The Ancients - Roman Beast Hunts

Episode Date: March 26, 2023

This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence and cruelty against animals.The Romans were - and still are - infamous for the brutal gladiatorial contests they held in their ancient amphitheatres. But often what made their games so spectacular were the exotic animals they put on show. Viciously hunted on an industrial scale, elephants, lions, crocodiles and even rhinos were thrust onto the arena floor and slaughtered, all for the pleasure of the Roman crowds.In today’s episode of The Ancients, Tristan talks to Caroline Freeman-Cuerdan to explore these beast hunts and the massive industry that lay behind them. Together they discover how the animals acted as both ‘hunter and hunted’ and why Roman statesmen were so obsessed with beasts from far-away lands. The Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie.The Assistant Producer was Annie Coloe.Edited by Joseph Knight.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store 

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient 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. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today's episode, well, we're talking about a pretty horrific, infamous part of ancient Roman culture today. We're going to the amphitheaters, to those great arenas such as the Colosseum, renowned, of course, for the bloody gladiatorial spectacles that the ancient Romans are now infamous for. But gladiator shows weren't the only terrible events that occurred in these arenas all across the Roman Empire. Preceding these events, usually in the morning, were another

type of gruesome spectacle which included wild animals either locally acquired or brought in from further afield from the far reaches of the roman empire and beyond and these animals they were then pitted against either each other or against specially trained fighters beast hunters called venationes or in a really terrible case sometimes these animals would be used as executioners for executing prisoners around midday during these bloody infamous games. The whole story of the beast hunts, it was an incredibly popular and important industry in ancient Rome, as you're going to hear in this episode, but it is also brutal. You won't be surprised to hear that there are clear cases of animal

cruelty, so I wanted to give you an advanced warning of that before we really delve into the details of the beast hunts. Now talking all about this, I interviewed the author Caroline Freeman Querdon, who has recently written a book all about animals in the Roman world. written a book all about animals in the Roman world. And naturally, when it comes to this topic, the stories of these unfortunate animals that were brought to these arenas, that fought in front of thousands of spectators, well that story plays a significant part in the whole tale of animals in the Roman world. So without further ado, to talk all about these beast hunts, here's Caroline. Caroline, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. No problem at all. We are back in the Roman amphitheatres. We're at the Colosseum and so many other of these ancient arenas. Because when we talk about the arenas, the Colosseum, the amphitheatres of ancient Rome, our minds might immediately go to gladiatorial combat. But there was also this brutal, horrible animal aspect to it too, wasn't there? Yeah, it was a massive industry. And even when you say, oh, when we think about it, you think of the film Gladiator and you remember those tigers coming up. But in reality, the information that we've been left by the Romans, lots of it is for these really massive spectacular shows which were recorded. If you think of it in today's terms, so you imagine

something like the opening of the World Cup, where you have these massive shows and people really want to show off their country and their success and what they can do. But you've also got smaller football games going on, even tiny ones like Macclesfield Town against Accrington Stanley or something. So over the Roman Empire, you would have had these smaller shows where perhaps all the seats weren't full and there weren't these massive animals like tigers and lions. And so you go back to the original beast hunts, which were more like your deer and your hares running around and people going in with dogs, hunting them for the public to see. The ones that we've got all this information about are these massive spectacular ones. So something like the Colosseum, it didn't even open till the first century, 80 AD. So you would have smaller amphitheatres over the Roman provinces. But the animals were a huge part and they were a massive industry. All these animals coming in.

And where could these animals be coming from? The big hub was at Alexandria in Egypt. And the animals that were coming from Western India would go down the side of the Indian Ocean, arriving in Alexandria, the ones who were coming from Africa, and then they're going over the sea to Ostia. I love imagining the night before the Games, how busy it would be. If you think of the Coliseum, this massive industry going on, the animal shows started at six in the morning. So those animals would have to be arriving the night before. Everything had to be set up just so. We even know in that arena, you would have 24 elevators. The animals kept below ground. They would be raised up. There would be 200 workers and then the animals would burst out onto the arena floor. The cages would open at the front and then at the back of the cage, there was a square hole on the top. And through that hole,

originally people thought it was to feed the animals, but we now understand that it was to goad them out. So burning straw would be put through that hole. Maybe even animals are getting burnt just to force them out. So whips was used, fire was used. So I just like imagining the absolute busyness of these places. It's clear that a lot of animals don't want to go out into all of this noise and the terror and the fear. So a lot of them were very bedraggled, reluctant to leave. There's the Emperor Probus. He had a hundred lions that he was going to display. And that's recorded that they were just listless. They didn't want to leave their cages and they ended up just being killed by the archers straight into the cages.

It is really horrible to envisage that today. Caroline, what was the reason or reasons for these beast hunts? It was a way of getting the public on your side. If you want people to vote for you, you give them things, you give them a great time. So the games were used right back in the Roman Republic, the first century BC. You've got Pompey, you've got Crassus, you've got Julius Caesar. He would go into debt putting on animal displays and shows and giving people a good time, that's what the people are going to remember. When you have somebody like the Emperor Septimius Severus, 204 AD, he put on a show in the arena.

There was a big ship built that looked like a shipwreck. And so when the ship broke up, all of these animals, from tigers to bisons, lions, they're all running out and then slaughtered. That was a massive, spectacular thing for the public to see. And a few years later, the picture of that ship with those animals running out was put onto a Roman coin. And the words above it, lititia temporum, mean the happiness of the ages, you know, like happy times. So that's a great advert for that emperor. It's as if you're saying, look, do you remember when you came to see in your thousands? What an amazing time you had. It's a way of advertising yourself because the coin, of course, is disseminated around. So the games were really important in that respect for you to get the public on your side. What I'd like to focus on first, Caroline, and you highlighted it there during your overview of the beast hunts, of the bringing of these

animals to big arenas like the Colossae, but also many other arenas, as you say, across the Roman Empire. The question is, in regard to our sources, we seem to know quite a lot about this. And it sounds from what you're saying, so we've got a mixture of quite a few literary accounts, literature, but also coinage. You see some of these depicting these great beasts, I guess. Yeah, the coins are really useful, but we've got inscriptions as well. So, for example, if you're talking about how they captured the animals, sometimes the Roman army were deployed to do this. So in Germany, part of the army were called ussariae. So ussus is Latin for bear. They were let off normal army duties. You're going to go out and hunt for bears.

And we've got an inscription of a centurion who had caught 50 bears in six months. So he was a really good bear catcher. So you've got inscriptions, you've got the coins which give us information, and you've got the letters. So Cicero, the great statesman and philosopher, while he was governor of Turkey, he was getting letter after letter from a chap, Caelius, who really needed leopards for his shows. So what you can learn from those letters is just how important it was for the politician to get their hands on this so that you could elevate your career. And he's writing to Cicero saying, he gets quite desperate in the end, like, please, could you just get me the bloody leopards? And Cicero is just not having any of it. And in the end, he sarcastically says, oh, they've left the area.

There's different things left to us like inscriptions, coins, letters, and of course, poetry as well. Before we delve into some of these, you know, you mentioned leopards there, we talked about bears. I'd like to talk a bit more about tigers and even crocodiles in a bit. But I think something which is also important to highlight with these beast hunts with these animals that were brought to these great arenas is what you highlighted near the start caroline was that although our mind makes us immediately think of great spectacles like in the coliseum or those huge arenas they were happening in smaller places all across the empire. And these animals, they weren't always exotic from faraway places. They were sometimes smaller. They were sometimes

more local too. Yes, absolutely. So you'd have the local Italian animals. So people were then watching these much smaller, more domesticated animals, harmless animals, getting hunted in front of them and just watching the skill of the hunters. When you're talking about the more exotic animals, then the Romans are tending to use the native hunters who really did know what they were doing. You mentioned crocodiles, so the Tentiriti people who lived on the west bank of the Nile, they would have, I'm imagining, grown up being taught how to hunt crocodiles. So they were completely confident in that. They knew the methods. They could get

into the water on the back of the crocodile, whack a staff into its open mouth, wrestle it to the shore. That's how they did it. And that's who the Romans would use. And so when the Emperor Augustus, use. And so when the Emperor Augustus, he knew the power of the games as well. During his reign, he's said to have ended up slaughtering about 3,500 animals over 26 shows, which sounds like a lot. But then when you think of the opening of the Colosseum, which was 100 days of games, that was 9,000 animals slaughtered in 100 days. That's so many animals. So these professional hunters who really have the skills, who knew what they were doing with lions and knew what they were doing with crocodiles. And so Augustus in 2 BC was able to put on a big show for the opening of the Forum of Augustus and have these 36 crocodiles and have the Tentiriti going

into the water and slaughtering all 36. Which again, it's such an amazing animal. You can just imagine what the crowds must have thought when they saw an animal like that. He flooded the Circus Flaminius to do that as well. But yes, the smaller animals were definitely part of the games too. Caroline, it is so remarkable when you delve more and more into this topic. One of the most fascinating things, it's real animal cruelty, it really is, but one of the most fascinating things about this topic is the logistics behind fetching these animals from far-flung corners of the Roman Empire. These are absolutely titanic efforts.

Definitely. It's like a massive, massive industry. So they're using so many people working at it. And I think also we've got such a different attitude towards animals today. But if the animals were suffering, although there was collateral, then it didn't matter. Nobody was going to sue you or anything. So animals would have suffered during the transportation and they would have suffered again in the conditions that they were kept in. But it was a huge industry. Rome would be taxing its provinces and they could be taxed by province giving them animals. The other thing when you're talking about it as an industry,

if you look at the Romans, they didn't like to waste anything. So we know that they collected urine for the fuller's yards and things like, you know, they have the massive purple dye industry where they used just millions of sea snail shells, millions of knees. And so if you take that as an example, they didn't want to waste, you know, once they'd got the mucus out the back of the little tiny animals that they were going to turn into this really expensive purple dye, they didn't even want to waste those shells. So the shells be put into beauty products. They could be used for aggregate. They could be used

for mosaics. So if you transfer that idea then to the arena, God, you've got all of these animals slaughtered and you think of it as an industry as well. What happened to these dead animals? Well, we do know that these big games at the Coliseum, 80 AD, throughout wooden balls. But tickets could go out and you look at what you've got, like a lottery. You might win slaves, you might win clothing, you might win some cattle. But there's academics who say that meat was handed out. And that we've actually got Roman literature that talks about bear meat having the same taste as boar. But you've also got the, he's called the father of pharmacy, Dioscorides, first century AD. So he was a Greek physician and he wrote a big work on medicine that was the go-to work for one and a half thousand years. And he lists lion fat and panther fat being used in a medicinal way on sores. We also know, not from Dioscorides, but for beauty treatments, it's listed lion fat with rose oil for your complexion.

Dioscorides says elephant fat as a snake repellent. So you have to wonder, if you've got all these slaughtered lions, you have to wonder, if you've got all these slaughtered lions, what were the Romans who don't want to even chuck away your rind or chuck away a sea snail's shell? What are they going to do with all of these animal carcasses? So there are academics who believe that there was meat handed out to the crowds. When you think about lion fat, what are they going to do? Are they just going to get rid of those bodies or are they going to make use of them? And if you think of the Spanish bull rings today, they don't just throw away the bulls. The bulls are collected in trucks and taken on for processing for the meat industry.

So when you're talking about it being this massive thing, maybe the business of the animals in the beast shows goes on further after their death. If you were a poor Roman, you'd get your brain dull, but you don't have access to a lot of meat. So there is a possibility that there would be some meat from the arena. March 2023 marks 20 years since the start of the Iraq War. The war was waged to rid the world of a brutal dictator, yet it would end marred in controversy. So why did the Iraq War go so badly wrong? And what legacies has it left behind today?

Well, I'm your host, James Patton Rogers, and every Monday on the Warfare podcast from History Hit, we're exploring a different aspect of this tumultuous period in history. We'll be asking, what was the role of the UK government and Prime Minister Tony Blair? Could the Secretary of State legally order British forces into Iraq and could British forces follow that law? And how did ISIS rise from the destruction left behind? But ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the US invasion of Iraq. Join me, James Patton Rogers, on the Warfare podcast from History Hit

as we look back on one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history. So the bringing of these animals to places like Rome by an emperor or in the late Roman Republic by one of those, well,amous statesmen as you mentioned Caesar, Pompey or Crassus. It wasn't just the types of animal that they are bringing back, these unusual animals they bring back to amaze the crowds. As you say there could potentially be this other purpose of them too by being able to access this type of meat or getting almost hands on with these animals. It is also so interesting we're hunting today in that with these beast spectacles, whether they're hunting each other or there are hunters hunting these animals in the arena, this all occurred, was it usually just during the morning? So this would happen actually in a space of a few hours. So you've got the beast hunts at 6am, then at lunchtime you've got the executions. And then the big thing was the

gladiator shows in the later afternoon. And I think the beast hunts weren't seen as kind of highbrow. So we know that there are certain people, Seneca, for example, who just wasn't into watching these particular things, especially the executions. Then you've got Claudius, who is said to have arrived at dawn and loved it and stayed at lunchtime when the executions would be going on with the animals. But these animals that were coming, when we're talking about the reasons for them being there, the executions are another reason. So the animals could also be used as the tools for people's executions in the arenas. So the animals could also be used as the tools for people's executions in the arenas. And that was a real lowly, lowly, dishonourable death. The person who started this was 2nd century BC, a general, Aemilius Paulus, who decided that those people who deserted from

the Roman army who were not Roman citizens, this was a suitable punishment for them with animals. So then as time goes on, when you get into the arenas, this has become by the first century AD more common than death by crucifixion or fire. like the person is being punished twice. The animal was the executioner and the animal was the desecrator. So first of all, they've got this terrible death that might be very drawn out, very slow, depending on the animal. A big cat might kill somebody quicker, getting you at the back of the neck. A bear was the worst death. If you've seen the Revenant, that scene with Leonardo DiCaprio, and it's really drawn out and it isn't a quick thing. So a bear was the worst death. If you've seen the Revenant, you know that scene with Leonardo DiCaprio, and it's really drawn out and it isn't a quick thing. So a bear was the worst one, and they used the bears a lot. But then when the person has actually died, then it's like the animal is desecrator. And now it's almost like a second punishment because the body is actually

eaten. Parts of the body are going into an animal, which was, especially in those days, the sort of significance, the symbolism of that is just so bad. The importance of the burial rites, you know, so that they can reach the afterlife and so on and so forth. Yeah, there are none. Your body doesn't exist anymore. It's inside another body, an animal body, the lowest that you could be. We do know that Caligula is said to have, when he had to feed the exotic animals that he had for his shows, that he said, I'm not going to waste cattle on these. We can use the condemned criminals. So the animals had another reason for it being the executioners as well. And another

reason is that when they had these animals, it's like saying, look how far we have come. Because when we talked about those Italian animals being used, now Julius Caesar is bringing in a blooming giraffe and Augustus is bringing in Egyptian crocodiles because we have taken Egypt and these animals are now the symbol of those places that they've taken. Augustus then brought out a coin again, has a crocodile on it. And the words are, I get to capture Egypt captured. So the public is seeing this message on a coin. So there's even more reason to have those animals brought over. At the end of the Civil War, you've got Julius Caesar

fighting the Pompeians, the Battle of Thapsus. And on the Pompeian side, they've been loaned all these elephants by King Uber. And Julius Caesar, he wins the battle and he brings over these 40 elephants from King Uber. And so you've got, again, that look. These elephants symbolize something. So in 46 BC, when Caesar then has these four triumphs in Rome, massive affair, 40 days of celebrations, five days of beast hunts. So Rome is packed. People are putting up tents. It's seething with people. This is so exciting. There's going to be chariot races. There's going to be the triumphs, which was like a massive football victory coming back through the town with animals and everything. And he's actually got King Yuba's elephants. And so this is when the animals then become something more because they're becoming the

symbol of Rome and how far it's going. You can see an animal like an elephant or a crocodile. Look how great Rome is because we're subduing it. We're killing it for your pleasure. And it's expensive. And I'm so great, whoever's putting on the show, I'm quite happy for that rhinoceros to be killed, even though it's a really expensive animal. Well, you mentioned rhinoceros, so we'll definitely get to that in a bit, Caroline. But I think from what you're saying there, it's important to highlight in the timeline of these animals coming to Rome, coming to arenas and so on and so forth, that the types of these species, they increase as the Roman Empire increased too, as they came into contact with places as far away as Egypt and, of course, to India. So you get tigers when you get Roman trade contacts really established with India, don't you? Yes, which is incredible, isn't it, to think of these animals coming from so far away. I didn't know that there were, for example, lions in Thessaly at that time, which because of all of

this eventually became extinct. But yes, the spread of it is massive. And I think especially with the elephants coming in for those reasons to do with winning battles, winning wars, because I think the first elephants that came in were from King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who was a massive enemy of the Romans, when they finally beat him in 275 BC at the Battle of Beneventum, and they brought back four of King Pyrrhus' elephants to Rome. And then again, 20 odd years later in the Punic War, they brought back 100 elephants from the Battle of Pernormus in Sicily. And so they symbolize this, and you're right, they're coming from all these disparate areas, but the elephants in particular really symbolize that might of Rome.

And those elephants that came back from the Punic War, from the Battle of Beneventum, they were jabbed around the Circus Maximus with these blunted javelins. So it's almost like to say, we're controlling them, we're in charge. So the animals from all these different areas, yes, the symbolism of them is very important. And that's why they are on the coins so often. We'd like to keep on elephants a bit longer because there's this one case, which I think you were going to mention anyway a bit earlier before I stopped you, which is, do we have any cases of the Romans protesting this bad treatment of these big

beasts, protesting and acknowledging animal cruelty? Yeah, this is really an anomaly. It's a strange story. And for me, it's the fact that it didn't change anything either. And we know that this event happened because it's written about, it's got four different sources to prove that it really happened. So it's 55 BC and you've got Pompey Magnus. So you've got this great Roman general and he's already had some trouble with elephants. So when you go back to when he was about 25 years old, about 81 BC, he's had massive success in Africa and he's got a triumph that's going to happen in Rome. Pompey really loved to align himself with Alexander the Great, who was aligned with elephants.

And Pompey thought, as a young man in this triumph, I am going to come into Rome, not on a carriage drawn by horses, but by elephants. It's going to really wow everybody. And his humiliation was that they wouldn't fit through the gate into Rome. So the whole thing had to be stopped. The elephants had to be de-harnessed and he had to just go in with the horses. So that's his first trouble with elephants. When you get to 55 BC, he's now going to put on at the Circus Maximus in Rome. First of all, I'd like to say people always think of the Colosseum, but the Circus Maximus is where loads of these gladiator shows and beast hunts and the incredible chariot

racing went on. You could seat about 150,000 people at the Circus Maximus. And so I was lucky enough to be in Rome recently. And when I was standing on the grass, I was imagining this event with Pompey. And it's incredible to imagine because now you have people like the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen playing there and people standing on this very spot where all of this has happened and people are just walking their dogs on it now. But he's putting on this massive event in 55 BC. He's shown the first ever rhinoceros to be seen at Rome. And then he brings out 17 elephants and they are going to be slaughtered by Gaetulian spearsmen. And at first it's exciting. There's one elephant who has been really badly wounded in the feet and it's on its knees, but it doesn't give up. And it's crawling

towards these spearsmen and it's picking up the shield in its trunk and it's swirling them into the air. And the shields are swirling around in the air and dropping. And the crowd are absolutely amazed by this and by the courage of this elephant who won't give up. Then another elephant is killed by a javelin just under its eye. Whereupon the whole herd panic. They've had enough and they start running at the iron barriers in a massive escape attempt. So now the crowd are absolutely terrified in that area. The barriers hold. But now the elephants go back and they herd together and they start raising their trunks up

and trumpeting up towards the sky. And everything changes because it looks like the elephants are now begging for mercy, praying for mercy and treating the heavens. Cicero was there that day and he witnessed it as an eyewitness. And he wrote about it in a letter to a friend. And he said, the crowd were astonished by what they saw, but they got no pleasure from it. And he said, there was a feeling of pity towards the elephants. And I'll quote him, a sort of feeling that that wild animal has a certain fellowship with the human race. So for a moment, the crowd felt a connection with this very intelligent, sentient animal. felt a connection with this very intelligent, sentient animal. Unfortunately, it didn't change a thing. And nine years later, when Julius Caesar showed elephants at the Circus Maximus,

he just had a big, massive canal dug around the edge as added protection to the crowd. So it didn't change anything about elephants being slaughtered. But it is a special moment, the fact that they felt something for those elephants. And it was really bad for Pompey because people didn't go for that. They wanted to really get in there. He should have been being cheered and applauded at this amazing show with these 1720 elephants being speared to death. But instead of that, they were upset and they felt pity. So Pompey ended up

getting booed and jeered because it was a bad show. And a few years later, going back to coins, Julius Caesar, Pompey's enemy, had a coin minted that has an elephant standing over a snake on it. And academics have argued about this, what it means. And there's an argument that it is Julius Caesar having a bash at his nemesis at Pompeii. Do you remember you with the elephants? Wow, there you go. You see that? Once again, as we highlighted quite recently, how these animals were important for advancing particular people's reputations over there, whether it was the late Republic or in the Empire with certain emperors. I wish I could go into the stories of certain emperors with the beast hunts, but I don't think we've got time. Very quickly, there is a celebrity rhino,

if I'm correct, with the Colosseum. Yes, there's a rhino. It's been about 70 years since a rhino has been seen at Rome. Most of the people there would never have seen a rhino before. You can imagine this animal coming out. It's out in the arena and it's tossed a bull into the air. So it's a massive success. And the animals weren't always killed. The rhino's taken back. And then they say, right, go again with the rhino. The rhino is a big hit and they want the rhino to go out again. And the rhino has had enough. So they use the whips, they use the fire. And then we have to think about what rhinos are like in the wild, which is they're herbivores and they're not just going to go and attack an animal for no reason. And you have to think about the atmosphere,

this alien atmosphere for these animals going out into a massive arena like the Colosseum. And the rhino is forced out again, and it's really goaded. And it will be making, not that anyone would have heard it over the noise, but we can imagine the shrieks, the screams that rhinos make when they have fear, the bellows, the growls, the snorts. And it then performs as it's supposed to. It kills a bear. It charges at a lion. I mean, rhinos can charge up to 40 miles per hour. So the crowd were watching an animal like this, swerving, changing direction, charging. The lion actually panics and runs headlong into a load of spears. But the rhino puts on a massive display. Again, we're back to coins with this rhino then is put on the cheapest Roman coin, which is great because that means it gets out to as many people as possible. And it's a tiny little ice, A-E-S, ice coin. And the rhino is those games that my family, my father, and now I'm emperor, that we put on?

Do you remember how great it was? And again, when I was lucky enough to be in Rome and go down onto the recreated amphitheatre floor, I was imagining that rhino coming up, this spectacular animal, and feeling really sorry for it. I think that's one of the overarching messages of this interview today, because it is such a brutal, horrific part of ancient Roman culture. And there are many brutal, horrific parts of ancient Roman culture, but I think there's something about these animals that will really strike home for a lot of people, particularly with how we view Animal Cruelty's day. But it is important to highlight, and I think it's been a really enlightening interview. You have written a book all about this topic.

Yes, the book is Battle Elephants and Flaming Foxes, Animals in the Roman World. And so it's all aspects of animals in the Roman world. So the amphitheatres, the chariot races, absolutely everything. And hopefully it's a real readable book that you can just open on any page. But I think the animals deserve to be remembered. They were a massive part of Roman history and Roman life, and they deserve to have the spotlight on them and to be remembered and have their stories told. Absolutely. Well, Caroline, it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Well, there you go. There was Caroline Freeman-Querden explaining all about the infamous beast hunts. I hope you enjoyed the episode, or at least found it enlightening. As mentioned at the start, it is a brutal, it is a gruesome topic. Last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you are enjoying The Ancients and you want to help us out, then you know what you can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It greatly helps us as we continue to build up The Ancients audience and to share these extraordinary stories from our distant past

with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.