinamensis and Sitophilus granarius were the biggest beneficiaries of introductions in Antiquity, more so than humans themselves, an idea which suggests a salutary perspective on the balance of power between animals and humans in the ancient world. Much has been written on the ancient Mediterranean environment in recent years, with many studies adopting a pessimistic view of the human impact on flora and fauna, emphasising processes of deforestation, overexploitation of resources, and even the impact on wild animal populations of the demands created by the Roman arena.50 Underlying these perspectives is the assumption that humans exerted ultimate control over the natural world, and attitude which has at its root the modern western experience of a world in which animals have become almost completely subordinate to human control by chemical or physical means. The introductions discussed in this paper, however, suggest that we should think about Antiquity in different terms: far from being masters of the zoosphere, humans were enmeshed within it, exploiting some species while being exploited by others beyond their control.
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Notes de bas de page
1Transl. Varinlioglu 1988; Nollé 2005, p. 57-58; Horden – Purcell 2000, p. 417-418.
2Cressman 2015.
3Homer, Iliad, 21.12-16; Plutarch, Table talk, 637B; Livy, History of Rome, 30.2, 10; 42.2.5 and 10.7-8; Pliny, Natural history, 11.103-106; Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthomerica, 2.195-199.
4Pliny, Natural history, 11.105.
5Ibid., 104; Arnobius, Against the pagans, 1.3.16.
6Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.24.8.
7Ibid., 1.24.8; Strabo, Geography, 13.1.64 (C613). On the forms πάρνοψ/πόρνοψ/κόρνοψ: Beavis 1988, p. 64.
8Nor can locusts be considered invasive in the technical meaning of the term; the concept of an “invasive species” is, however, broad. In general, the term denotes a non-native species which has a harmful effect on the biosphere into which it has been introduced, yet on closer examination the issues are more complex: whether the spread of species must be anthropogenic, how long a species must have been established in a region to be considered native (the camel, Camelus spp., for instance, is now established far from its point of origin in South America), and what precisely the definition of “harm” might be: Jernelöv 2017, p. 279-290.
9Purcell 2020.
10Buckland – Sadler 1989; Panagiotakopoulou – Buckland 2017.
11Homer, Batrachomyomachia, 174-184; Hatzivassiliou 2009, for a series of lekythoi depicting birds removing offerings from an altar; Normand 2015, p. 407-413.
12Aristophanes, Clouds, 169-174; Aristotle, History of animals, 612b.4-10; Pliny, Natural history, 29.22; Theophrastus, On weather signs, 19.
13See the remarks of Smith 2012, p. 41, on the disappearance of household insect species from urban settings.
14Theophrastus, On weather signs, transl. Brunschön – Sider 2007.
15Theophrastus, On weather signs.
16Hesiod, Works and days, 746-747; Mynott 2018, p. 249-266; Rasmussen 2003, p. 149-150; Capdeville 2016.
17Hesiod, Works and days, 448-451, 485-489, 568-573, 582-587; Aratus, Phenomena, 1075-1081; Theophrastus, On weather signs, 38; Aristophanes, Birds, 709-715; Mynott 2018, p. 7-19.
18Aristotle, History of animals, 542b.26-28; Pliny, Natural history, 10.85.
19Cuckoo: Aristotle, History of animals, 563b.14-29; Pliny, Natural history, 10.25; Plutarch, Aratus, 30 ; redstart and warbler : Aristotle, History of animals, 632b.14; 633a.28.
20On early 21th c. observations of European bird migrations: Niemann 2013.
21Aristotle, History of animals, 551a.13-27.
22Beavis 1988, p. 138-139 for full references.
23Panagiotakopoulou 1995.
24Cucchi et al. 2020; Cucchi – Vigne 2006.
25Valenzuela et al. 2009; 2011.
26Yu et al. 2022; McCormick 2003, p. 10-11 and n. 13.
27Armitage 1994; Ruffino – Vidal 2010; Vigne – Valladas 1996; King 2001, p. 442-443; Audoin-Rouzeau – Vigne 1994, p. 135.
28Aristotle, History of animals, 581a.2-6; 600b.13-14; 604b.21-24.
29Modern translations of ancient authors often introduce a distinction between the field mouse and house mouse which is absent in the original text.
30Aristotle, History of animals, 580b.10; 581a5.
31Theophrastus, On animals that appear in swarms, fr. 359A (= Photius, Library, 278); Aelian, On animals, 12.5.
32Callimachus, Aetia, fr. 54c and above n. 10; Lewis – Llewellyn-Jones 2018, p. 393-402.
33Baker 1994 for the persistence of mouse infestation in transported foods and grain even today.
34Blanchong – Smale 2000.
35Panagiotakopoulou 2004 suggests that plague-carrying fleas had the Nile rat as their original host and jumped species to the black rat, spreading to Europe when the new host subsequently found a niche.
36Odo of Cheriton, Fabulae, 21 (The cheese, the rat and the cat) (Perry 594).
37Cicero, On divination, 2.33; Pliny, Natural history, 27.52.
38Aelian, On animals, 17.17.
39Beavis 1988, p. 136-137; Odyssey, 21.393-395.
40Panagiotakopoulou et al. 1995.
41Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, 8.11.2.
42Buckland 1990; Panagiotakopoulou 2000.
43Larew 2001, p. 317 and fig. 258.
44Panagiatokopoulou – Buckland 1991.
45Plarre 2010.
46Buckland 1990; Smith – Kenward 2011.
47Buckland 1990, p. 72.
48Panagiatokopoulou 2001.
49Jackson 2002, p. 51-52.
50Donald Hughes 2014; Harris 2013; Bomgardner 1992; contra, Grove – Rackham 2001.
Auteur
University of St Andrews
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