Sideshow 8: Lion & Lamb

you name it. There were beautifully manicured gardens, kept animals. The climate was temperate, and agriculture was abundant. Pompeiis eleven thousand person population was small by today's standards for what we might call a city, but for a little perspective, scholars believe that only about a hundred people lived in the Roman and Hires london I um London's forerunner around the same time. Compared to many other places. Pompeii was a city. But as the saying goes, all good things

must come to an end. Mount Vesuvius had created the physical geography of Pompeii with an eruption and would put an end to all of it with just one more in She did just that. In the aftermath, Pompeii probably looked like something between a lunar landscape and a nuclear fallout zone. The city would fade from memory, becoming something of myth and legend until it was accidentally found again

fifteen centuries later. And while Pompeii had become best known for how its story ended, archaeologists have busied themselves with trying to understand the city before the eruption, and one of the ways we've gone about this has been through discovering how the city eight. Just a few years ago, a team from Ohio was digging around in the remains of fast food stalls. They found evidence of a standard Mediterranean diet it legooms, olive pits, nuts, seeds, that sort

of thing. But they also found salted fish which would have been a product from Spain, and different kinds of shellfish not native to Italy. And as a side note, I have a lot of questions about transporting shellfish overseas in the days before reliable refrigeration, but those are going to have to wait for another day. And among all this tasty debris, they came upon something very exciting. Lying in a trash pit was a butchered leg joint of

a giraffe. The question, of course, is how an exotic animal like a giraffe ended up on the dinner menu. After all, giraffe meat isn't exactly essential eating for anyone just trying to scrape by. It points to consumption by a refined pellet, perhaps someone or some people's with a desire for novelty, and this was something that the city of Pompeii, poised on the seaside and doing a brisk international trade, was able to afford itself. We humans have

long been interested in things that wow us. We love to marvel and get our kicks. Many of us orient our lives towards newness and discovery, and when we find these things, we celebrate them in the form of gaudy displays of wealth, announcing scientific discoveries, embracing new sensory experiences, or by curating unique collections. I'm Aaron Manky, and welcome to the side show. If Ptolemy, the second Philadelphist, was around today, he probably would have loved fast cars, expensive vacations,

and bottle service. That's all to say he was a hedonist of the highest regard. So when he ascended to the throne, he decided to throw himself a parade, and it was going to be big, really big. In fact, he wanted to create one of the most extravagant and elaborate festivals in history. The city of Alexandria was soaked with sun and anticipation that February day in two b C. Thousands of people poured into the city from around the Mediterranean.

Packing the wide column line boulevards. They craned their necks Joscelyne each other ancy to get a view. We can imagine all of this some two thousand years before Macy's ever launched a single Thanksgiving Day float. The heart of Ptolemy's festival was going to be his collection of animals. They were big and exotic, and they were set to march two by two through the city. Too many in the crowd. These were alien other life forms. Most people had never seen such things before. In a cloud of dust,

twenty four elephants drawing chariots came into view. According to one eye witness, they pulled and I quote, billy goats, hornless antelope oryx is Boubaila's ostriches, two thousand, four hundred, Indian dogs, Ethiopian cows, a white bear, leopards, wildcats, carrat calls, a giraffe, and a rhinoceros, as well as captive human spectacles from across the continent. The non human animals, though, had a curious purpose. They weren't domesticated pat creatures, and

they weren't pets either. They were somewhere in between owned and no longer wild, but not domesticated either. These animals were commodities, and their captivity suggested something that whoever owned them had enough wealth to maintain them and, perhaps more impressively, power over the lands from which they came. As the world modernized and urban centers grew, people began to feel

more disconnected from nature. There was a desire to recreate natural settings, but in a more convenient kind of way, so people began designing gardens, importing plants, seeds, and bulb weren't too hard to transport after all. The animals, though, they were more finicky, but people with money they could have anything they wanted. Collection rivalry seems to have developed early on. Why well, just typical neighbors trying to keep

up with the Joneses. You could say, these days, if you have a midlife crisis, you might buy a shiny jaguar. Back then, you bought a literal one. And we know that this impulse to collect animals existed in almost every ancient civilization. In fact, one of the earliest collections appeared long before Ptolemy's Parade, right around b C. In Egypt, their rulers kept various creatures. They would teach them to

dance and obey orders. In a way, you can think of this as one of the very earliest forms of using animals for entertainment. Ramsey's the Second, for example, had a tamed lion which would accompany him wherever he went in battle. Lions kept in cages and pits and meant to impress important visitors, were also popular in upper crust Mesopotamia. Mesoamerican civilizations are thoughts to have held their collections for ritual and aesthetic purposes. In ancient Greece, they were traveling

shows that featured dancing bears. As Greco Roman infrastructure crumbled, many animal collections were likewise dismantled. However, many European rulers kept on with their own, and over the years, animal collections became popular attractions, not just for the wealthy as they had been, but for the pain public as well. These animal collections, it seems we're here to stay along. Dead European once joked that the only reason the America's

had animals was due to Noah's flood. The idea was that the shipwrecked animal cargo was on its way not to salvation, but to European menagerie's. The word menagerie itself is thought to be rooted in an old French word for farmyard. Menagerie's as we understand them today didn't develop as a form of public entertainment until about the sixteenth century, but a hundred years later they seem to be everywhere.

In the history of menagerie's, there are a few that stand out, and it's from these collections of creatures collected like pokemon, that people began to realize their potential for helping us understand the greater world. They were proto zoos, if you will. Zoos, of course have an educational and scientific mission. They weren't quite there yet, but the idea

was coming. Now, let's take a brief tour you've probably heard of our first stop before, but maybe as a place for condemned prisoners and executions, the Tower of London. But it was also home to one of Europe's oldest and longest continually running menagerie's. It was established in the thirteenth century during the reign of King Henry the Third, after he was gifted three leopards Leopards, by the way, that you can still find on the Royal coat of

Arms of England. In twelve fifty two, at the king's orders, a budget was set aside for animal maintenance, which by this point had already expanded to include a polar bear. It said that the bear was allowed to fish for its food in the Thames, even if it had to wear a muzzle while doing so. Rumor has it that today the grounds are haunted not just by Anne Boleyn and her unfortunate contemporaries, but by a spectral bear, whose appearance is said to have caused at least one member

of the Palace century to die of fright. Our next stop, the Jardin des Plants in France, might also ring a bell from earlier episodes in our series. It was an institution rooted in two distinct establishments, Louis the thirteenth Garden of Medicinal Herbs and Louis the sixteenths Menagerie. It became the first place to combine plants and creatures into exhibits, and at its height boasted over two hundred species of wildlife.

And we can't forget about the menageries that took to the road try Leveling Animal acts of all kinds have been present throughout history. However, a few things had to intersect for the industry to flourish as it did. Combine an interest in private animal collections, rising scientific curiosity, and the entrepreneurial showman, and you get a potent cultural moment at a very hungry market. And of course, the largest and most famous name associated with traveling menageries during their

boom in nineteenth century England was George Womble. George's entrance into the world of traveling animal collections, if the legends are true, may well have been an accident. Like many rural folks, he had come to London at some point around eighteen hundred in search of a city job. He found one, and one day, while most likely working as a cage maker, he went down to wander London's docks. It was here that he met two Boa constrictors, freshly

delivered from across the ocean. He purchased them for the hefty sum of seventy five pounds and then with them on display at a small scale local venue. Doing so made him a small fortune, which he used to acquire even more animals. He then established his own menagerie at where else but Piccadilly Circus in eighteen o eight. Eventually, though, he took the show on the road. One story tells of him preparing for a big trip while loading a caged Bengal tiger onto a horse drawn carriage. The horse

got spooked and bolted. The cage busted open, and the tiger escaped off into the streets of London, much to the dismay of George and everyone else involved. It was recaptured, but many hours later. George's acts and one's just like his, eventually evolved to showcase the relationships between animals and humans, echoing back to those dancing bears in Greece and animals fighting in Rome and some of the earliest English menagerie's.

For example, elephants were trained to perform tricks like kneeling or picking up small object x. The spectacles soon became more elaborate and a lot more violent. Lion tamer acts were developed, showcasing human control and domination. Animals also came to be used in elaborate shows and pantomimes I think, dramatized in a theater or re enactments of famous battles. In these cases, horses and elephants were even trained to

play dead. However, it was one of Wombell's most infamous acts that would firmly cement his place in the history books. On July he advertised a lion fight to take place in Warwick, England. There he promised to pit his lion Nero against six dogs. Nero, a docile creature, was at a disadvantage. He was totally ravaged. Witnessing this, wom Bell called the fight off before it was over, leaving the

crowd incensed their thirst for blood hadn't been sated. George, a man of his word, it seems, promised to make it up to them. The following nights he invited the crowd to gather once again. This time George pitted a new lion, Wallace against three dogs and Wallace was a fighter for the price of about seventy dollars. Today, spectators had the pleasure of seeing the lion slaughter the three dogs in less than a minute. We can imagine it

was a ghastly spectacle of carnage. The newspapers catching word of this were appalled, and they said as much. The scene would surely make for some angry tweets and live streams today. Over the course of an evening, George Wombell, already famous, suddenly became infamous. And if you're shuddering, here's

some balm for your heart. Some people believed that these events never actually happened, that they were just one more clever albeits horrifying publicity stunt, engineered for the sake of the mighty dollar, a trick pulled right from the playbook of the world of traveling curiosities. All good origin stories help us make sense of our present. When deployed correctly, origin stories can help us draw a linear thread through our lives, and sometimes we can sell these stories for profits.

Isaac van Amberg was one of these people. In the case of his life, he claims that it all came to his mother in a dream. She was pregnant with him. He said, when she dreamt of an old barn, she walked inside, and there found rows of bubbling cauldrons. When she peered inside them, she found boiling lion parts, and in true Goldilocks fashion, she took a taste of each. Finally, she arrived at the last pot and found a simmering lion's head. She plucked it out of its stew and

put the whole thing in her mouth. It was then, according to Isaac's retelling, that she awoke with a fright. What could this mean for her unborn child? Fild for him. In his early teens, he went to New York City to work as a clerk at a warehouse for a relative, But at some point in the early eighteen twenties he was hired to work as a cage cleaner for the New York Zoological Institute. It said that the headline tamer there was killed while trying to move a line from

one cage to another. It was then that Isaac offered to the end I quote, tame the spirit of the animal, which he did with a crowbar. This decision was based on a strange act of faith. You see, he recalled the biblical Daniel escaping from the lions den and resolved that he wouldn't be the one to run away from danger. Instead, he would run toward it. By the mid eighteen thirties, Isaac had risen through the ranks, becoming famous as an

animal tamer in his own right. People came to his shows not just wanting to see animals in cages, but also to see people carousing with them. And they came to see man triumph over nature because it helps them feel good about their place in the world. They wanted to be shocked and odd, to feel close to danger without having to touch it. This is a very human feeling,

after all. So with a large cage filled with wild animals, a lion, panther, a tiger, and a leopard to be exact, Isaac would boldly enter, dressed in a costume that broadcast his authority. He would stand tall as the animals quivered before him and the audience would gasp. It was then that the lion would come over and lick his hand and lay at his feet, as did the leopard. The tiger rolled on its side and Isaac would step on the animal's neck. Then he would sit down with his

back against the cage, calling the animals to him. Not surprisingly, people wondered how Isaac was able to instill spontaneous peace in his animals, But it was all just a facade. This piece had been gained through exceptional cruelty, both behind the scenes and sometimes on the stage itself. He later described his process of taming the animals in part by saying that he spoke to them as though they were humans.

He said, they believe that I have the power to tear every one of them in pieces if they do not act as I say. I tell them so, and have frequently enforced it with a crowbar. Isaac went on to appear in London in the summer of eighteen thirty eight. His lions and tigers arrived on a separate boat, and when he reunited with them, the local press reported that the animals recognized him immediately, crouching and wagging their tails.

His newest act that season was a play. In it, Isaac played the role of a man condemned to death for plotting an emperor's assassination. As punishment, he was thrown into the den with two lions, a tiger and a leopard. Then he would force them all into submission and bring

out a lamb to lie down with the lion. The piece to resistance of the whole act, though, was when he pried the lion's jaws apart and put his head inside, the first person thought to have ever done so, and an echo of what his mother had once dreamed, and the title of that play, The Brute Tamer of Pompeii. Our fascination with animal people relationships continues today. We are

curious creatures. Much of our curiosity is perhaps motivated by the pursuit of knowledge about the world for its own sake or for us to better care for it, but we also remain interested in the seemingly pairing of opposites, of the transcending boundaries, and the expression of human superiority, and all of this is captured in the Animal side show. We've also continued to see interest in animal trainers and acts.

For example, popular television shows like Tiger King have traced the expand of an interesting, oftentimes dubious animal conservation movement that allows you to get up close and personal with these creatures. The practice of wealthy folks amassing large collections of animals for their own enjoyment also continues. Infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar established his own elaborate menagerie, some of which escaped following his death. His collection has since become

a public zoo. And then, of course there was Roy. You probably already know him. It was just another fall day in two thousand three when he went to work. He had been at this gig for decades, but this day would be his last. While under the hot lights of a Las Vegas stage, Roy's longtime friend Monticore viciously attacked him. Why well, it was hard to get an alibi from him, but we can certainly guess. Roy was left with debilitating, career ending injuries, but Monticore would get

off the hook later dying of natural causes. They were never were able to charge him with the crime, because well, montcor was a tiger and the performance of Siegfried and Roy would never be the same. If you're anything like me, this episode has made it easy to reflect on the relationship we have with our own four legged friends. I know, around the grim and mild office, one of the things you can count on seeing every day in our group

chat our photos of our furry companions. But we're not quite done discussing the connection between animals and the side show. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear one more tale At that intersection. Joseph Merrick had seen a lot of spectacles on this night, though at the Theater Royal in London, something special was happening to him. Hidden in a private balcony box, he was able to be an audience member for that year's Christmas play. It was

an opportunity he was rarely given. Considering how he was the one who is used to being watched, his ambitions certainly weren't unusual. He wished for friends, a family, to move about freely. We can imagine that he also wished for kindness. Years later, after he died, the same man who conducted inquiries into the Jack the Ripper murders would call for an investigation of Joseph's death. It was a sad end. Really, he was only seven and his life

had been very complicated. When it comes to the Side Show, the truth is that the institution itself is complicated. Each individual came into it with circumstances that set them on a specific trajectory in life. The sideshow itself was home to a spectrum of experiences. It was neither all good nor all bad. For some, this was the only place where they were going to find work because of how they looked. For others, they altered their looks because they

wanted to join the ranks. Many were trafficked because of their physical appeal. And for the rest, it was a combination of all of those things, a sticky mess that called into question the idea of agency, power, self determination and the almighty dollar. Joseph was born in Leicester, England, in eighteen sixty two. He was the son of a working class family and lived fairly normal childhood. By the

time he turned five, though, something started to happen. He began developing patches of grayish, lumpy skin all over his body. After that came the fleshy tumors in the bony growths, and most notably of all was a long, fleshy protrusion that began to grow and dangle beneath his upper lip. His hips ached, and he began to walk with a cane. His speech also became impaired. With every passing year, his body continued to morph in ways no one had seen before.

Doctors couldn't slow his condition, and people began to grow afraid of him, and the physical demands of his job in the workhouse made it unsustainable, so at the age of twenty two, he decided to enter the sideshow trade and see if he could sell his body. He came into contact with a man by the name of Sam Tor, who ran a human oddity show. It was here that

Joseph got his new billing. He would from here on out be known as the Elephant Man, and in the long tradition of side shows, they created a story to go with him. They said that his deformities were a result of his mother being frightened by an elephant while he was still in utero. It was a concept known as maternal impression and fairly popular at the time. The lecturer would be sure to remind the audience of his humanity, claiming that if you were to cut Joseph, you would

bleed the same blood as quote yours or mine. Even so, women were discouraged from visiting his exhibit for fear that they would become upset or that their children would be born looking like him. Towards the end of his life, Joseph lived at a hospital in London. He dreamt of the outside world, reading novels and picking flowers. There, he spent time thinking about what could have been a doctor

who had taken care of him. Later said, it was not until I came to know that Merrick was highly intelligent, that he possessed an acute sensibility, and worse than all, a romantic imagination, that I realized the overwhelming tragedy of his life. His story, you see, doesn't have a happy ending, although at this point in our series you know that

they all won't. They can't. And there are many trite things to say here about judging a book by its cover, about being kind of strangers, about everyone fighting their own battle, but we shouldn't have to be confronted with such an extreme case of mothering to have compassion for human and non human creatures alike. Sideshow was written by Robin Miniter

with narration by me Aaron Manky. Research for the series was by Robin Minator, Taylor Haggard Dorn, and Sam Alberty, with production assistants from Josh Than, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. Grim and Mile Presents was created in partnership with I Heart Radio. You can learn more about this show and everything else from Grim and mild over at grim and mild dot com, and as always, thanks for listening.