The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

It is also clear that Aristotle got some of his exotic zoology from travel books. Ctesias of Cnidus, a fifth-century Greek physician to the Persian court, wrote several books about Persia and India that Aristotle felt he could neither ignore nor trust. None of these kinds [genē] of animals [live-bearing tetrapods, i.e. mammals] has a double row of teeth. Well, there is one, if Ctesias is to be believed. He claims that a beast that the Indians call the martikhōras has a triple row of teeth, resembles a lion in size, is just as shaggy and has the same sort of feet. It has a face and ears like a man’s, blue eyes, vermilion colouring and a tail like a scorpion’s. It has a sting in the tail, shoots spines like arrows, and has a voice halfway between a shepherd’s flute and a trumpet. It runs as fast as a deer, is savage and a man-eater. Behind the thicket of fable that is Ctesias’ martikhōras lurks a tiger (the Persian is martijaqāra, literally ‘man-eater’). Elsewhere, ‘What Ctesias has written about the elephant’s sperm [that it is as hard as amber] is false.’ ‘And in India, so Ctesias claims, there are no wild or tame pigs, but the bloodless and scaly animals are all large.’ This is a reference to Ctesias’ ‘Indian worm’ that lives in trees and devours domestic animals and is obviously a large python.