'Beast' in the sewer: Octopus folklore, border-transgression, and civic infrastructure in Rome

(Originally posted elsewhere on 14 August 2020.)

Fun stuff here. Comes from cultural studies/folklore analysis angle. Unsure if it would be embraced by a historian. Neat to think with/about, however. Ancient Roman folklore not anywhere near my wheelhouse, so I can’t corroborate; just in a mood for reading about monsters and urban infrastructure.

If I had to summarize the fun:

Beast creeps into the city through civilization’s magnificent sewer technology! Frontiers of the Empire transgressed by the octopus from beyond the edge of the world! It has an unquenchable thirst for the fish sauce in YOUR kitchen pantry!

Anyway, the following text all comes from the work of Camilla Asplund Ingemark.

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Present-day New York and the ancient Roman town of Puteoli have at least one thing in common: the sewer systems of both have been said to harbor rather unusual creatures. [...] The legend of the alligators in the sewers turned out to have older antecedents [...]. [T]he common core of the stories is the hostile intrusion of a wild beast, an octopus, into the urban environment [...].

The ancient legend is [...] preserved in two variants, both incroporated into the fabric of literary works on natural history. The first is included in the work of De natura animalium [...] by [...] Aelian (AD 165/170--230/235), [...] of Praeneste, Italy [...]. Written in Greek [...]. The second comes from a Latin sources [...] in the voluminous Naturalis historia [...] authored by Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24--79). [...] The ancient legend features a multifaceted and even contradictory animal [...]. The most basic trait is its liminality: the octopus often tends to straddle or transgress two cultural categories at once, fully belonging to neither [...]. The entire body of the octopus was a contradiction [...], with the numerous, fluidly flexible tentacles [...]. Aelian mentions craftiness [...], the octopus was a symbol of intelligence [...]. Its ability to change color in accordance with its surroundings was interpreted to be [...] cunning (Theognis; Plutarch ...). [...] In Aelian’s version the octopus emerged through the city sewers, whereas in Pliny’s it descends from the sky by climbing up and down a tree. [...] The octopus transgresses other categorical boundaries as well.

Aelian states that the octopus “despised and disdained the food from the sea and its pasture.” Its unquenchable desire for pickled fish or fish sauce, the much-loved garum of the Romans, means that it abandons its own natural, unprocessed food for a quintessentially human gastronomic product.

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Garum [...] provided the Roman diet with salt [...]. It was an important object of trade and Iberian garum was deemed to be some of the very best [...]. The Iberian merchants functioning as the human protagonists in Aelian’s variant of the legend [...] represent the archetypal garum merchants [...]. The octopus’ monstronsity [...] in Pliny’s [account] gains an added dimension because of the Roman cultural conceptions of the prodigious bounty of the Iberian waters. Many types of fish and marine animals, such as conger-eels, lampreys, trumpet-fish, purple-fish, cuttlefish, and octopuses were thought to attain giant proportions there. [...] [T]he waters around Italy had been depleted through excessive fishing at this time [...].

[T]he motif might also be related to the notion that Iberia was situated at an important geographical and conceptual boundary, which may have imbued it with liminal qualities. The Pillars of Hercules, i.e., Gibraltar, had long been considered the last stop before the vast innavigable ocean [...]. In the first century AD this idea of a boundary took on renewed relevance with the Roman conquest of large parts of the known world. Roman ambition needed a new purpose and the legendary, dangerous ocean beyond, which few had as yet penetrated [...] could provide the basis for dreams [...]. Thus, the monstrous octopus might be set to fit into the general paradigm [...] of the wonders at the edge of the known Earth. [...] In terms of social status, the benefits of producing and propagating such accounts were actually so great that Roman officials of the early Empire actively competed with each other in producing them [...]. Pliny himself captures this pervasive ambience of the marvelous nicely when he describes the story he is about to relates as “close to the wondrous” [...].

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Aelian’s account exploits the notion of the intruder entering the city through the sewers [...]. The most celebrated sewer was the Cloaca Maxima [...] [T]he sewers were counted among the greatest of all Roman accomplishments [...] Some went as far as to compare the city of Rome with Babylon and Thebes -- alluded to as “the hanging cities.” Rome similarly “hung above” the torrents of its magnificent sewer system (Pliny the Elder Naturalis historia ...; Dionysius of Halicarnassus Antiquitates Romanae ...’ cf. Strabo Geographia ...). The sewers furnished the foundations on which Roman greatest rested [...]. On the other hand, turning a sewer into a triumphal arch, as a great Roman proverb stated (Cicero Pro Placio 40.95), did not succeed in ridding the sewers of their more unpleasant connotations. [...] In terms of metaphor, the sewers were frequently associated with the less noble parts of the body: the guts (Cicero ibid; Varro ...). [...]

The fear of sewage clogging up the drain during floods and causing an intrusion of alien filth into the home is believed to have been a [...] factor in keeping private households disconnected from public sewers. [...] This anxiety about the sudden reemergence of dirt recurs in the legend narrated by Aelian [...]. The octopus strengthens its liminal position by transgressing not only conceptual boundaries between cultural categories, but also the physical boundaries between nature (the world of the sea) and culture (the sphere of the human city). By traveling between these spheres through the manmade sewers, the octopus metaphorically conquers the human domain by stealing through the underground structures of the city to the surface.

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Text by: Camilla Asplund Ingemark, “The Octopus in the Sewers: An Ancient Legend Analogue,” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 45, no. 2, pages 145-170 (May-August 2008). DOI: 10.2979/jfr.2008.45.2.145