From the Vault: Roman Extinctions

previous empires driving species to extinction? Right? Yeah, And it's not to single out the Romans as the only empire that caused extinctions, but there are some pretty interesting examples from that time period. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name

is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking about not just extinctions, but we're gonna be talking about Roman extinctions, extinctions that occurred during the time of the Roman Republic, but especially the Roman Empire. That sounds like one of those names for like a made up lewd act, the Roman Extinction. Roman Extinctions made

maybe so good band names certainly so, Robert. I know you wanted to talk about this because of some weird, uh maybe false memory you had that you were trying to explain to me yesterday. But it seems like a very apt topic, whatever the inspiration, because of course, all decadent empires place large stresses on the environment around them about so you would expect the you know, one of the great decadent empires of history would do the same. Yeah.

So I think, well, one of the important things to keep in mind throughout this topic is, like, we're not we're certainly not meaning to single the Romans out as being like the like the the the soul examples of some of these activities that led to uh, to some extinctions, um, because ultimately you can look to very parts of the world in various times, including our own, to see plenty

of extinction inducing activities. But I think it's an interesting exercise to sort of look to to look at Rome, which which would have been I think, in many ways sort of uh, an intensification of of impulses that were already present in other cultures. So to to get started, let's just remind everybody who the Romans were. I'm not sure that one of the Romans ever done for us. Yeah, I mean, well, speaking of that, yeah, you know, I don't for reasons like that, I think that we don't

really need like a full introduction. I think pretty much everybody has some idea of who the Romans were and what the Roman Empire was about. I mean, just the basic tropes um of of the Roman Empire a pretty uh you know, ubiquitous in our culture. Um. Look to, for instance, to Monty Python's Life of Brian, which you just quoted, which by the way, has been singled out for being actually quite historically accurate concernment concerning life in

Roman occupied first century Judea. Yeah, I've read that before. A lot of historians that it's more accurate than a lot of serious movies, right, yeah, because you know, a lot of de pictions of Rome, they really especially the older cinematic interpretations, but even like more modern films that were influenced by those older interpretations, you just get like the stoic, colorless, very British vision of Rome generally not

a lot of like street level understanding. Um. But but but that's one of the reasons that HBO's Rome series, it was on for several years um, you know, which isn't perfect, but certainly had some admirers because of the way that it injected a lot of of color and and and life off in like street level life into this time

in this place. I've also read that Kubrick spartacus Is is more accurate than a lot of the films that that you would have encountered in the nineteen sixties regarding the Romans, but of course still has a number of problems as well. I mainly just remember Joe Panaliono in the sub Pranos being mad at it because Kirk Douglas has a flat top and he's like, they didn't have flat tops in ancient Rome. Um. But by the way, I I always enjoyed the Ancient Roman detective novels of

Gordianus The Finder by Stephen saler Um. I highly recommend those to anybody there to be clear contemporary novels set in ancient Rome. Anyway, we're in short, we're talking about an empire centered in Rome, established in twenty seven b C after the collapse of the Roman Republic, which was founded in five oh nine BC, and eventually grew grew rather rather sizeable and actually rather difficult to manage due to its size, stretching across Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East,

and North Africa. It's the classic risk problem. You over extend your armies, you go out too far, you think you can hold all of Asia and get those whatever, you know, fifty men at the end of each turn, that is to overextend. Yeah, it's the problem you see in every empire without fail and uh. And since they were an empire, they were of course built on military

conquest in domination of other lands. And and to be fair, the characters in Monty Python are mostly correct in their list of the quote unquote good things that the Romans have done for us. Um. You know, we've we've we talk a lot, especially on our other podcast, Invention, about various Roman innovations. Roman technologies talked about sewers and toilets, sewers and toilets, But of course they didn't risk bring sewers and toilets. They all in Rhods. They also brought

death and bloodshed. They depended on slave labor and uh, we can at least lay some of the hollow scene extinctions at their sandaled feet. So that's what we're gonna

focus on today. And uh, and just fair warning that we will be talking in places about the Romans trade and exotic animals and their harsh treatment of these animals in the in the arenas and in the Colosseum, and this is all bloody and depressing stuff, cruelty to animals on a massive scale, So just you know, sort of fair warning on that, and uh, and just a reminder for information on how to report cruelty to animals today in the United States, please visit the American Society for

the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals at a spc A dot org or search for Report Animal Abuse a s p c A. That being said, let's move on to

the extinctions. Okay, let's hear about it. So one of the articles that we were looking at and preparing for this episode is an excellent two thousand and sixteen Atlantic article titled the Exotic Animal Traffickers of Ancient Rome by Caroline Wazer and the it she points out that bloody animal spectacles were an important part of Roman culture, Like you know, it wasn't just you know, something that was

also going on. It's not like say, pointing to today's culture and saying like, uh, look at look at the popularity of say, mixed martial arts. It's central to the American experience. I don't know, you can maybe make that argument, but it's not just a thing in the culture. It's like an integral part of the culture. Maybe you're saying like you can't really understand the culture without it. Yes, yeah,

and I believe that's the point. She's a king. Um So, I think most of us are familiar more familiar with human on human gladiator sports, which we've we've touched on on this show before and if it's in you know, any things in large part of Ridley Scott's Gladiator in modern times, but so many different treatments of gladiatorial combat have been rolled out in our media. But it wasn't just human on human violence. You also had daminatio at best. It's my Latin correct on that, Joe. It looks like

dumb natio a beast. I mean, I'm not an expert either, okay, but dumb natio right like damn nation. Well anyway, it stands for execution by beasts. And then there were the venatitiones or the hunts, in which animals were condemned to die either at the hands of human hunters um and sometimes like just we're talking like just a brutal display of like a hunter dispatching all sorts of exotic animals out there on the field, or they would have animals

battle each other all for sport. And sadly, these uh, these blood sports have been a part of human civilization for quite a while, and though thankfully outlawed in most places, but still, cock fighting remains legal in parts of the world, as does dog fighting. Sports like bear baiting and lion baiting continued depressingly far into modern times, at least in some parts of the world, and bullfighting remains legal and parts of the world as well, uh, namely Spain and Portugal.

I would say it's not quite the same because it doesn't involve vertebrates. But I mean even the bug fights thing on the internet. I'm sure you've seen that. We're like crickets or beatles are made to combat each other, or centipedes or spiders. I mean, it's just basically, you put two kind of scary looking bugs into a container together and then shake it and try to make them fight. Yeah, it's uh, I don't know what exactly that impulses. I mean,

there's a part of it. I guess I understand because I remember when I was a kid, I would very often want to ask adults questions like what would win in a fight between a tarantula and a score be in and like as if I thought that, like, adults just know these things. You know that, Yeah, you're grown up, you know which one would win. Well, there is kind of like a need, there's an human necessity to to

rank and profile the creatures of the natural world. And you still see this kind of thing in like kids books today, Like my son has a book, uh like who would Win? And and it's it's about prehistoric creatures and dinosaurs, uh, and all good educational information, but it's delivered uh with the wrappings of this creature versus this creature. So I was not alone in this childhood curiosity. No, I think it's I mean, I think there's something you know,

normal and healthy in it. I mean, I mean, look at nature documentaries, uh, which can be quite uncomfortable to watch at times when you have a predator and prey battling each other. But of course one of the key differences here is that these are natural occurrences or they better damn well, be natural occurrences in a nature documentary, and they're not something that has been orchestrated through cruelty

by humans looking for entertainment. Right. Putting animals into the Roman arenas kind of the equivalent of the bug fight like you put him in the box and shake it and try to get him fighting, right. So I think this is though, an example of where you know, if you know the Roman cruelty to animals via blood sport, it's it's an outsized and more sensational example of something

that occurs in other cultures and in other times. It's not an excuse for any of this, but again it's important to ground such activities in the larger picture of human awfulness. But ways are actually opens her article with a discussion of a Roman orator m. Marcus Cicero in his correspondences with a former illegal client, a man by the name of Marcus Calias. This is while Cicero was

governor of Cilicia in modern day Turkey. So basically um Calias just continued to hound Cicero about how he needs him to have some hunters capture and send back some local leopards, which they refer to a Greek panthers because he needs because he's He's like, you gotta give these to me, Cistero. I've got to throw him in the arena. The people love this, and I'm trying to kick start my political career here, come on, don't let me down.

And it's just it's like multiple correspondences where he's just really hounding Cistero over this, and Cistero keeps dodging him on the matter and saying, well, look, the the you know, the local hunters are busy, you know, etcetera. That's that sort of thing. It's like, can you get Mick Jagger to come to my party? Yeah, I mean it is.

It's like, imagine if instead of when you see an individual running for political office today, instead of it being a situation of them trying to score saying Neil Young or you know, the guzzlers to play their event, if instead you were trying to procure exotic animals to massacure each other in a public arena. But it speaks to how important this was to at least a large segment of the population. And so this is something that would have been practiced in uh, you know, in the Roman Republic.

But but then reached you know, new heights in the Roman Empire. But it but it also is important to know that like, not everybody was completely on board with this. Uh. Wayser shares descriptions by by Cicero that describe it as being you know, barbaric and unnecessary and uh. And there are also some descriptions by a plenty of the Elder as well, which I think we can we can trust him a little bit more here because he's dealing with domestic matters and not mysterious species that he has no

firsthand knowledge of. But the plenty you will get vindicated a little bit later on in this episode two. But but in this case, Wayser points out things that they were both writing about how Pompey the Great organized a series of spectacles. Um. But but what like the main event essentially was a great elephant hunt in the arena. And it's interesting interesting in the in the accounts that showed that that while individuals like Cicero viewed these shows

as bloody and cruel, the crowds generally loved it. But the elephant hunt was even too much for the masses. And here's the quote from Cicero, obviously translated that She's shares quote the last day was that of the elephants, on which there was a great deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it, and a kind of belief created that the animal has

something in common with mankind. Yet they kept watching. Huh, well, yeah, they kept watching, and but apparently felt awful about it, and there was you know, some some booze and whatnot. And of course this didn't prevent later elephant spectacles from taking place, and and ultimately indeed, like the continued trafficking

of exotic animals is the focus of Weser's article. Uh that there was this booming industry for folks who would arrange the capture of exotic wild animals, generally from the extremes of the Empire, and then transport them back to

Rome to fight in the arena. So it was a cruel business, but enthusiasm, the enthusiasm for the spectacles in the arena also also bubbled over into enthusiasm for the details of the actual hunts and the tactics that procured them, and this is reflected both in the literature of the day and also in the art of the Roman Empire, where you see murals and whatnot depicting individuals hunting these wild animals so they could bring them back, and that

that the wildness of it was something that the Romans seemed to crave, if she points out, because the uh there there weren't there weren't really that many attempts to try and raise them in captivity. They had to be captured and brought back to Rome as part of the appeal.

I wonder if the idea about the methods used in hunting them, does that show up later in the sort of styles of gladiators that appear in the arena, because I know, we have like the there was the style of gladiator that's modeled after the fisherman, you know that has like the trident and the net and all that. So there are certain styles that seem to be based on on like the armies of opposing nations, or or

on professions like fishing. I wondered also if that the hunting methods that they talked about, what these animals can tributed there? Uh yeah, I mean it might very well be the case. So she doesn't get into that in this paper, and I didn't see it mentioned in some of the other more animal focused sources I was looking

at here. But you know, obviously the gladiatorial tropes that they used in the arena, they were all, you know, based on existing things, you know, to be it be it a fisherman or a uh, you know, a soldier or you know, some sort of animal component that was going to be echoed in the design. So let's come back to the elephants though, because I think because so far, that's been the most alarming, um, you know, obscenity that

we've looked at here on the part of the Romans. Yeah, it's interesting that passage that you read from Cicero where you know, he's describing the crowds feeling sympathy for the elephants while they watch this brutality being done to them.

I mean, I wonder if there's more of that kind of thing going on in the appetites of the Roman Arena audiences than we would normally imagine, like we imagine the audiences of the editorial games and all this kind of stuff just being you know, bloodthirsty, like, yeah, they want the fight, they want the violence, and and they

love it and they're eating it up. I wonder if there was some element of the audience that I don't know, it's something more equivalent to to the kind of like hate watching or the hate clicking kind of thing that people do now, like where you know, people are constantly clicking on things on the Internet that they know we're going to make them unhappy. You know, you just reliably know if I click this link, I'm gonna feel bad and I'm not gonna like what I read, but I

click it anyway. You know, I wonder where people going to the arena, like, I know, I'm gonna feel bad, but I have to look at this, you know, that would be might be worth while to come back and explore that in greater detail, like the nature of these gladiatorial blood sport events um which we should stress are generally there were a lot more varied, uncomplicated than uh it is often relayed in fular media, but still we're violent, blood,

blood thirsty events. You know, what, what was the psychology of that? And then how much of that psychology still remains in the fandom of various you know, high impact sporting events or you know, actual mixed martial arts or other martial arts contests or even simulated um athletic contests such as professional wrestling. I don't know, I have to

come back to that, I think. But one thing the ways are also points out is you know that like there were there their artistic uh renditions of say big cats that were used in some of these events, and they would be given names in the art and they would be kind of there, like some of the iconography would be akin to that that would you be used for human gladiators. So yeah, it gets it gets sticky.

And and then I mean just thinking about the elephants and the obvious connection, like the obvious intelligence that is there in the elephant, and the sympathy that one feels like this, uh, this kind of connection like has existed throughout I think our our experiences with elephants, and yet cruelty to elephants continues to this day. Uh and um, you know had certainly continued on through the you know,

the history of circuses around the world. So um, yeah, I mean our relationship with animals is always complicated, even when we have you know, sympathy actually activated for them. Well, I know you wanted to explore more about the Romans and the elephants. Yeah, so I I found a book titled Elephant Destiny, Biography of an Endangered Species in Africa

by Martin Meredith. And in this the author details the slaughter in the Roman arenas in general in the in the opening of Pompei's Games in the b C. And he mentions that no fewer than six hundred lions were massacured. Just to give everyone an idea of the scale of bloodshed. Here, six hundred lions. Can you imagine, I mean a lion is a lion as an apex predator, so there already

aren't that many of them. And to remove six hundred lions from their habitat, Yeah, to essentially like basically put out the call and say, look, Pompey the Great knees lions. So everybody that is in the in the business of catching lions or could conceivably catch a lion, get out there and start catching lions. Essentially, uh and and this but this one meant just before the elephant event described previously,

So what elephants were they catching? Well, the author here points out that the North African elephant was was the likely species, as these were the elephants used by the forces of Hannibals, Carthagian army, the African bush elephant that is still around. Um that this one is too wild to to ride around or to really tame in the same way that one uses uh, the Asian elephant and uh and and not to just you know, to a

single out Carthage. Other groups used the North African elephant for labor in war as well, but any by following hannibals defeat, the region fell under Roman control, and the Romans used these elephants in their bloody sports as well as in attractions that really have more in common with the sort of circus work that we see uh, you know, throughout even like the twentieth century. And then that includes things like tight rope walking here, yeah, they single he

singles that out in the book. But here's a quote that touches on the additional levels of exploitation that could become employed. Quote. Rome's liking for elephants meant that the North African herds faced constant raids, But even more perilous was the insatiable Roman demand for ivory. Ivory was used to decorate temples and palaces, carried in triumphal processions and made into a vast range of luxury goods, thrones, chess statues, chairs, beds,

book covers, tablets, boxes, bird cages, combs, and broches. Caesar wrote in an ivory Chariot Seneca possessed five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs. Do you need that many tables for large events? Large scale events? I guess Caligula gave his horse an ivory stable. Wow, I'm glad we got Caligula in there. I wasn't sure we were can actually

uh be able to make room for him. So that being said, some of the ivory came from India and Ethiopia, but North Africa suffered the most, and in seventies seven CE, plenty of the Elder Road about the shortage of African ivory quote an ample supply of ivory is now rarely obtained except from India, the demands of luxury having exhausted

all those in our part of the world. And of course, um the ivory trade still remains a threat to elephant populations, despite laws and the hard work of of conservationist worldwide. And if you want more information about what's going on and what can be done, I recommend everyone check out stop ivory dot org for more information. Okay, but what was the ultimate effect on the elephant populations? Do we know if the Roman exploitation of these animals did it

Did it damage their populations, did it drive mixtincts? The general consensus is that it it definitely drove their extinction. They either died out during the fifth century or at

least were well on their way to extinction. But the damage was done during the Roman imperial period, So it wasn't necessarily that we know that the Romans like hunted down the very last of the North African elephants, but they may whatever they did to them damaged their populations enough and all that that we think it strongly contributed to their decline, right, And that's something we're going to see in some of these other examples we bring We bring out as well, is that there are other cases

where it's certainly not in a situation where the Romans just went out and had killed or had killed all members of a species, but they you know, they had the power, through their their appetites, through their their economic demands, to actually like do this much damage to the environment. Again, with the Roman An empire. Everything that was already present in human of civilization was there, only maybe ramped up

a little bit. Uh so their destructive tendencies, you know, had a little more reach than you might find in other civilizations. And of course the same thing can be said for today. They are various human appetites and our various wants and desires and our uses for the natural world that uh, at the scale we're doing things now are even more destructive than they ever were. Yeah, it's a sad fact. And that's going to come up again,

and some of the other stuff I've got here. It's it's sometimes striking how similar the patterns of civilization level activity are between things that we do today and the things the Romans did to exploit their environment. Yeah, all right, Well, on that note, let's go and take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to continue to

discuss Roman extinctions. All right, we're back. So, so, Joe, what what is the next organism we're going to discuss here that was made to to fight glad he years in the arena? Well, uh, it's not. This next one is a plant. But this is going to be one of the main examples that people often bring up as something that was likely driven to extinction by the Roman Empire. So my main source here is an article from Conservation Biology from two thousand three by Ken Peregeco called plenty

of the elders Sylphium first recorded species extinction. Now the author Ken perege COO. I looked him up. He was a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin Stout. I think he's retired now. But in this essay, the author asked the question, how do we know when a species has gone extinct? In the words of E. O. Wilson, quote, extinction is the most obscure and local of all biological processes. It took me for a second, and then I realized, Oh, yeah,

I guess that must be true. Whenever the last ones disappear, it's always kind of a local and isolated phenomenon. I mean, like a lot of these cases, it's it's looking to when was the last recorded like dependable and recorded sighting or killing of a particular organism. Yeah, and so the author writes, quote, the question of how many species extinctions have gone unnoticed in human history is unanswerable, Yet the past may shed light on the present. On what in

our behavior has changed and what hasn't. So he starts off by talking about our old friend Plenty of the Elder. Now remember, of course, so we know the timing. The Plenty of the Elder's natural history was first published around seventy and so Plenty in one section of his natural history dives into an ex explanation of a sort of

miracle plant that he calls silphium. The plant is described as having plentiful kind of stubby, thick roots, a finnel like stalk blade like leaves that resemble parsley, and then at the top the stalks have an umbell. When an umbell is a a cluster of short flower stalks all clumped together, so that the flowers kind of resemble a parasol. You've probably seen plants like this. Robert got sort of a little dome of little flowers all clustered together, so

the Romans called it sylfium. It was also known as silphion by the Greeks, as well as laser wart uh and laser pithecum uh and and from this plant, apparently you can create a resin that is called laser l A s e R. It might be pronounced losser. I don't know, but I'm gonna say laser. So this resin called laser. Plenty describes it quote as among the most

precious gifts presented to us by nature. And you could get this resin by making slits in the roots and the stem of the plants so that it's juices and its sap would leach out, and then those juices and the sap would be dried into a resin to produce laser.

Plenty cites a Greek author, probably the philosopher Theophrastus, who is a student of Lato and Aristotle's on the origins of the plant, and the Greek author claims that the plant was discovered in the seventh century b c. After a black rain fell upon the gardens in a region of north North Africa known as syen Aca, which is now Libya. Pareto writes, quote, it grew most profusely in a region of that country known as the Sylphio Ferra,

near the Gulf of Syrtus. There where the plateaus along the Mediterranean coast rise as tiered highlands that received considerably more rainfall than the deserts to the south. Sylfium thrived in a region of hilly and forested meadows. So we're almost getting this picture of this pristine, you know, lush little area with a desert to the south, the coast to the north that has all these little plants with the fenel like stalks and the parsley leaves and the

umbell of of flowers near the top. And in ancient times, sylfium had a number of uses that recommended it to plenty as a kind of miracle plant. And among these uses document ended by Peregco number one. It was fed to livestock like cattle and sheep under the idea that it gave their meat a special desirable flavor. So you really wanted you wanted your mutton to be fed on

sylfium tasted way better. Apparently, the plant parts could also just be cooked and you know, used in cooking, like the stalk could be used, or the resin could be used. It was also used medically as a laxative, you know, so for fast effective relief you go with sylfium. But the concentrated resin called laser, which was which was made from the plant, was considered even more useful. It could

supposedly treat fevers and coughs and warts. It was believed to be a pain reliever and a hair restoration tonic, and apparently, as I mentioned, it was sometimes just also used in cooking. And there's also another huge use for this plant, which was that it was apparently believed to be a contraceptive and a board efficient, and so the juice or resin would be applied to a piece of wool and then used as a vaginal suppository as a contraceptive or a board deficient, and contraceptives and a board

officians were highly desirable in ancient room. They were largely sought sought after for of course, many of the same reasons that they have been throughout all of history. So apparently a laser was in such demand that there was a widely acknowledged problem of unscrupulous merchants selling low quality, adulterated laser. You cut that laser, buddy. You know. It's like the scene in the movie where the guy gets in trouble for for cutting the coke with baby powder

or something. You know, this is this is cutting the laser, maybe with with assa fatida or something like that. So Peregco notes that within Gaias Petronius first century CE fictional work known as the Satiricon. There's a scene where an Egyptian slave sings a song from what is apparently a well known contemporary musical farce, and this musical force of

the day is called the laser dealer. So you get a sense that the laser dealer of ancient Rome, the ancient Roman Empire might have had a reputation sort of like the used car salesman of today who's trying to give you, you know, get you to buy, to pay too much for something that's not worth what you think it is, Okay, because I mean, ultimately we're not talking

this was not FDA approved. There was not no like a system you were you were going to you know, essentially an apothecary or just somebody who had a supply or claim to have a supply of the the the the the laser that you needed. And yeah, if you didn't trust them, if if they were a little sketchy, they might be cutting the product or selling something else, you know that they're calling laser. And think about what

people were using this product for. I mean, it's something that if you you got something that was an inferior product that didn't work as well as you thought it would, you might be facing serious consequences. And so here's the weird fact. We don't know for sure what plant species Plenty was talking about. It was this hugely important, commercially important plant, and we don't know for sure what it was. There is a plant genus in North America called Sylfium,

but it's apparently not related. An author named Rackham in nineteen fifty suggested that plenties Sylfium might have been the species called Ferula tingatana or Farolla marmarica, which are North African plants that still exist today. Or of course it could be an extinct relative of these, but that's just rackham suggestion. It's widely believed that the Roman Empire may very well have driven this miracle plant to extinction, So how would that be Well. Already in his day, Plenty

complaints that you can't really get sylfium anymore. He notes that in the year forty nine BC, Julius Caesar ordered the stockpiling of fifteen hundred pounds of lasers just the resin in the Royal treasury, but by Plenty's own lifetime. Remember Plenty, this is published in seventy seven CES, so would have been just about a hundred years later in

Plenty's lifetime. By this time, the plant had vanished in its natural range, and the last known stock of it quote being valued at its weight in gold and sent to the Emperor Nero. And I'm you know, I'm sure Nero did something awesome with So what's the reason for this decline and disappearance of sylfium? Well, Plenty says that number.

The main explanation Plenty gives is quote tax farmers who rent the pasturage and strip it clean by grazing sheep on it, realizing that they make more profit in that way. And to be honest, I'm not positive I understand what plenties saying there what that means, but I think possibly it refers to the fact that meat from the live stock that's fed on sylfium got a much higher price because it was believed to taste better, so you could

get more money for the you know, upgraded meat. But this is you know, this decimating your sylfium fields, Okay, I said in a in a way like they're just multiple demands on the product because it was used for so many things, including people who just want to graze their animals on it and produce superior meat. But it all comes down to like to demand for the various products, direct products or products that depend upon the sylfium, and

there were limited habitats in which sylfium would grow. So Peregiko also offers some other thoughts about what what could have contributed to the decline of sylfium uh and a chief concern he raises his habitat destruction. He says that a very popular wood for Roman furniture came from the Thuon tree, which filled the forests of Synaica, and over harvesting of this would possibly lead to deforestation of the area that is now Libya, and in turn this led

to soil erosion. So without tree roots to hold the soil in place, you know the soil of roads in rainfall or in the wind or in anything um which destroyed the sylfium's natural habitat and the hilly meadows near the coast. So there you've got a couple of unsustainable practices coming together to conspire for the demise of this plan. He also points to unsustainable farming practices in the region which were aimed at short term profits but which came

at the long term expensive soil quality. Also, he says there are historical records of political conflict over sylfium in Syrenaica um so in the region. In this region during the Roman Empire, they were like there were native tenant

farmers and then the rich Roman landlords. And as sylfium became scarce, the Romans tried to put tight control on the production by saying only they could farm it on their lands, and they put fences up around the meadows where the sylphium grew in order to keep the locals out. But Perejko writes, quote the natives practiced to kind of a grarian terrorism by tearing down the fences and letting their flocks graze on the sylfium to increase the value

of the sheep's mutton. And then also apparently sometimes they would just go into the fields in the night and just upper the plants, just pull them up by the roots, kind of as a middle finger to the Roman overlords Romans go home. Another thing that's a possible explanation here, apparently the Romans were obsessed with garlic. Oh well we still have that. Well, yeah, and I don't often side

with the Romans, but I cannot fault them there. Garlic is great, Yeah, I mean garlic not only is it a wonderful culinary ingredient, but I mean it has a number of different medicinal uses. And you know in in herbal traditions, Um is that antimicrobial property? Yeah? Um yeah, yeah, absolutely, And so Pereshiko writes, quote garlic was such a popular plant with the Roman army that it was said one could follow the advance of the Roman legions and expansion

of the empire by plotting range maps for garlic. Uh. So the Romans and Cyrenaica also apparently destroyed some sylfium habitats so they could plant garlic locally. Uh. And so the question is did sylfium fully go extend in the

first century CE or not. Some scholars have argued that sylfium was cultivated at least until a few hundred years later in the fifth century, because there are references to it in some later writings, like people have you know, writing letters in the fifth century CEE talking about having

sylfium plants. But these references could very well be to what what Peregco calls pseudo Sylfium's other plants that were incorrectly identified as sylfium and had been for a long time, or also for a long time had been combined with laser resin to adulterate it, or had simply been sold

as fake sylfium by yet another unscrupulous laser dealer. Yeah, you know, this is something I was reading about recently, and another book about just you know, as his ancient people's moved around, there might be a traditional plant that they depended upon, and as they move out of its range. Uh. And sometimes you know, take it with them to some extent, but then lose it. They have to find new substances that will fulfill at least some of the properties, or

they hope will fulfill some of the properties. And sometimes you just give it the same name or you know, or a similar name exactly. Uh. And you know, and not all plants can follow you outside of I mean, some plants are very particular about their native range and and can't be really grown outside it very well. And

it does appear sylfium as one of those. But in the first centuries, see other plants and spices were being recommended as a substitute for sylfium, like petco sites a Roman cookbook from around twenty CE that recommends assa fatida as a substitute for laser and recipes, presumably because real

laser was already really expensive or hard to get. So ultimately, we don't know for sure whether or not the species Plenty is talking about actually when extinct, but it seems pretty likely it's got a limited natural range, subject to habitat destruction and over exploitation, as well as intentional destruction. Uh. And the author ends by saying, either way, it's interesting and sad to see the exact act patterns of human behavior leading to extinction of plant and animal species today

have been with us for thousands of years. I mean, this almost reads like a like a parody of you know, modern stories about how we we overexploited certain plants and animals. Absolutely well, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to discuss a few more Roman extinctions, or at least, in some of these cases, extinctions that were greatly contributed to by the Roman Empire. Alright, we're back, Okay. Can we talk about bears? Yes,

let's talk about bears. The Atlas bear is by some estimates. A notable victim of Roman civilization and the civilizations that followed in the wake of the Roman Empire. Uh. These were the Brown Bears of northern Africa, and their extinction can at least be partially attributed to the Romans, though we have to stress here it didn't truly go extinct in the wildland, the wild to the late nineteenth century,

so sometime later to be sure. But so we're saying that maybe the Romans did stuff to contain its range or something like that, yeah, or certainly really kick started the tradition of of exploitation uh and and habitat destruction that would reach you know, its final form uh in

the nineteenth century. Uh. So, basically what happens is when the Romans expanded into the Atlas Mountains of modern day Morocco, the bears were hunted for sport and they were captured for transport back to the Arenas in Rome as well. So we're talking thousands and thousands of them again, you know, when we're talking about the the trade and exotic animals, it's not just like a few a few individuals here and there catching a few curious creatures and sending them

back you know, I think it's easy to fall back on. Uh. You know, certainly a lot of this took place during you know, the time of European colonialism as well. Um, but uh, a lot of times it brings to mind pictures of sale the hold of a ship with a few different animals in it or something like that. But no, we're talking like tons and tons of creatures here. Um, thousands,

thousands and thousands of bears. I mean, it's not like they're all that many bears to begin with, right, Yeah, and uh, and so the initial depleting of their numbers put them in a terrible position for a centuries of habitat loss and deforestation to follow, and also continued hunting, which was ultimately bolstered by the development of modern firearms.

And apparently when you look at the like the the the last known sightings of these animals, they pretty much line up with modern firearms being available, so that that just pushing the hunting over the edge. Um. This made me think a little though about bears and human extinction. Uh. It was once theorized that prehistoric cave bears were hunted into extinction by humans, but it doesn't seem to be that this was actually the case, or at least this

is not the predominant theory. Now. Uh. You know, these were largely herbivorous creatures and they might have just been too much for ancient humans to really tackle on a regular basis, and human numbers might not have been sufficient to pull off that kind of extinction at the time, So we can't lay their extinction entirely at human feet.

I'd love to come back and discuss cave bears or or other prehistoric bearers like the short faced bear in the future, but it is interesting to sort of think of that in terms of the scaling up of human activities, Like, you know, there were there were times there were certainly there were certainly animals that you know that that that that early humans contributed to their to the extinction of uh,

you know, no doubt about it. But if if, if populations are smaller, uh, there's less that can be done towards pushing an animal's extinction. Right now, another animal creature you might not expect to show up on this list is the ostrich because you know, it doesn't seem like a knack roll creature that would be out there in the Roman arena, right, But the ostrich were talking about about here is not the common ostrich that you're probably thinking of, and that you would you can see it

most zoos and window and what have you. Well, I mean I was thinking when you said this, okay, there are some large birds I can't imagine in the arena. I was thinking about the cassowary. Oh yeah, well, and that is the scariest feed of anything I've ever seen. Well, yes, and ostriches can be quite terrifying close up, for sure,

and they can and they are dangerous animals. But but I have to admit it wasn't like the first thing I thought about as being something that there would have you know, really suffered due to the pressure of Roman appetite. But what we're talking about here is not the common ostrich, but the Arabian Ostrich or the Syrian ostrich, also known as the Middle Eastern ostrich, and it lived in the Near and Middle East, as opposed to the common ostriche

of Africa that we still know today now. To be sure, the Arabian Ostrichs suffered under humans for quite a while. They're mentioned in other ancient texts. They're even mentioned in the Bible, and given that they are giant birds. You know, they're they've always been something of a curiosity for humans. And then you see this as far east as China where specimens were taken for display, but the Romans were

were also rather taken with them. And again everything with the Roman Empire you can sort of see as like a leveling up of of of of appetite to a certain extent, but also just the ability to exert that appetite on the natural world. Uh So, because again these ostriches, they were exotic and they became something of a status symbol. You see them popping up on Roman coinage from that from that time period, seems true Sylfium sylfi amazon coins we have, which just speaks to like what kind of

value was put on these on these species. But in the arena, the ostriches were made to pull chariots to participate in other you know, violent arena spectacles, which of course tended to have a terrible end for the animal. But they were also prized in Roman cuisine, both the meat and the eggs. I was the Romans were omnivorous to an extreme. I mean you can read these uh these cookbooks where you know, it seems like they ate,

they tried eating just about everything. I was reading a cookbook entry and something earlier today with this recipe for like a parrot and flamingo. I think, yeah, there's some very exotic dishes, which again I think is part of just like the traffic of these exotic animals. Uh. Yeah, there's apparently a really good book on it that I didn't have time to really get into a lot. But Patrick Foss wrote one called Around the Roman Table, Food

and Feasting in Ancient Rome. Uh and and he was looking at some Roman cookbooks and uh he appointed to at least a couple of Ostrich recipes, one for an ostrich stew and one for a boiled Ostrich so boiled whole ostrich. Uh no, not whole, not whole. You know, there were limits to what you could do. But then I mean outside of this too, I mean ostrich feathers

were prized um for use in ornamentation and costumes. But the Arabian Ostrich, the Syrian Ostrich ends up surviving the Roman Empire, but they did not survive the pressures of the modern world, so they're thought to have gone extinct sometime in the mid twentieth century. So they made it

pretty far. But again, this is a situation where you can't lay their extinction entirely at the feet of the Roman Empire by any means, but you can certainly look to the degree that the Roman Empire added additional pressure upon their survival. All right, well, I've got another one where, uh, we don't have clear evidence that the Romans drove a species extinct, but with there are some interesting clues about possibilities in history that that may have previously not been imagined.

So uh, let's let's take a look at Plenty again, if any of the elder from his Natural History book nine, chapter five, and this one's the John Bostock translation, where Plenty is talking about ballina, the ballina and the orca. Uh and note in this passage there's this word billina. It's believed to refer to some kind of you know, key toss, meaning like sea monster or big fish, which which for Plenty would include whales. But we don't we think he's talking about a whale. We don't know what

whale he's talking about. Okay, but this is where we get balin from. Is it like similar etymology? I would assume? So yeah, uh, so he says uh, the billina penetrates to our seas. Even it is said that they are not to be seen in the Ocean of Getties before the winter solstice, and at periodical seasons they retire and conceal themselves in some calm, capacious bay in which they

take delight in bringing forth. This fact, however, is known to the orca, an animal which is peculiarly hostile to the ballina, and the form of which cannot be in any way adequately described, but as an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth, the animal attacks the billina and its places of retirement, and with its teeth tears its young, or else attacks the females which have just brought forth, and indeed while they're still pregnant, and as they rush

upon them, it pierces them just as though they had been attacked by the beak of a Liburnian galley. And that refers to like a sharp pointing ship. And he goes on and on about the orca hunting these billina. But all of it is I mean, this sounds exactly like everything we've discussed regarding the orca in the past.

I mean, this is like straight out of a modern documentary in which we get to see, you know, spectacular underwater footage of the orcas, or at least the the the variety of orcas that that feed on whales going after them. Yes, I mean it is an accurate description of things you might see in some parts of the ocean, except there's a problem. In the early part of this passage, he's referring to some kind of whale that retires seasonally to the shallows to give birth in the area around

what is now Cadiz. So that's in southwestern Spain. But the passage has long been of interest to marine biologists because there are no whales in the region that match this ecological and behavioral description. And in fact, there are whales in the Mediterranean sometimes, but they tend to be you know, like deep water whales that do not retire to shallow bays around Cadiz to give birth. So what was plenty of talking about, Like did he get the

story mixed up? Is he confused about the location or about the behavior of the whales or what or maybe was he referring to whales that once would have calved in that area but no longer do Now there are whales that fit that ecological and behavioral description, but they

don't live in the Mediterranean. A couple of examples would be gray whales, which is the gray whale is a baleen whale up to about fifteen meters long roughly fifty feet about thirty five metric tons, and it's worldwide range today has been reduced to a couple of populations in the northern Pacific Ocean, and one of its two population subgroups, the Western group, is endangered. And then also it would fit the North Atlantic right whale, which is also a

baleen whale of being day injured today. It lives in the Northern Atlantic. As the name implies, it's up to about sixteen meters or about fifty feet long and about sixty four metric tons. And the right whale was a huge target of the historical whaling industry because they were valuable and they were easy to catch, and they were hunted to commercial extinction by the mid nineteen hundreds and nearly to biological extinction. They're they're pretty much entirely gone

from the eastern North Atlantic. There's a single population of about five hundred individuals that survives in the western North Atlantic and that's it. So, you know, in terms of extinction, we've often touched on like the differences between extinct and the wild. Uh, you know, absolute extinction, but commercial extinction is something I don't often think about, like basically depleted to the point where, like the the industry of whaling

this particular animal is no longer viable. Yeah, exactly. Um So, so let's come back to the whales in a minute, a different question. When was the first time somebody decided that they could base a whole industry off of hunting whales? And we know that the hunting of whales in like individual cases goes back thousands of years, but the first known large scale commercial whaling industry and history has long been believed to be the basque whaling business of the

medieval period. And there's no evidence that hunting of whales by humans would have happened at any scale large enough to have had an effect on whale populations before the basque whalers of the Middle Ages. But there are earlier descriptions of whale hunting. Another piece of ancient Roman literature we want to look at. Here is an awesome poem about fishing by the second century CE. Greco Roman poet Opian called the hali Utica, and this is from the

Lobe Classical Library edition. It describes all kinds of stuff, you know, the way the fishers go out in the boat, and they stab at the whale with barbs and attached a hook to it with a rope, and that they then attached the rope to water skins or skins that are filled with human breath, and there of course buoyant. So it's kind of like in Jaws, right when you and they spear the shark with the floating barrels um.

But then uh Opian writes, quote, now, when the deadly beast is tired with his struggles and drunk with pain, and his fierce heart is bent with weariness and the balance of hateful doom inclines, then first of all the skin comes to the surface, announcing the issue of victory,

and greatly uplifts the hearts of the fishers. Even as when a Harold returns from dolorous war in white raiment and with a cheerful face, his friends exulting follow him, expecting straightway to hear favorable tidings, so do the fishers exult when they behold the hide the messenger of good news rising from below, and immediately other skins rise up and emerge from the sea, dragging in their train the huge monster, and the deadly beast is hauled up, all

unwillingly distraught in spirit with labor and wounds. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's like, I feel like Oppian is kind of a good poet in a way, but it's, uh, it's it's a sad story. He seems to be delighted about it, though it does seem to resemble the shark hunting sequence and jaws more than more than It's not

clear what kind of whale Oppian things he's talking about. Okay, so we know the Romans didn't have the technology to do deep ocean whaling, but it but is it possible the Romans did participate in more shallow whaling than previously thought. They certainly did a lot of fishing and fish processing. The Roman Empire loved fish that had like fish processing plants. Basically they made stuff that's like you know, modern fish sauce,

like colatura, uh, you know, salted fish products. So they were they were big on seafood and and the fishing industry. But did they do any whaling. We we didn't previously have really any evidence that that happened at any kind of scale, but a study from ten finds some interesting

evidence that might make us question that. Uh And this was published in Proceedings to the Royal Society b Biological Sciences by Anna Rodrige as at All and the authors here point out that whales are often archaeologically invisible, meaning when they die, their bones sink to the bottom of the ocean, and we just don't usually get much of a record of them even when they're you know, called

or processed by humans. They tend most often to be processed on the beach and there's stuffed you know, all the blubber and everything taken away, and then the bones

just get washed back into the water. Uh. And this study used DNA analysis of bones found in Roman and pre Roman archaeological sites, I think primarily ancient fish processing factories in the Gibraltar region, and they found among the bones that there were there were remains of three right whales, three gray whales, but also a fin whale, a sperm whale, a long finned pilot whale, a dolphin, and one bone from an African elephant. Not sure what was doing at

the fish processing plan. Also makes me wonder which if this was truly since it's not a study about elephants. If we're talking about the uh, the extant African elephant

or the extinct the African elephant. Oh yeah, I'm actually not sure they're But so the author has used radio carbon dating that placed the bones with an origin between two fifty b C and C. So that's the Roman Empire period uh, And the authors believed this indicates that the historical range of these two whale species, the gray whale and the right whale, actually included the Gibraltar region in the Mediterranean Sea as Calvin grounds at the time. So in the Roman period the ranges of these two

whales were very different. They were much bigger apparently. And the author's right that when these two whale species disappeared from the Mediterranean, it was probably accompanied by quote, the disappearance of their predators, killer whales. So you're not normally going to be seeing orca in the Mediterranean, right, but they might have been there to prey on these whales at the time, and when they're their their main prey vanishes, they have to vanish as well. Exactly and then also

they say, and a reduction in marine primary productivity. And the authors also think that if these two species of coastal excess sable whales were historically present, it might indicate that the Roman Empire had a forgotten pre basque whaling industry. Quote. None of this demonstrates that the Roman whaling industry existed, but it indicates that Romans had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to capture gray and right whales at

an industrial scale. And then also quote nonetheless, if such an industry did exist, it could have had an impact on the eastern North Atlantic populations of these two species, as it would have affected uh, particularly adult females with disproportionate demographic consequences in these long lived, slowly reproducing species. Thus, Roman exploitation may have played a role in the observed decline in Atlantic gray whale genetic diversity before the onset

of industrial basque whaling. So quite a few ifs they're right, we don't know, uh, you know, if this whaling industry existed and all that, But you can see how it's plausible that a Roman whaling industry could have contributed to the client of whale populations in the Mediterranean in the Atlantic. But I did just want to caution this with, you know, because not everyone agrees with how to interpret the study.

So I was reading an article about this in The Guardian that cited a doctor Erica Rowan, a classical archaeologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, and she said the study does show that these whales habitats once included the Gibraltar region, but that the small number of bones over the short time span found doesn't necessarily prove that there was a large commercial whaling industry in ancient in the ancient Roman Empire, which of course the authors didn't say

they were proving that, but they just suggested as possible. Uh quote. I think that if these whales were present in such numbers, and we're being caught on an industrial scale, that we would have more evidence, perhaps not in the zoo archaeological record, but in the ceramic record. In the literary sources. The Romans ate and talked about an enormous variety of fish and seafood, and if the whale was widely exploited and exported, then it is strangely absent from

many discussions. So she makes the point. Yeah, you might not expect to find many physical remains because of the way that whales are often processed, but you would probably expect to find writings where people talked about the whale industry. Yeah. One of the Roman authors whose work survives today would have would have seen it, would have commented on it,

would have been impressed by the scale of the industry. Yeah, you would have said that they ate it, would have recorded some sort of a recipe, or if not a recipe, than like, you know, some sort of record of what they were using the you know what, the various things they might have been processing the whale into. Yeah, I can see that being a potential red flag there. So I guess the big takeaway today is that empires have consequences. They do, uh, that they have a lot of consequences.

And it's and it's I think easy to to overlook the consequences that they have on the natural world and have always had. And again, we have to think about the scaling up of human behavior as our you know, our modern empires, in our modern um you know, nation states, UH continue to scale up what they're doing, sometimes uh taken into into account their impact on the natural world, but perhaps uh not as much as it should be the case. Uh so kind of a cautionary tale, I

guess from the Roman world. Don't kill the elephants, don't deplete the sylphium. And of course these are the mainly the species. Most of the species we talked about here were things that their absence is notable because they were a value in some way. Right, these are the things that they are historical records of of going missing, right, Yeah,

so we're being reduced. Yeah, so just imagine other species that were less remarkable or at least less valued, or you know, they weren't exotic creatures, you know, very you think of the various rodents or insects or birds or what have you that could have also been destroyed by Roman activity and it just didn't make it into the history books. All right. So there you have it. As always, if you want more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, visit Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com because that's

where you'll find them. And if you want to support the show always, the best thing you can do is tell friends about Out of the show. Make sure that you rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so. And if you have any thoughts on the the organisms we discussed today, the histories we discussed today, if you have additional ideas, if you have corrections additional organisms we might have missed that when extinct or might have gone extinct during the Roman time, or do in

part to the Roman influence, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, Torri Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, to answer any of those questions Robert just said, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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