The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6)

Chapter 146: CHAP. 43. (29.)—NATIONS THAT HAVE BEEN EXTERMINATED BY ANIMALS.

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The volume assembles an encyclopedic survey of the known world and its living inhabitants, moving from detailed regional geography and descriptions of seas, rivers, islands, and peoples to extended treatments of humanity, its generation, anatomy, and the origins and inventions of arts. Subsequent books catalog terrestrial animals—their habits, capture, and uses—followed by comprehensive observations on fish and marine creatures, their sizes and behaviors. Accounts mix naturalistic description, reported marvels, medicinal uses derived from animals, and travel and secondhand reports, organized as topical chapters intended as a practical compendium of natural and human phenomena.

CHAP. 43. (29.)—NATIONS THAT HAVE BEEN EXTERMINATED BY ANIMALS.

We have accounts, too, no less remarkable, in reference even to the most contemptible of animals. M. Varro informs us, that a town in Spain was undermined by rabbits, and one in Thessaly, by mice; that the inhabitants of a district in Gaul were driven from their country by frogs,1790 and a place in Africa by locusts;1791 that the inhabitants of Gyarus,1792 one of the Cyclades, were driven away by mice;1793 and the Amunclæ, in Italy, by serpents. There is a vast desert tract on this side of the Æthiopian Cynamolgi,1794 the inhabitants of which were exterminated by scorpions and venomous ants.1795 and Theophrastus informs us, that the people of Rhœteum 1796 were driven away by scolopendræ.1797 But we must now return to the other kinds of wild beasts.