Supplicia Canum

In the entry for geese in the section “From the Air” of Patrick Faas’ book Around the Roman Table (1994; p. 293), you’ll find a less-than-charming tale about Romans and their dogs. See, back before Rome ruled Italy from top to bottom, they were defeated by the Gauls at the Battle of the Allia [River], a loss that the poet Lucan in his Pharsalia (7.337) ranks as bad as Cannae, mentioning them in the same breath as he describes the titular Battle of Pharsalus as potentially worse because, as the deciding battle in the Roman Civil War between Caesar and Pompey, Rome would suffer a great loss regardless of the victor. After the battle, the Romans fled up to the impenetrable Capitoline Hill. Except…

They were in correspondence with a Roman general, Camillus, about coming with an army to break the siege and the Gauls figured out how the messenger got up and down from the hill and followed the path in the dead of night. As Livy (History of Rome 5.47), Diodorus Siculus (Library 14.116), and Plutarch (Life of Camillus 27) tell it, the Gauls went unnoticed by the guard dogs but were woken by the spooked gaggle of geese sacred to Juno/Hera. They all name Marcus Manlius (Mallius in Diodorus) in particular, who, depending on who you ask, pushed the first Gaul off the cliff with his shield, threw off two Gauls by lopping the arm off one and bashing the other with his shield, or doing both to the same, very unlucky Gaul. Either way, we find that in Rome geese were perennially celebrated and dogs punished in Pliny (Natural History 29.14), Aelian (On the Nature of Animals 12.33) and Plutarch again (On the Luck of the Romans 12). We’ll start relatively light with Aelian:

The dogs’ failure to alert the Romans is called an “ancient betrayal”—prodisia archaia. The contrast is sharpened by the similarity of the two verbs for each subject, the dogs or the goose: tino and timō. All dogs actively “pay the price” (tinousi) and the goose (not geese, this is the heroic archetype of geese, like when we use “Man” for “humans”) is passively “honored” (timatai). Aelian highlights the stark difference in treatment for these animals with the syntax all/active vs. one/passive.

On to Pliny:

He’s actually making a bit of a pun here, if you can believe it: “pendunt” has two subjects, the implicit Romans weighing out the “annual punishment,” and the explicit dogs, hanging from a “fork of elder-wood,” that is, crucified. This crucifixion took place by the temple of Summanus, an ancient Italian deity that was associated with the night and Jupiter, something like the Jove of the night sky—at that location because the dogs shirked their ultimate nighttime duty (in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the guard dogs of Apollo’s herds are the prototype of alarms that the god of thieves sneaks past). And yes, I checked, an alternate spelling of “sabucus” is “sambucus” and it’s where we get the name sambuca, traditionally flavored with elderberries. Now “furca” isn’t necessarily synonymous with “crux,” but let’s turn to Plutarch for some clarification:

Plutarch says the dog is anestauromenos, “put up on a cross.” Horrific. In his Lives of historical and mythical figures, Plutarch is already prone to moralizing, but in his On the Luck of the Romans, moralization is front and center. The Romans generally or particularly being blessed with luck wasn’t exactly a karma thing, wherein moral rectitude was met with fortune in battle. Rather, the blessing or cursing of Fortuna—or Tychē to Plutarch—is hereditary, both in prominent Roman families and in the Roman race as a whole. You and your family and your race were lucky for as long as they were favored and the favor of Fortune could be entirely arbitrary. But in closing I’d like to point out a masterful poetic device in Plutarch’s prose. (It is important to have some poetry in one’s prose if one is moralizing, since moralistic prophecy was often given in meter, like when we hear the poems of the Delphic oracle in the massively prosaic Histories of Herodotus.)

νουν αλογοις αφροσιν αλκην θρασος δειλοις

noun alogois aphrosin alkēn thrasos deilois

“[Fortune gives] word to the wordless, to the senseless sense, and courage to the cowardly.”

The grammar and sense of the word order are doubly chiastic so that you’d draw two Xs between gifts and recipients if you stack the pairs (word, wordless) atop (senseless, sense) atop (courage, cowardly). This weaving of words must be deliberate, perhaps to show that the webs Fortune weaves are beyond mortal comprehension and heedless of the laws of Man.

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