8: You sexy beast: the pig in a villa in Vandalic North Africa and boar-cults in Old Germanic heathendom Richard North University College London In the early 520s, little more than a decade before the Vandals of North Africa vanished in the wake of Count Belisarius’ invasion from Byzantium, the poet Luxorius of Carthage wrote a short jeu d’esprit which, in its sole surviving context, the Latin Anthology, is entitled Archilochium de apro mitissimo in triclinio nutrito (‘epigram on a most tame boar fed in the dining room’). 1 The pig is described eating quietly among gilded colonnades. Unlike other swine he refrains from muddying the furniture, and is called a beast no longer of Mars but of Venus. Luxorius’ subject belongs to a long Latin literary tradition in which wild animals such as lions and boars are hailed as tamed. 2 This type of poetry is popular in the Latin Anthology in which many aberrant or untypical humans are also described. Luxorius, a grammaticus (‘teacher of Latin’), was also styled vir clarissimus et spectabilis (‘most notable and respectable citizen’) possibly in recognition of a teaching award. 3 Yet for all his learning, most poems in Luxorius’ Liber epigrammaton (‘book of epigrams’) dwell on the buzz of Carthage, on the people of parks and villas, parties, pantomimes and chariot-racing in the circus. His bestial novelties are part of this. Although the vogue for this type of thing began with Martial’s epigrams in the reign of Domitian (81-96), Luxorius’ poems show that nobody had tired of it in Carthage, second city of the western empire, four centuries later. In his poem before the boar, Luxorius writes on a fish which fearlessly inhabits the lacunas regias ‘royal ponds’ (No. 5, line 1). Elsewhere he pictures birds who prefer the garden of a Vandal patron, Fridamal, to their old home by the sea (No. 16), as well as a monkey taught to sit on the back of a dog that it fears – Quanto magna parant felici tempora regno, Discant ut legem pacis habere ferae! What great things the times hold in store for the happy kingdom, That animals may learn to keep the laws of peace! (No. 44, lines 3-4) – where the beasts in question might prompt an uneasy comparison: one between half-Roman Hilderic of Carthage and his Vandal relatives? Luxorius further celebrates a she-bear nursing cubs (No. 47), his own pet puppy (No. 73), leopards trained to hunt with dogs (No. 74), an articulate magpie (No. 84), and a cat that died eating a mouse (No. 89). There is another wild, but virtual, boar pictured on a painting in the same or another villa to which Luxorius gives the honour of being speared by his patron Fridamal: Hic spumantis apri iaculo post terga retorto Frontem et cum geminis naribus ora feris. Ante ictum subita prostrate est bellua morte, Cui prius extingui quam cecidisse fuit. Iussit fata manus telo, nec vulnera sensit 1 Alexander Riese, ed., Anthologia Latina, sive Poesis Latinae Supplementum: I: Libri Salmasiani Aliorumque Carmina (Lepizig, 1894), p. 211 (No. 292). Based on Codex Salmasianus, Bibliothèque Nationale, Codex Parisinus Latinus 10318, which is copied from a now-lost archetype of 534. Text here taken from and translation based upon Morris Rosenblum, ed. and trans., Luxorius: A Latin Poet among the Vandals (New York and London, 1961), pp. 114-15. 2 Rosenblum, Luxorius, p. 181 (n. 6.7). Gregory Hays, ‘“Romuleis Libicisque Litteris”: Fulgentius and the “Vandal Renaissance”’, Vandals, Romans, and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa, ed. Andrew H. Merrills (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 101-32 (esp. 112-14). 3 Rosenblum, Luxorius, pp. 39-42 (esp. 40). 1