In the summer of 102 BCE, Theutobochus led portions of the migrating tribes, made up of the Teutones, Ambones, part of the Cimbri, and one the revolting Swiss tribes, toward the route that Hannibal had used to cross the Alps 120 years earlier. This route led from the Rhône River, up the valley of the Isere, and over one of several possible passes to enter the Po valley from the northwest. Marius anticipated this route and had placed his army in a well-fortified camp at the junction of the Rhône and Isere Rivers, not far from where the Marquis Langon would have his lands seventeen centuries later. Theutobochus led his warriors in unsuccessful attacks against Marius’s defenses for three consecutive days. On the fourth day, rather than continue the attacks, Theutobochus broke off and led his people south hoping to take the coastal road along the Riviera to invade the Po valley from the Southwest. Marius waited until the entire horde was on the road, then broke camp and followed them. The Romans attacked and beat the barbarian rear guard and, full of confidence, raced past the main body of the horde to build a new fortified camp on high ground across the coastal road at the Roman settlement of Aquae Sextiae near the modern city of Marseilles. Once again Marius let Theutobochus attack his prepared position, this time uphill, under the unforgiving Mediterranean sun. Late in the day, the Romans counter-attacked, routing the northerners and killing tens of thousands. The fate of Theutobochus’s is unclear. Orosius says he was killed in the battle. Florus says he was taken alive to Rome for Marius’s triumphal parade, where, “being a man of extraordinary stature, he towered above the trophies of his defeat.” According to Roman tradition, he would have been executed in Rome immediately afterward.
How Theutobochus became identified with Marquis Langon’s giant’s bones is a bit of an historical mystery that has never been solved. Theutobochus’s story was fairly well known in France at the time. Both Orosius and Florus had been translated into common French several times since the advent of printing in the fifteenth century. Ten days after the discovery of the bones, Mazurier made a notarized statement about the discovery to Guillaume Assalin, the local constable. Mazurier gave the constable a very detailed description of the bones, including the skull which he had measured in place before the unsuccessful attempt to lift it out of the pit. Along with this description, Mazurier added two details. He claimed the workers found the bones inside a brick sepulcher thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight feet high. On the front of it, he claimed, was a gray stone engraved with the words “Theutobochus Rex.” No trace of the tomb or the stone has ever turned up. He also described the silver medals saying they had the image of Marius on one side and the letters MA on the other.
In the four hundred years since, historians have generally regarded Mazurier as a charlatan who invented the Theutobochus story from whole cloth. If there was a fraud, Mazurier wasn’t alone in committing it. It’s highly unlikely that, of Marquis Langon, constable Assalin, and the notary, none of them was ever curious enough to look into the hole in the ground and confirm what Mazurier claimed. They would have known whether or not the tomb Mazurier described, or something like it, really existed. When critics began to attack Mazurier, all of these men were silent or unavailable for comment. Though none of them stepped forward to support him, none of them stepped forward to denounce him either. Although Theutobochus’s last battle took place at Aix near Marseilles, there was a local tradition in Dauphiné that battle took place on the stream that passes below the Castle Langon near where the earlier battles between Marius and Theutobochus had happened. The French paleontologist Léonard Ginsburg pointed out in the 1980s that the soil where the workers dug has a brick-like color and often breaks in straight lines. He believes that we should give Mazurier the benefit of the doubt and allow that his imagination caused him to see bricks and Roman letters where there were none and that his enthusiasm was great enough to convince the others to see the same.
We likely will never know the full truth of the discovery. What we do know is that the bones were real. For that, we should thank Mazurier rather than condemn him. The usual fate of giants’ bones in Medieval and Renaissance Europe was for them to be put on display at the local church or town hall as evidence of God’s majesty and to be brought out for special occasions until they fell to pieces. Alternatively, they might be picked up by a wealthy collector with an interest in the new natural philosophy, such as Marshal Lesdiguieres, and displayed in his cabinet of curiosities, also until they fell to pieces. Had either of these been the case, Langon’s bones would have vanished from history. Thanks to Mazurier’s showmanship, they did not. Mazurier brought the bones to the attention of a literate audience, who examined, argued over, and wrote about them. What the learned men of France had to say about the bones gives us an excellent view into how they viewed the whole concept of fossils at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.
On June 18, 1613, Mazurier arrived in Paris with the bones. He set up a tent with a large sign featuring a drawing of the bones and charged the curious a small fee to see the real thing. The show was a huge success. In two months, Tissot’s pamphlet ran through three more printings to meet popular demand. The show eventually attracted the attention of the court, as anticipated, and Mazurier received notice that the king would like to have the bones sent to Fontainebleau Palace so that he could look at them. King Louis XIII was twelve years old at the time. What twelve-year-old with unlimited power would not have “asked” to have them sent over? The bones were laid out in the chambers of the queen mother and regent, Marie di Medici. On seeing them, Louis asked a courtier if such giants had ever really existed. Yes, the courtier replied, imagine what a great army such men would make. The king was not enthusiastic about the idea; they would soon eat the country clean, he commented. By all appearances, the court enjoyed the exhibition. The king gave Mazurier a reward for the show, but even he had doubts about the Theutobochus part of the story. Two weeks after the viewing, the king’s secretary wrote to Langon requesting the rest of the bones and some parts of the tomb, including the gray stone inscribed with Theutobochus’s name, be sent to the court. Four days after that, Mazurier packed up, slipped out of town, and took the bones on a tour of northern France, England, and Flanders. He was last seen taking the bones to Germany. At least one other request for evidence of the tomb was sent from the court to Langon. Langon was away on business when both letters arrived. He stayed away for a year and never responded to the requests for additional evidence. Eventually, the king lost interest and the requests ceased.
Even though Mazurier and the bones had left Paris, people outside the court continued to talk about them for years and debate whether they were really the bones of a giant, and if it was a giant, whether that giant was Theutobochus, and whether they were really bones at all and not natural productions that just happened to look like bones. In late October, a pamphlet entitled Gygantosteologie, ou Discours des os d’un Géant (Gygantosteologie, or Speech on the Bones of a Giant) appeared in Paris. The author was Nicolas Habicot, a member of the barber-surgeon’s guild, the same guild as Mazurier. Habicot defended Mazurier’s claim that the bones were those of a human giant and specifically those of Theutobochus. Habicot’s pamphlet had three parts. First, he repeated Tissot’s story. Second, he explained how his own medical examination of the bones convinced him that these were the real remains of a human giant. Third, he made a more general argument for the historical existence of giants. Habicot was able to add many facts about the discovery that were not in Tissot’s pamphlet and that he could only have learned by talking to Mazurier, most importantly the measurements of the lost skull. Responding to the suggestion that bones might be those of some large animal such as a whale or elephant, Habicot explains that this is not possible. Man, he writes, possesses a soul as well as other unique attributes such as the bones in our hands that allow us make all manner of useful tools and the heels on our feet that allow us to walk upright. That last was very important to him. Two of the most identifiable bones Mazurier brought to Paris were a heel
and and ankle bone. He admits he has never seen an elephant, but he knows it to be true that they do not possess these traits. Moving from the specific to the general, he delivers a passionate argument for the historical existence of giants. In this, he brings together examples from the Bible, classical mythology, history, chivalric poetry, and modern rumors, ultimately building an argument that amounts to little more than “so many eminent writers couldn’t all be wrong, could they?”
Habicot and the king’s courtier were not out of the mainstream in believing in the historical existence of whole nations of giants as opposed to occasional men of unusual height. The belief that giants had once walked the earth and tormented our ancestors was once found in mythologies all over the world. I won’t go so far as to say the belief was universal—anthropologists hate it when you say anything is universal—but it was very common. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the literate elite of Europe was divided over the question of giants. Those challenging the idea had to go against traditions that pre-dated Christianity. In the thirteenth century BCE all the major Mediterranean civilizations underwent a simultaneous collapse. Historians argue passionately about the causes of this collapse, the sequence of events, and how bad it was in each region. Some areas, such as Greece, were plunged into a dark age that lasted almost five hundred years. When they returned to an urban, literate society, a great deal of their specific knowledge of the past had been lost, including their writing system. Surviving records were indecipherable. A new writing system had to be borrowed from the Phoenicians and modified to the Greek language. Events like the Trojan War had become legendary narratives in which gods and demigods participated beside mortal men and women. To Classical Greeks, the ruins of pre-collapse temples, fortresses, and palaces seemed impossibly large, the sort of thing that only men of gigantic stature could have built. This idea fit in well with the idea that mankind and the world in general were in decline. Hesiod, writing around 700 BCE, left the earliest, surviving, Greek account of the Ages of Man. From the nearly perfect world of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote that man declined into the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age (a slight improvement), and into his own age, the Iron Age. In each age, mankind had a shorter lifespan, worse health, smaller stature, and more strife as the world itself became worn out. Eventually, mankind will reach the Clay Age and everything will fizzle out altogether. Six hundred years later, the Roman poet Lucretius looked at the world and lamented “what we are witnessing is already in its decay: the Earth has lost the creative power of the past, animals no longer produce the gigantic size of those early days, the ground is no longer capable of spontaneous fertility.”
Fossils contributed this dismal world view. The Classical Greek world surrounding the Aegean Sea has a great number of bone beds filled with the remains of large mammals, animals much larger than any known to the Greeks. A large percentage of these bones are from mammoths and other proboscideans. By interpreting these bones as human, the Greeks found one more proof of the idea of eternal decay. Various bone beds became identified as the specific locations of famous battles between the gods and the Titans. The Greeks and later the Romans also identified certain bones as the remains of specific heroes and monsters. Herodotus wrote that a Spartan cavalryman found the bones of Orestes at Tegea. Pausinias reported that the remains of Theseus had been found at Skyros and those of Ajax at Mysia. When the Romans diverted the Orontes River in Syria, they were said to have found the coffin of a giant sixteen feet tall. An oracle told them that it was Orontes, a giant from India for whom the river was named. Pliny described the discovery of the bones of Orion, uncovered by an earthquake in Crete. They were forty-six cubits (sixty-nine feet) long. The stories of various discoveries came to be gathered into a standard canon that each subsequent writer repeated while adding new reports. The most comprehensive, and later the most influential, were those of Pliny and Pausinias.
The early Christians adopted the gloomy tradition of the decay of the world and the historical reality of giants and combined them with the Old Testament narratives: the fall from Edenic perfection and of giants who once oppressed God’s chosen people. Several of the early Church fathers wrote about the decline of mankind. The most important of these was St. Augustine. In The City of God, while dismissing the arguments of pagans, he writes:
They do not believe that the size of men’s bodies was larger then than now, though the most esteemed of their own poets, Virgil, asserts the same, when he speaks of that huge stone which had been fixed as a landmark, and which a strong man of those ancient times snatched up as he fought, and ran, and hurled, and cast it—
Scarce twelve strong men of later mould
That weight could on their necks uphold;
thus declaring his opinion that the earth then produced mightier men. And if in the more recent times, how much more in the ages before the world-renowned deluge? But the large size of the primitive human body is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchres, either through the wear of time or the violence of torrents or some accident, and in which bones of incredible size have been found or have rolled out. I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at Utica a man’s molar tooth of such a size, that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it. But that, I believe, belonged to some giant. For though the bodies of ordinary men were then larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature. And neither in our own age nor any other have there been altogether wanting instances of gigantic stature, though they may be few. The younger Pliny, a most learned man, maintains that the older the world becomes, the smaller will be the bodies of men. And he mentions that Homer in his poems often lamented the same decline; and this he does not laugh at as a poetical figment, but in his character of a recorder of natural wonders accepts it as historically true.
By the late Middle Ages, the narrative of the aging and loss of vitality of man and the world had acquired a standardized form supported by the familiar list of giants. The giants’ roll call still was not closed. Boccaccio reported on a discovery made in Sicily during his lifetime, though he was not present to witness it himself. In 1342, near Trepani, on the western end of the island, a group of workers, digging the foundation for a new house, uncovered a deep cave. They climbed in and found a great grotto where they saw the figure of a seated man of almost unimaginable size. In his hand, he held a staff as large as ship’s mast. According to their report, he was two hundred cubits tall (three hundred or four hundred feet, depending on your cubit). The workers hurried back to the village of Erice to share the story of their discovery. Soon, a crowd of three hundred people armed with torches and pitchforks marched to the worksite and entered the cave. Once inside the grotto, they paused, all frightened and awestruck except for one brave man who stepped forward and touched the giant’s staff. It disintegrated, leaving only dust and some iron pieces. He then touched the leg of the titan who also turned to dust leaving only three enormous teeth. The teeth were taken to the Church of the Annunciation where they were strung on a wire to be displayed. Boccaccio does not report what happened to the iron. We can safely assume that the local blacksmith took advantage of the free materials. There was some debate over the identity of the giant. Some thought he was Eryx, a legendary early king and founder of the village. Although a demigod himself, Eryx was killed in boxing match with his fellow demigod Hercules who had a bad habit of doing that sort of thing. The opposing and more popular idea was that he was the cyclops Polyphemus and that this was the very cave where he was blinded by Odysseus and his crew. In making that claim, they faced some competition. Over the years, a number of villages in Sicily had discovered a number of caves containing the bones of a number of giants and all had proclaimed their giant to be Polyphemus. Classics scholars, then and now, believed that the Odyssey described an itinerary of real places around the central Mediterranean and that Sicily was the home of Polyphemus. Even the average Sicilian peasant knew this and was proud of
the history of their island. And if the local giant wasn’t Polyphemus, well, enough giants had been found that no one doubted that the island had once been home to a whole race of them.
Almost six hundred years later, the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel wondered if there was more to the story than that. In 1862, Hugh Falconer, one of the first great authorities on the diversity of extinct proboscideans, had presented a paper on the discovery of the remains of a dwarf elephant on the island of Malta. Falconer named it Elephas melitensis. In the years after that, other dwarfed species were found on most of the major Mediterranean islands. All of these species, except one, are believed to descended from Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the straight-tusked elephant. The exception is a dwarf mammoth that lived on Sardinia. Sicily is especially rich in these fossils, having been home to three different species of dwarfed elephants at different times. Abel thought the skeletons explained the origin of the cyclops myth. Most land mammals share a basic skeletal structure, but proboscideans and humans have some very specific resemblances. The most obvious in the limbs. Both have long straight limbs with short ankles or wrists and five digits. Laying the disarticulated bones of the body of a proboscidean out on the ground, it’s easy to form something that looks like an enormous, stocky human. Then comes the problem of the skull. Abel pointed out that the most distinguishing feature of a proboscidean skull—if the tusks are missing—is a huge hole in the middle of the face. This is the nasal cavity, with all of the attachments for the trunk. The true eye sockets are on the sides of the skull and almost unnoticeable. This would make it very easy for an awestruck discoverer to mistake the nasal cavity for the socket of a single huge eye. Other differences in the skulls can be explained by the fact that giants are, by definition, monsters. For example, even if the tusks remain, on Elephas melitensis they are very small and can be interpreted as fangs. Finally, add to this the tendency of probosciean skulls to fall apart and the fact that the Greeks didn’t encounter elephants until the time of Alexander and you have all of the ingredients necessary to construct a race of one-eyed giants from bones.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 2
