The Boys' and Girls' Pliny: Being parts of Pliny's "Natural History" edited for boys and girls, with an IntroductionPliny, the Elder
History
The Boys' and Girls' Pliny: Being parts of Pliny's "Natural History" edited for boys and girls, with an Introduction
Pliny, the Elder
Animals -- Juvenile literature; Natural history -- Juvenile literature; Physical sciences -- Juvenile literature
Among the animals that are domesticated with mankind have occurred many
circumstances that deserve to be known. Among these animals are more
particularly those faithful friends of man, the dog, and the horse. We
have an account of a dog that fought against a band of robbers, in
defending its master; and although it was pierced with wounds, still it
would not leave the body, from which it drove away all birds and beasts.
Another dog, in Epirus, recognized the murderer of its master, in the
midst of an assemblage of people, and, by biting and barking at him,
extorted from him a confession of his crime. A king of the Garamantes
was brought back from exile by two hundred dogs, who maintained the
combat against all his opponents. The people of Colophon and Castabala
kept troops of dogs, for the purposes of war; and these used to fight in
the front rank, and never retreat; they were the most faithful of
auxiliaries, and yet required no pay. After the defeat of the Cimbri,
their dogs defended their movable houses, which were carried upon
wagons. When Jason, the Lycian, had been slain, his dog refused to take
food, and died of famine. When the funeral pile of King Lysimachus was
lighted, his dog, to which Darius gives the name of Hyrcanus, threw
itself into the flames, and the dog of King Hiero did the same.
Philistus gives a similar account of Pyrrhus, the dog of the tyrant
Gelon.
[Illustration: MALTESE DOG.—_Canis Familiáris._]
Among ourselves, Volcatius, a man of rank, who instructed Cascellius in
the civil law, as he was riding on his Asturian jennet, towards evening,
from his country-house, was attacked by a robber, and was only saved by
his dog. The senator Cælius, too, while lying sick at Placentia, was
surprised by armed men, but received not a wound from them until they
had first killed his dog. But a more extraordinary fact than all, took
place in our own times, and is testified to by the public register of
the Roman people. In the consulship of Junius and Silius, when Titius
Sabinus was put to death together with his slaves, for the affair of
Nero, the son of Germanicus, it was found impossible to drive away a dog
which belonged to one of them from the prison; nor could it be forced
away from the body, which had been cast down the Gemitorian steps; but
there it stood howling, in the presence of vast multitudes of people;
and when some one threw a piece of bread to it, the animal carried it to
the mouth of its master. Afterwards, when the body was thrown into the
Tiber, the dog swam into the river, and endeavored to raise it out of
the water; quite a throng of people gathered to witness this instance of
an animal’s fidelity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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