Solinus takes the reader on a tour of the known world of his time (early third century AD) and on the way we meet unicorns, men 'transformed into wolves', deer which swallow snakes after 'dragging them out of their lairs' by the force of their breath, serpents with four horns, hyaenas which 'imitate the sound of people vomiting', men without noses and faces which are entirely flat, and with no mouths so that they eat through 'small holes by way of oaten stalks'.

There are also cannibals and 'the Pamphagi, who eat everything which is chewable, and anything which happens to be born'. In Phrygia there is an animal called the bonacus: 'When it turns to flee, it discharges dung with a quick evacuation of its stomach, for a length of three acres. The heat of the dung burns whatever it touches. Thus it wards off pursuers with its noxious secretion.'

In the midst of all this menagerie of strange people and stranger creatures, we are treated to careful descriptions of all the foreign lands and learn titbits such as this: 'India gives pearls; so do the shores of Britannia. The divine Julius [Caesar] wished it to be understood by an adjacent description that the breastplate he dedicated in the temple of his ancestress Venus was made from British pearls.'

About the Author

Gaius Julius Solinus, better known simply as Solinus, was a Latin grammarian, geographer, and compiler who probably flourished in the early 3rd century AD.

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