Description of Greece

​I also saw another Triton among the wonders at Rome, smaller in size than the one at Tanagra. The Tritons present the following appearance. On their heads they have hair like that of frogs in pools, both in color and in the fact that one cannot distinguish a single hair from the others; the rest of their body is bristling with fine scales like a shark. Under their ears they have gills, and a human nose, a wider mouth, and the teeth of a wild beast. Their eyes seem to me blue-grey, and they have hands and fingers and nails like the lids of shell-fish. Under their chest and belly, they have a tail instead of feet, like that of dolphins.

​I also saw bulls, both the Ethiopian ones, which they call rhinoceros from what happens to be the case, because each has one horn on the tip of its nose and another not large one above it, but on their head they have no horns at all, and those from Paeonia—these Paeonian ones are shaggy in the rest of their body and especially around their chest and jaw—and Indian camels in color like leopards.

​There is also a beast called alce, in appearance between a deer and a camel, and it is found in the land of the Celts. It is the only beast we know of which a man cannot track or foresee, but when people set out to hunt other things, a deity sometimes brings this too into their hands. For it scents man, they say, while still a long way off, and plunges into ravines and the deepest caves. So the hunters, when they have surrounded a plain of at most a thousand stades, or even a mountain, by no means break their circle, but by closing in they capture everything that is inside the circle, both other things and the alces; but if it does not happen to be nesting there, there is no other way to catch an alce.

​As for the beast in the account of Ctesias on India—which he says is called martichoras by the Indians, but “man-eater” by the Greeks—I am persuaded that it is the tiger; and as for the story that it has three rows of teeth in each jaw, and stings on the tip of its tail, with which stings it defends itself at close quarters and discharges them at those further off like an arrow from a bowman’s bow, this untrue rumor has, I think, been accepted by the Indians from one another because of their excessive dread of the beast.

​They were also deceived as to its color, and whenever the tiger appeared to them in the light against the sun, it seemed red and of a uniform color, either owing to its speed or—even if it were not running—because of its constant turning, especially as the sight of it was not from close at hand. And I think that, even if someone were to traverse the remotest parts of Libya or of the land of the Indians or of the Arabians, wishing to find whatever beasts are discovered among the Greeks, he would not find some at all, and others would appear to him not to be in the same state.

​For indeed not only does man acquire a different appearance along with the air and the land which are different, but the rest of things too would suffer this same experience, since even among beasts the Libyan asps have a color different from the Egyptian ones, and in Ethiopia the land rears black asps no less than it does black men. Thus one ought neither to have a hasty judgment in everything, nor to be unbelieving toward rarer things; for I too, though I have not seen winged serpents, believe in them; and I believe that a Phrygian man brought to Ionia a scorpion with wings very like those of locusts.