The Ancients - Oppian’s Halieutica: Creatures of the Ancient Deep

Episode Date: January 10, 2021

The deep blue sea is the subject of speculation to this day but, in this episode, we have access to the mysteries, myths and misgivings that were associated with the ocean in the 2nd century AD. The Halieutica was written in Hexameter by the Greek poet Oppian, and dedicated to the then Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. Emily Kneebone from the University of Nottingham has recently completed a monograph on this overlooked Epic, and she is here to tell us about the sea and its often personified, often hostile inhabitants.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today's podcast we're going to be focusing on what the ancients thought lurked beneath the waves in antiquity, particularly the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks. And this topic is going to vary from huge sea creatures, terrifying beasts that apparently

fought with fishermen in the rough waters to dolphins and their enduring friendship with humans. Now to talk through this topic I was delighted to be joined by Emily Kneebone from the University of Nottingham. Emily has recently written a book all about an epic piece of poetry called the Haleutica, written by a figure called Oppian in the second century AD and dedicated to the emperor Marcus Aurelius. And this piece of poetry was all about fishing, but also about the sea creatures that lurked, or what they thought, lurked beneath the waves. This was a fascinating topic and it was great to get Emily on the show to talk through it all. Here's Emily.

Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show. Pleasure. Now, this is a remarkable subject. This is the story about a Greek poem written in Roman times about the sea world, the sea creatures and how the ancients viewed the sea. That's right. It's sort of a study and exploration of the marine imagination and the sort of alternative marine world. And no such thing as a stupid question starting it all off. Let's look at the background first of all. Emily, who was Oppian?

We actually don't know very much at all. We can date the poem itself. So he wrote a five book poem on the sea and fishing and the creatures that live in the sea. And we know because he dedicates it to Marcus Aurelius, mentions him in every book, he talks at one point about his co-regency with Commodus, which dates it to 177 to 180 AD. So that's what we have to go on. He also talks about being from Cilicia, which is in modern day Turkey. Those facts really are all we have. And we know that we have a few ancient references to Oppian. So Athaneus, who writes an enormous dinner party, which features innumerable fish and discussions of fish, talks about being a little bit beyond Oppian's time, so a little bit

after Oppian. And we have epigrams and so on that talk about Oppian. Beyond that, though, that's all we have, really. We have fictionalised ancient biographies, but nothing about Oppian himself. What's really interesting, what you're saying there, is that, forget the Iliad, forget the Odyssey, this is an epic ancient Greek poem being written in Roman times in the 2nd century AD. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the story of epic poetry in the imperial period is really undertold. We think of this as a period in which the novel develops, in which we get witty, dazzling satires, things like Lucian, or the oratory that people

very much associated with this period of the second sophisticate, the Greek world and Rome. But actually, at the same time, there's enormous amounts of poetry being produced, both didactic poetry like this poetry, aiming to teach you something, but also narrative epic, heroes and gods and all kinds of poetry. And it's also really interesting what you say that if you're saying Opium is from Cilicia, and this area in the Roman Empire, this is far, far away from the nucleus of the Roman Empire in Italy. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a lot of material from this period that comes from well beyond Italy or Greece. This is a period in which Greek identity and debates about

Greekness are taking place all over the Hellenized Roman Empire. And is Cilicia renowned for fishing? Well, yes. There have been some studies looking at the kind of fishing that takes place on the Turkish coast. It's also renowned for piracy, which might give us a flavour of the dangers and the hostility and the chaotic forces at work at sea, perhaps. At one point, Oppian refers to the banks of Cilicia and the association of the red-stained earth, which he says is from the blood of Typhon, the monster that Zeus killed. So this is the Cilician, the sort of Cilician caves in Cilicia. So he's clearly interested in

this kind of moment, the ways in which Cilicia can stake a great claim to these pivotal moments in Greek literary history. So we have Hesiod talking about Zeus's destruction of Typhon, the sort of monster who tried to defeat him, overthrow him. And so there's clearly a sense of local pride, local identity. And he associates that with fishing, he says, that we have there. The fact that we have Hermes helping out, Hermes and Pan helping out there, being associated with fishing. So he claims that this is a mythological facet to it as well, the idea of Cilicia and fishing, which is interesting. Very interesting. And you mentioned earlier the cilician pirates and the dangers possibly of

going out to sea in this part of the world and sea fishing in antiquity it's not the pleasant pastime the retirement person's dream that we perhaps often associate fishing with today. That's right absolutely so we think of fishing as something almost a kind of philosophical reflective pursuit that you could do on a Sunday when you have time to meditate on a grassy bank. In the ancient world, this is partly because we're talking about sea fishing, which was immensely dangerous, as some of our early Greek literature as Hesiod says in the works and days, and says, don't go anywhere near ships, they are lethal. ships, they are lethal. And so it's partly sea fishing, but it's partly also that this is quite a banal activity carried out by fishermen who don't have a high social status in the ancient world. What's so interesting about Oppian is he takes this world of fishing, which wouldn't have been an elite reflective leisure time pursuit in the main, and then turns it into an epic foray,

a tale of adventures and very erudite literary allusions. That's really interesting how if fishing was not seen as a very high status job in the ancient world, that Oppian is creating this poem, but he's also giving it to the person with the highest status in the whole of the empire, which is the emperor. Yeah, absolutely. And he actually talks a little bit about the emperor's own fishing, and that's fascinating for its juxtaposition with the dangerous world of the sea fisher. So at the beginning of book one, he talks about how awful it is when you're a fisherman out. You've got this paltry little boat that's sort of threatening to fall apart at any moment.

And there's a storm coming and there are sea monsters beneath you and how frightening that can be. And then he cuts straight to the emperor in his quite sanitised fish preserves. So, you know, an area of the sea that was clearly marked out as his to fish in. He talks about him being rowed out by attendants who've been feeding the fish and the fish just hop onto his hook and delight at being caught by the emperor. So there are kind of tropes of how you praise an emperor there and the idea that the emperor is in control of the natural world but there's also quite an unsettling juxtaposition with the realities and this ideological glorification of the emperor's power over the sea there and keeping on the realities and what you mentioned just there about the possibility of

storms and tempests above and sea creatures below the psychological impact of it all in antiquity we were talking about this a bit before we started recording, about being this poor sailor in this little wooden raft, perhaps out to sea, having a fear that you might have this storm descending on you in any moment, but also the fact that you don't know what is beneath the waves, whether there are these terrifying sea creatures that you've heard about in these myths. Absolutely right. So he talks quite a lot in the poem to that first book about being able to look out over the sea but not into it so you've got no idea what's skulking underneath the surface and so that might be enormous monstrous creatures that are ready to devour you but it's also an

epistemological problem in how do you know this is a poem that sets out to tell you what's under the sea what kind of creatures there are zoological facts about them but that's very hard to determine because we just don't know what's in the sea deep and even nowadays we have nature programs devoted to the monstrous creatures that we didn't know about under the sea so in antiquity it was you know a hundredfold as mysterious and strange a realm oh absolutely if you've got planet earth nowadays and you're still being amazed by what sea creatures lurk in the depths of the ocean you can only imagine what it must have been like for people on the sea, even if it is just the Mediterranean, over 2,000 years ago.

Yeah. And he talks at one point about the dangers when humans go too far into the sea. So he says that humans have actually only explored up to a very finite point in the depths of the sea. And then later on, he has divers going in, sponge divers, who end up getting eaten by the monsters of the depths. And so they're on a rope and the rope is brought up and it's this very sort of macabre but quite poignant scene where the sponge diver has been devoured by something mysterious and horrible. And his companions are terrified and sort of row away in lamentation. Well, let's dive into Oppian's poem now. And first of all, it's tied to the Halieutica. Why is it called the Halieutica? What does this word mean? So this is things to do with

sea fishing, essentially. So we have a series of poems from the ancient world on parallel subjects. So one called the Synergetica on hunting, we have one on bird catching, and one on fishing. So we know that this was a genre of ancient writing about sea fishing. So it's a genre of ancient writing about sea fishing and how is it composed? So it's five books of hexameters so the same meter as epic this would have been counted as epic in the ancient world and it's what we call didactic epic which means that it purports to teach you how to catch fish or two books about fish themselves and three books on catching fish so it's epic poetry in the sense that these are

beautiful hexameters and it's using the language the archaizing it's kind of slightly old-fashioned deliberately sometimes elevated language of epic it's got a grandiosity to it, but at the same time, it's got an educational drive to it's teaching you something. And we don't know very much about the compositional history of the poem. We know that straight away afterwards it proliferates and we have huge numbers of manuscripts and we have even papyri and things, but we don't know much more about the circumstances of composition than that. But it's also constructed in this very clever way the use of language in it all but it's also educational at the same time it's supposed to tell you more about fish and fishing. Yeah that's right and we know that this was an enormously popular genre of didactic poetry in the ancient world so

think of something like Lucretius's poem on the nature of things and Virgil's poem, the Georgics, for instance. But it's not a genre that we really understand nowadays. With all the ancient didactic poetry, people say, well, okay, it's didactic, but what's it supposed to teach exactly? Because why would you have a treatise or a manual in epic verse? That seems a very strange thing to us. So we have epigrams from the ancient world, from what are clearly a school context, which talk about the glorious feast, the abundant feast the Dopians laid out, and also complaining a bit about having to read so much of this poetry. We also have ancient commentaries, scolia, that are clearly from a school context.

So we know that it was taught but we don't know what was taught from it. We don't know because the hexameters are incredibly elegant, really beautiful, really rich in imagery and metaphors and often very, very elegant language. So it might have been the language but I think it more probable that it was kind of wider truths about the world so partly it purports to teach you about the mechanisms of fishing so what kind of bait you might use partly about different kinds of fish but really the information you get there isn't systematic or comprehensive enough for it to be really about that so you couldn't actually catch many fish based solely on the information here and ancient fishermen couldn't read so as with much didactic poetry

same thing with Hesiod or Virgil's poems on farming exactly the same quandary so that they give you a tantalizing glimpse of the life of a farmer or the ways in which agriculture fits into kind of the wider cosmic order but you couldn't really run a farm on the basis of that poetry yes very interesting how this poetry might have been relayed in elite schools of education, where actually it was perhaps more useful for someone a bit lower down, a fisherman who would maybe want to know some of these techniques that Oppian is telling them about. That's true, I think, up to a point. But there are certain points where Oppian says, so I don't think he was himself an expert in fishing. His information comes from textbooks, comes from manuals and things.

And once or twice he says things like, well, you know, if you really want to know the details about this, just ask a fisherman. His role, as he sees it, is to think about the place of humans and animals, to think about the sea, the kind of the rich symbolism of the sea, to think about things like power relations and the imperial world. And the fish are a mechanism for thinking through some of these questions. symbolism of the sea to think about things like power relations and the imperial world and the fish are a mechanism for thinking through some of these questions but what you get out of this poem is much more than simple technicalities of how you catch a grey mullet for instance. Well let's go into that right now then. So what behaviours does Oppian talk about about the fish and the fish world that we can then see parallels with the human world.

Almost every behaviour that fish have, actually. It's a wonder, it's almost a thought experiment, really, in taking a creature that seems so unlikely, so sea creatures, and saying, well, in what respect are they like and unlike us? And it turns out that they're so heavily anthropomorphised throughout the poem, or at least we see so many parallels between fish and other creatures, that that's really an ideological position that Oppian, the poet, has. And he talks at one point about the interconnectedness of the different parts of the world. He says you can't really understand the sea without thinking about the land or the air, everything is interrelated. And he structures his poem in quite an interesting way. So book one is really about

the habits and the habitats of fish and mating practices and things. Book two is about guile and hostility. So the way that fish are always eating one another and they're just going after one another and the ways in which they can elude or catch one another. Then book three is very much about their greed. So this is about how you catch fish by using bait, but it becomes a wider issue of appetites. And humans as well as fish need to learn to rein in their appetites, otherwise you'll meet much the same end as these fish. And book four is about lust. So again, it's about how you catch fish. thrust so again it's about how you catch fish and for instance you might dangle a female fish in the water and the fish come flocking or it might be that with the merle wrasse you dangle a little prawn and the merle wrasse thinks that this prawn has designs on its multiple wives and it comes

you know to attack the prawn so these are essentially lessons based on reining in one's more bestial urges as it were that apply equally to humans and fish. And actually, that example of the Merlewraths leads the poet to talk about analogous practices in humans and saying, this is why polygamy is bad. Because if you look at the Eastern tribes, he says, that engage in polygamy, they're always just waging war against one another. It can never lead to good things if one man has many, many wives. And then book five is about enormous sea creatures. So you can see that the structure of the poem, particularly those three middle books on hostility,

greed and lust, are very much geared around foregrounding that parallel between human and animal behaviour. And how does he use his language to convey those parallels between these, perhaps I would say, fish vices and human behaviour? He does it partly by using the same language of both. And it's so interesting that he is not using dry scientific language. So there are debates even nowadays in the sciences as to how do you describe animal behaviour? Is it right to use the language that we've developed for humans? We talk about jealousy or play or rape or all these kinds of ideas that we have that describe human society, how far do we want to project those onto the animal world? And, you know, in the sciences, of course, in much of the 20th century, people

erred on the side of a parsimonious explanation saying we shouldn't attribute to animals any kind of higher cognitive state than we have to, essentially. And nowadays, many scientists and ethologists are rethinking those and saying, well, actually, what happens if we do attribute higher, much more human-like motivations or behaviours to animals? I think we see exactly these same kinds of debates playing out in Oppian, actually, that he talks, for instance, even from the opening lines of the poem he says okay we're going to look at the lives and loves and friendships and amenities of fish and he talks about the marriages of fish for instance and so he regularly talks not just about mating of fish but about fish having

suitors and about bridegrooms and marriage beds and things like that. So he's deliberately pushing that idea that there is no hard and fast separation between human life and the lives even of fish, which we would assume to be much less like us than other kinds of species that we regularly interact with. I mean, many of us would see many of our own characteristics reflected in, say, a pet dog, but fish seem to us to be a very different kind of world. And Oppian is challenging that, I think, quite profoundly. Well, it's especially a different kind of world when we think the fish thrive in that environment beneath the sea where a human could never be able to thrive. Obviously, no gills and all that.

But of course, we thrive above the sea in the world we are today, but where a fish couldn't thrive. Absolutely. And I think that's partly what makes the sea such a good space for thinking about a model of society that is both like and unlike the human. So it's unlike insofar as we don't have the same laws in the sea, he says. There's no justice at sea. All the fish are constantly trying to eat one another. But in a way, that makes it quite a good reflection of human society because you don't have politeness and etiquette and laws holding you back, you see these kind of really base urges of destruction and lust and greed and things play out with immediate effect and with a real sense that this is where humankind could go if we're not careful. So there are many, many similes that draw exactly those parallels. So the most striking feature of the poem is these incredible similes.

They're just so vivid, so lively, so original, many of them. So some of them look back to earlier epic traditions, but some of my favourites, there's when the Moerass is watching his many, many mates give birth. He's sort of hovering around like an anxious grandmother, waiting for the birth of the first grandchild. Or there's an episode where an octopus is attacking a crayfish, part again of one of these tales about the savagery of the sea. And Oppin says that this is like when there's a drunken banqueter who's coming out of dinner and he's sort of singing a slightly tipsy song, it's not very much in tune, staggering out, and there's a thief lurking in the alleyway in the darkness, kind of skulking and waiting to pounce

and strip off all the banqueter's sort of clothing and take his wallet and things like that. And so these are kind of incredibly vivid similes and they're both very captivating but they also very often have a deeper point to make which is precisely that we cannot think that we as humans are divorced from the practices that you see play out everywhere in the sea. There is a very profound sense of likeness between human and animal life. Well, it seems like the simile and the metaphor, they seem these prime ways that Oppian uses to emphasise the parallels between the maritime world and the human world. Absolutely. And not just the maritime world either. He often compares fish to terrestrial animals as well. So again, this sense that all parts of the world need to be seen against one another in order to be made sense of now you mentioned there the octopus and the crayfish and you were talking about

hostility and certain creatures not being able to get along with one another emily what is the story of the crayfish the octopus and the moray eel these are three creatures that were thought in antiquity to loathe one another above all other species. So he says that all fish have a tendency to eat one another, there's only one exception to that, and he showers on praise for the vegetarian grey mullet. But all others, he says, hate one another, but there are no more hostile enemies than the octopus, the eel and the crayfish. And it's a particularly interesting group because we see it recur in many contexts in the ancient world. So we have lots of authors, so Aristotle and Clini and others talk about,

Athenaeus talks about it, but also in things like mosaics and wall paintings across the Roman Empire. So it clearly had taken on a paradigmatic quality by Oppian's time. And I think the reason for that is you've got these three species. So we have the eel eats the octopus, the octopus eats the crayfish, and the crayfish eats the eel. So it's got a circularity to it, almost a philosophical harmony to it. And they can do that because they've got complementary characteristics. So the octopus is slippery and can change colour and can hide from most things, but the eel just pounces and devours the octopus. from most things but the eel just pounces and devours the octopus and the crayfish is prickly and so it can eat the eel but it gets eaten by the octopus that just strangles it and scoops out its

flesh so it's a slightly gruesome but philosophical reflection so Aristotle calls it peripateia the sudden reversal unfortunately the same way that we get of these reversals in tragedy so it takes on this idea that you can't at sea ever be in power for long. You might think that as a species you have the upper hand, but the sea is a space of chaos and fluctuations and overriding hostility. And he says the same thing of the dolphin, which is the king of the fish. But he says even dolphins don't have a stable rule. They're attacked by Benitos. and we have a long, long story of the Benitos attacking a dolphin. So this is fear of fluctuating chaos, unlike the stable rule in some ways of the Roman imperial world, he says. I definitely want to get onto dolphins in a, but you mentioned that this whole idea of power. And it's very interesting how Oppin is using the study, this work on fishing in the maritime world to talk about power relations.

And for instance, of the eel, of the crayfish and of the octopus to try and reflect on the human power relations. That's absolutely right. So there is both a sense that what you see in the marine world is a power in its barest form. You see creatures that are able to overpower others because of their strength, but also because of their ingenuity. We have these moments where you have one almost gloating over another. So when the eel catches the octopus, of one almost gloating over another so when the eel catches the octopus the eel says ha you thought because the octopuses in antiquity were proverbially good at camouflaging themselves so the sort of chameleon of the sea and she said ha you think you were able to outwit me but I've got you now so this is moment of you know real reveling in that power and that's partly the kind of language that you get a Homeric warrior when they're about to kill their enemy and things like that but it's also this broader sense of the desire to overpower other species and that's mapped on too to the idea of fishing as an exercise in power

so the fishermen outwit the fish either by force or by trickery much like the fish are doing to one another so there's a parallelism there but partly what you get with fishing is a sense that human beings are able to plan to realize the relationship between cause and effect the consequences of their actions whereas fish are not they just take the bait because their urges their appetites are so strong that they're unable to see much further down the line so there's a way in which fishing too plays into this sense of the sea as a sphere where you're really examining power relations. And fishing had long in antiquity become emblematic of different kinds of power. So you get in things like erotic context with the lover and the beloved, often hunting images are used, but fishing too.

But also things like us talking about fishing for compliments, for instance. They talk about this in antiquity, that people taking the bait and things like that. So it's used of human relations too, as a metaphor. And Oppian really exploits that. Because fishing also seems to be very common in ancient comedies. That's right. So ancient comedies are utterly obsessed by fish. And I think there's a question as to why do we find fish so funny? There's something that's very

one level quite banal about fish. So if you leave them out, they get sort of slimy and they start to smell and things like that. And that lends itself to a comic idea. But there's also a sense you get things like epic parodies. So from the 4th century BC, we have figures like Matro of Paterni, who has an epic parody of a dinner party where you have things like an eel being carried in and described as a white-armed goddess, for instance. And the speaking of this creature is actually sizzling as it's being cooked. And there's a deliberate juxtaposition of that high epic register and the banality of fish that gulf between the two is quite important and there's also a fascination with fish I think as objects of desire in

gastronomic circles so James Davidson has written a very interesting book about this quarterstones and fish cakes and we see it all over ancient gastronomic and comic literature, that there was this frenzy to eat the tastiest morsels, or it's a space of conspicuous consumption. So people are ostentatiously buying very expensive fish, displaying it to dinner guests, greedily eating as much as they can, and things like that. And there's a lot of discussion about which species are the most ostentatious ones and part of that too is the fact that fish are marked out as different from other kinds of things that you can eat so in the ancient world almost all meat that was eaten came from a sacrificial context and so they're kind of elaborate ritualized forms

of slaughtering these creatures and it was usually a communal affair so you would divide up a larger animal amongst participants it's a way of bringing people together as a group fish you don't get sacrificed there's occasional references to the sacrifice of tuna but in almost all cases fish are for personal consumption which puts them in a different category from something that is an offering to a god and a way of bringing group together. So fish are kind of differentiated. And there's a lot of discussion about things like in the Homeric epics, heroes don't eat fish. So again, Athenaeus and others discuss this at their dinner party at great length. You know, why is it that we have heroes eating meat and endless, endless sacrifices in the Iliad, but only in the direst

of circumstances will they ever catch fish when they're marooned on an island, say. Yes, if I was hoping for good winds sailing from Richborough to Boulogne, I wouldn't sacrifice a mackerel. I completely understand what you mean there. But it is interesting, was it very much this idea that the more difficult a fish was to catch, the more valuable it was seen as being by the elites and by ancient Roman or ancient Greek society. Yeah, there are a number of issues surrounding fish and they would have been expensive. We have a sense that, yeah, there is a huge amount of effort, particularly for certain species that have to be caught individually. It's different when you can catch huge numbers in a net. And I think that plays a part as well.

They don't last for very long. And of of course you get methods of preserving fish in the fish source as well but fresh fish was certainly and eels were a particular luxury and we have references both in Greek and Roman contexts to the price and the sense that people are really showing off their consumption of eels. And then in the Roman context, you get this kind of absolute mania for artificial fish ponds and the keeping of fish as a display of wealth and luxury as well. That's then bringing fish

from being in quite a dangerous environment, especially if they were sea creatures, but into a very peaceful environment, very similar to, let's say, river fishing or something like that, where the whole elements of this being a dangerous enterprise are removed. They might be removed or it might be a reveling in being able to take control of that

a little bit like when you have sort of arena concerts and you have a sense of play acting of the dangers of these creatures you know might be lions and things but you're controlling that environment you might get the same thing if you get a fish pond and you've got these creatures but you've got them contained you've got them in your garden and things but we do have other examples we have an example of one grasshopper who kept a pet murray eel and dressed it up in jewellery and sort of lavished all his attention and people found this utterly ludicrous this anthropomorphisation of an incredibly hostile creature have you ever seen a murray eel they are terrifying things so clearly that's something that people are playing with or concerned about, that juxtaposition of control, pets, domestic environments and the terrors of the sea.

Absolutely. Well, let's go back to the Hali Utica and can we say the climax of his work, book five of his epic poem? Yeah, absolutely. We go from discussing smaller scale creatures in the first four books to enormous creatures, so keta or kind of sea monsters or big things. So that would include things like dolphins, but also sharks, whales, sea monsters and so on. And what's the key story in this book that is so fascinating,

this contest between fishermen and insanely huge sea beast? and insanely huge sea beast. Yeah, so we have almost the first half of book five dedicated to a Moby Dick style quest for an enormous sea creature. And it's a terrifying beast. We never know quite what it is. It seems to be somewhere between a whale and a shark. And I think the idea that it's something

that is a composite mythical beast that we don't actually know what it looks like even because it's beneath the water until it's dragged out onto land and then at that point everybody from around comes to marvel at it and then you know some are marveling at its tusks at its spine at its size at its belly and it's so terrifying that there's an onlooker who says oh i never ever want to go into the sea if that's the kind of thing that you get there. Just keep me safe on land, please don't make me go out there. So it becomes kind of emblematic of these enormous, monstrous creatures that lurk in the sea.

It very much sounds like the ancient histories version of the Moby Dick hunt. Yeah, absolutely. And it's got this almost cosmic scope there. The idea that it takes on a symbolism of the dangers and the horrors of the sea. And it's invested with a whole series of monstrous illusions. So it's compared to Typhon, to Charybdis, to implicitly to figures like Polyphemus, the Cyclops, to all kinds of cosmic battles that you get in epic poetry. So it really becomes the emblem of the sea's ferocity. Well, you mentioned all those mythological figures there. So let's go on to myths and sea creatures, because just thinking of Greek myths, perhaps like the Odyssey and the Charybdis

who sucks the whirlpool and all that, it is filled with all these stories of these mythical sea creatures that do battle with some of the heroes of antiquity. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what's so interesting about Opium Sea and the sea monster as a creature that fits into this pattern as well is that you can read it on two levels. You can read it as fishermen catching just a bigger version of a fish in the way that you get throughout the rest of the poem, or you can see it as mankind against this sort of huge mythical threat, the terrors of the chaotic or the disordered or however you want to see it. And I think sort of huge mythical threat, the terrors of the chaotic or the disordered or however you want to see it. And I think you can see that with the sea throughout

the poem. So sometimes you see that this is the sea in a specific location, it might be off the shores of Sicily or something, but sometimes it's the sea of Jason and the Argonauts kind of voyaging or it's the sea that Odysseus sort of battles or sort of struggles with on his adventures on the way back from Troy. And you often get these parallels between the fisherman and Odysseus himself, the fact that these are figures who have to engage in trickery to outwit their opponents, that they're kind of being buffeted across the seas, that the fish themselves are much like the baddies of the Odyssey. So the suitors and the foolish companions who are again indulging their appetites and not being able to foresee the long-term consequences of their decisions. So the companions, we're told right from the beginning of the Odyssey,

eat the cattle of the sun and will be punished. And the suitors similarly devouring Odysseus' possessions and they'll get what's coming to them. And we get in many instances the fish that are have a wonderful description of sea bream where the fisherman puts down a little basket onto the seabed and the bream gather in there but they're described very much like the suitors of Odysseus where they're sort of sitting in a basket you know it's a home that's not theirs to own they're consuming somebody else's possessions. They're sort of sleeping. They're kind of indolent and greedy and lazy. And only too late do they realise what they've let themselves in for as the fisherman hauls the basket up. So is it fair to say that for many sea creatures, there seems to be portrayed in literature, a natural hostility between certain sea creatures

and humans? That's right. So I think that most of these sea creatures seem to be characterised by their hostility towards almost everything. And so this is a recurring theme in the poem is that the sea is a sphere of fluctuating power relations because there isn't a stability because everybody tries to eat everybody else or is mostly trying to not be eaten too. But this comes out sometimes in the relationship between fishermen and fish. So for instance, the sea monster is clearly going to eat those humans if he can catch them. If they don't catch him first, he'll simply devour the boat and its inhabitants. But there are other creatures that have a slightly more positive relationship with human beings. So we have,

for instance, one in this book four, which is about lust and the loves of fish. We have some fish that have this real affection for goats and are always frolicking about the hooves of goats when their goat herds bring them down to the shore to bathe. And I think probably the most troubling episode in the poem is the fisherman that befriends a certain kind of fish and goes down and feeds them day after day after day and they have a kind of a bond of loyalty and they will follow the fisherman in his boat, they'll go where he points and it's described very much in terms of a guest and a host exchanging toasts to one another, enjoying reciprocal bonds of friendship and hospitality and then of course the fisherman betrays them by catching them, he just sort of scoops them up when they become, as it were, kind of tame and so on. And there were a few moments where it's the humans that seem to behave more savagely than the fish,

which have a sense of trust or of good moral qualities. And the absolute epitome of that is the dolphin. So we're told that dolphins are sacred to Poseidon and they must not be caught and they must not be slaughtered or eaten. And most humans don't. And there are tales of, so dolphin tales were absolutely huge in antiquity. We have endless anecdotes of these remarkable bonds of friendship between humans and dolphins. They survive in all kinds of sources and visual representations as well. And some dolphins help the fishermen by herding fish into the net. But we have this one again in book five, a very troubling episode where Thracians and the inhabitants of Byzantium slaughter dolphins. And they do that by, they catch a baby dolphin.

And once they've caught that, the mother just sort of lets herself be caught as well. But she, we have a whole speech put into her mouth that says oh look humans no longer respect the sanctity of our relationship they have no respect for the gods and we're told that these are people who would happily kill their own families and things as well so there's a moment where humans there are clearly breaching a sacred bond of loyalty and respect between humans and sea creatures. And dolphins were thought formerly to have been human, to have been metamorphosed into dolphins, which is a mark of that same profound similarity of mind between humans and dolphins, such that to kill them is

really sacrilegious. Nevertheless, it is interesting how this bond between humans and dolphins, this idea of companionship, has existed down to this present day. And it seems that it was also there in antiquity. Yeah, absolutely. So we have lots and lots of stories of things like Orion and the dolphin or dolphins' love of music. We have the idea that dolphins come onto land to be buried. Lots of these stories kind of seem to be reflecting on what we might think of as dolphins' mammalian status, the fact that they are the fish. If you think about the categories of fish and human, the creature that comes closest to the human there is the dolphin. And so in the ancient world, that gets thought through as metamorphosis. So we get that in things like the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus. We have lots of visual representations

of humans being turned into dolphins. So clearly, that's a way of kind of thinking through the sophistication, the bonds between humans and dolphins. And we have stories of friendship, and even sometimes a kind of hint of erotic relations between humans and dolphins in a lot of these ancient stories. Well, I mean, absolutely. One of my favourite coins from antiquity is the coin of Tarentum, where it shows on one side the dolphin of the city because it's so linked to that city's mythical foundation of this figure who is shipwrecked is it he's shipwrecked and then he's brought and he finds the city was it something along those lines yeah yeah yeah absolutely and dolphins were thought very often to rescue shipwrecked human

beings and to sort of carry them on their backs and so on yeah and you mentioned just their visual depictions of dolphins but also other sea creatures which brings you on to my next area that i'd like to really ask about and that is mosaics because we seem to see even in britain at bignor roman villa at fishbourne palace we see these depictions of sea creatures loud and clear on these beautiful mosaics absolutely and there's clearly a fascination with the bounty of the sea and the huge range of different species that you get in the sea. We have things like fish plates as well, depicting lots of different kinds of species in really

minute detail often. And there's a fascination both with this sense of the way in which the sea is teeming with creatures that are edible but also weird and wonderful and what we get on mosaics too is also a sense of the kind of the symbolism of the sea when we have very often marine deities and things depicted on mosaics as well and on these mosaics is it sometimes a mixture of sea creatures that people know well how they look like but also see creatures which are mythical which are legendary which people think may lurk beneath the waves yeah absolutely so you get ideas about all kinds of weird and wonderful hybrid creatures or there's a sense that when you go down into the depths you might get enormous unfathomable species as well that this is a sphere where precise zoological knowledge

actually quite rapidly gives out and gives way to fantasy or speculation or terror, that kind of horrified obsession with what might be down there. Yeah. It's very interesting how in the ancient world, when they think about the edges of the known world, as it were, and those edges of the known world are shrouded in myth and legend. It's also the edges of the sea world beneath what they know and how far they can go is also this place shrouded in myth and legend too absolutely and in fact you get many ancient theories about the edges of the world being ringed by oceanus by kind of the ocean that there's a sense in which and opina very much emphasizes the idea that the sea is sort of infinite and vast and nobody can possibly know what's actually in there he says only only the gods can know. And he's replaying this idea that this

is a vast sphere that is well beyond mortal knowledge. It marks the boundaries of human ability to comprehend the world that we live in. Wow, yeah, it's frightening in itself, very frightening. And let's go back to Oppian's Heliutica. It sounds like an amazing epic poem. How was it received by the emperor and in Roman times? We know very little about how it was received by the emperor. What we do have are probably Byzantine biographies of Oppian. So these really extrapolate from material that we find in the poem itself. poem itself. So there's a moment where Oppian talks about a lobster and he says that they have a really profound attachment to their own little nook or cranny of the seabed and if a fisherman takes that lobster out, takes him far away, the lobster will scuttle back however long it takes to its own little den. And Oppian says well you know we all know how awful it is when you're exiled or when you have to live out your life in a foreign land.

And of course, the biographer sees on this and they create this story that Oppian was exiled himself with his father to an island because his father had not, his father was supposed to be a philosopher, had not sufficiently recognised the emperor's authority. And the biographers say that it was only when Oppian composed and presented the Haliutica to the emperor's authority. And the biographers say that it was only when Oppian composed and presented the Haliutica to the emperor, and the emperor was so thrilled that he presented him with a golden coin for every line. And there are three and a half thousand lines in the poem, so it's quite a lot of coins, and then restored them both from exile. And you can see both in the biographies and also in the commentaries on the poem in these lines on the lobster they say ah he's riddling here he's conveying a hidden truth he's trying to tell us the real story of what's going on so you can actually quite interestingly see that process

of these biographies being extrapolated from what we get in the poem itself but we certainly know that the very fact that we have all these biographies, we have these commentaries, epigrams, we have a prose paraphrase, and actually we have a poem penned in imitation of the Haliutica by a poet that we know is Pseudo-Opian about terrestrial hunting. So perhaps imitation is the wrong word, but homage certainly. So we can see that very early on it became enormously influential because Opian's so innovative in his language we can trace that through imperial authors well into Byzantine times so we have many many declarations of admiration on the part of Byzantine authors so Eustathius who wrote this

sort of magisterial commentary on the Homeric works talks in absolutely laudatory terms about Oppian and really really refers to him much more often than you might expect or than even was necessary. He seems to delight in making comparisons between Homer and Oppian. And so the huge number of manuscripts, we have over 70 manuscripts, all of this suggests phenomenal popularity. It just begs the question, if he was so popular past Roman times into the Byzantine era and into the Middle Ages, why do so few people know about Oppian today? Yeah, it's a really good question. So we know that his popularity continued in certain quarters. So Julius Caesar Scaliger said that Oppian was the best poet from antiquity after Virgil,

in his opinion, and he knew his ancient authors. So clearly, there's people who do read Oppian, very often love Oppian. So a lot of the translators and editors of Oppian talk about how extraordinary this work is. But I think the problem is partly that we don't know how to read didactic poetry, that we have a very romantic idea of what poetry ought to look like. And that is that it ought to be spontaneous and genuine and born of, you know, our own emotions and passions and experiences. So in the romantic view, a poem that is based on a versification of prose treatises cannot be proper poetry. So I think that's been very influential on what we think poetry ought to look like. And actually, you can trace the

18th and 19th century decline of didactic to a lot of these debates about how poetry ought to look and I think we still get confused by these questions of well you know we have first of all assumptions that it must be dry and boring because it's didactic and we use didactic or Winston as a slur nowadays it's something that's sort of preachy or overtly educational and therefore not inherently gripping but I think we just don't really understand who was reading this stuff in antiquity and why. We know it was phenomenally popular, but we struggle to understand that. And I think the final Nail and Offian's coffin for much of the 19th and 20th century was simply that it's late Greek, and particularly late Greek poetry.

So if you've got a model where the height of sophistication of ancient Greek culture is the 5th century BC, and after that you see a decline, then you're not going to look to stuff from the 2nd century AD as being particularly sophisticated, which it absolutely is. It's incredibly complicated, sophisticated, elegant work. And there's been a gradual renaissance in, first of all, Hellenistic poetry, and then secondly, the prose literature of the imperial period and now the poetry of this period is starting to be looked at afresh as well so I think Oppian's time is very much coming. Exactly but the nails in Oppian's coffin they're being taken out there is a revival in Oppian going on at this moment in time. Yeah absolutely and I

think particularly this is a moment where people are increasingly interested in the relationship between humans and animals. And this is something that's very much part of our 21st century consciousness. So it ties in not only to looking afresh at imperial Greek literature, but thinking about questions of post-humanism and ideas about whether in the ancient world, it was always the case that thinkers thought that humans were automatically superior to or at the top of a hierarchy or separated cognitively from other kinds of animals and these are debates that are going on and they have a lot of energy at the moment and I think Oppian actually speaks very much to these kinds of questions about what was the perceived relationship between humans and animals or humans and other kinds of non-humans,

questions about agency in non-humans, things about the levels of sophistication of fish and other animals. Well, there you go. Oppian's time is coming once again. Emily, that was an amazing chat on Oppian sea creatures and everything to do with that. One last thing, your book is called? It's Oppian's Heliutica Charting a Didactic Epic and it's published this year with Cambridge University Press.

Fantastic. Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you.