(no subject)

[porphyry]

Playing with A. in the back yard today, we inspected the birdbath. There was ice floating in it. It had originally been a ring beucase of the central island, but the sun had fallen on it unevenly so it was a precisely shaped crescent. I picked it up nad showed it to A. He immediately recognized that it was the moon which, he said, had come down from the sky last night. Now, the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder does say that frosts and freezes are a cold liquid that is emmitted by the moon during certain astrolonomical configurations. But of course A doesn't know anything about that. He took the ice crescent and insisted on placing it in the trailer of his tractor (his 'trunk')as a talisman. Long melted by now.

Comments

[benicek.livejournal.com]

A great little story, if that isn't an oxymoron.

I remember reading something very cute about elephants in Pliny. He said that they are kindly animals and that if one meets a lost man in the desert he will point the way for him with his trunk. Aaaaaaah.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

He is also, I blieve, the source for the story of the Elephant who, ahving spotted him at random in a crowd , took revenge by killing the man who decades before had killed his trainer. Then there were the elephants that were trained to preform in the arena by staging a mock dinner party in which they would eat reclining on couches, etc. They became popular in Rome, then toured the whole Empire, and finally returned for to the capital a farewell performance, after which their owners announced they would be butchered and their meat sold on the open market as a delicacy. But tehy were so cute this caused a public outcry and Tiberius took them and provided for a nice retirement for them somewhere--is that in Pliny or Martial?

[benicek.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if it was Pliny or Martial but I think I read something along those lines in a compilation of such ancient animal stories. Apparently they called giraffes 'cameleopards' because they thought they were a cross between camels and leopards.