Gladiator II and Weird Words

Allow me to indulge in a tangent.  Words are weird, especially words borrowed from other languages.  I got on this train of thought while watching a trailer for the new Gladiator movie, wherein a fighter enters the arena astride a fully accoutered rhinoceros.  This is likely an artistic choice predicated on tigers in the Gladiator of 2000, leading show runners to up the ante with regard to spectacle.  That said, historian-trained though I be, I do not think the inclusion of a rhinoceros in a third-century Roman death-match a necessarily unreasonable creative decision.  According to my limited knowledge of animals, the rhinoceros is said to be violent to a point, but mostly because he is easily startled, and is otherwise comparatively docile insofar as hulking wild animals are concerned.  Thus, the rhinoceros looks fierce and intimidating, but is not nearly so dangerous to the unassuming passer-by as is his neighbor, the hippopotamus.

Which brings me back to words.  “Hippopotamus” is a goofy-sounding word used to name a goofy-looking creature, which no amount of Greco-Roman plumage will ever render remotely as awesome in aspect as a perfectly naked rhinoceros.  Moreover, such a curious name, so famous among kindergarteners, is taken from the ancient Greek for “horse of the water”; in short, hippopotamus is a word that describes the beast as the ancient Greeks observed it, or maybe as they heard it described.  

Two thoughts spring to mind: Firstly, that the hippo’s predilection for breathtaking violence, verging upon the premeditated, makes the name “homicide horse” (as suggested by such luminaries as Casual Geographic on YouTube) more appropriate, because the hippo is far more ferocious than the rhino; Thought the Second: would someone not protest that the hippo looks nothing like a horse?  Indeed, quite apart from his exceedingly generous physiology, the hippo (like the rhino and the elephant) has toes!

Now, I am frankly inspired by the notion of dignifying the bloody-minded hippopotamus with the moniker, “hippophonos,” so I’ll swiftly move on to the second consideration: don’t those toes give the lie to the idea that this could be anything like a horse?  Maybe my love of the ancient world makes me a sympathetic critic; in any event, I am inclined to think that, however inaccurate this hypothetical modern may think the name, I suspect this may be less a mistake on the part of Greek tourists and more an attempt by Greeks to describe a strange animal,  using words that they had ready-made.*  We do the same today, observing orangutans and gorillas, then introducing modifiers (silverback gorilla) or wholly new generalizations, like “great apes.”  Oh, I hear you!  “That’s just differentiating groups of things (bigger apes) from like-things (apes generally).”  To which I respond, “Thank you for illustrating my point.”  This “water horse” is thusly differentiated from horses more generally. 

(*It is worth noting that ancient Greek depictions of hippos were wildly inaccurate in parts, including references to horses’ manes and tales, and hides so thick that, when dried, could be fashioned into spear shafts; also, that Herodotus, at least, is perfectly aware of the bizarre aspect that he is attempting to describe.  Critics of the second mosaic in the north African Villa Nile are not necessarily wrong to point out the horrifying nature of that artist’s hippo, but can any of us be expected to accurately illustrate an animal which we’ve never seen—or even sketch out an acceptable profile of a common house cat?  Meanwhile the contemporary Egyptians styled the hippo “water ox,” which linguistic example is still akin to the Greek attempt, if more visually reasonable.)

“But the toes!” you say.  That is very true, yet let us not forget that there existed a whole prehistoric range of horses possessed of three “toes” or claws (interestingly, a quick Google of the dinohippus claims that some were monodactyl (single-hoofed), while others of the same species were tridactyl).  I hear you!  “Those breeds died out so many thousands or millions of years ago!  How then could a Greek who’d never seen a dinohippus or an eohippus or any other sort of tridactylite equine mistake a multi-toed hippopotamus for anything like the majestic stallions of Xenophon’s Peri Hippikes?”  In answer, let me first direct your attention to any one of the more exotic artistic reimagining of what these little stallions looked like; observe how extravagantly different they appear next to their majestic modern-day descendants.  Then let me ask what may strike one as odd: did the Greeks never see a three-toed horse?  

Absurd as one may think it, hear me out: the ancient Greeks lived in a world very different from out own, where stories of lions and anatomically accurate depictions of lions figure un-ironically in the cultural landscape.  I take the Middle Ages’ artistically-reinterpreted lions (seen in illuminated manuscripts and tapestries) as evidence of what happens when one has only a description of lions with which to work (as with Herodotus and the artist responsible for the walls in the Villa Nile).  But even the Middle Ages are a time remote from our own, where the things held true and normal seem fantastical to us today.  Take Beowulf, who brags about his clash with sea monsters while swimming the fjords.  In the 2007 film, our titular hero is accosted by many-tentacled monocular hell-spawn from beyond space and time, but in the tenth-century poem, it is “merely” orcas with whom he tussled; the classically heroic bit is that he was swimming in armor with a heavy sword in his hand, in anticipation of such an assault.  I hear you!  “Orcas don’t attack people in the wild!”  Yet we do know them to be fiendishly intelligent and prone to developing strategies for washing seals from ice flows, and we read about generations of orcas assuming temporary habits of attacking tourist vessels or donning dead salmon as hats; moreover, we see video of captive orcas giving in to frustration by pushing their handlers underwater and pinning them to the pool floor—exactly as Beowulf describes.

So I think myself justified in suggesting that the medieval, antique, and ancient worlds were very different from our own, and that horses with toes would be surely the least surprising anomaly.  Indeed, it is a certain kind of arrogance on our part to assume that we have even a reasonably accurate view of the past, especially the farther back we peer.  No matter how many manuscripts we decipher, or friezes copied, or artifacts recovered, our assembled depictions of the ancient past can only ever be a best guess; and like the technically accurate urban neighborhood of Vivarium (2019), there awaits an uncanny valley for any time-traveller from second-century Rome who attends a showing of Gladiator II.