When Rome’s Elephants Weep: Humane Monsters from Pompey’s Theater to Virgil’s Trojan Horse

This paper explores what can be gained by uncovering the shadows of a post-humanist ethics behind the accounts of Pompey’s elephant spectacle in 55 BCE. This paper begins by reviewing elephants’ monstrosity in the classical imagination, then closely reads the three principal sources for what transpired in Pompey's exhibition in light of natural philosophical views of elephants as uniquely humane, and the symbolic role of elephants in the socio-cultural vocabularies of the ancient Mediterranean, Near East, and, specifically, Rome's late Republic and early Empire, as symbols of kingship and apotheosis. By way of conclusion, this paper shows how he intertwining of these strands—natural philosophy and cultural symbolism—finds literary reflex in Augustan poetry, most especially in Virgil’s Trojan Horse. Pompey’s elephants are thus an example of how scholarship must more closely attend to the symbolic bestiaries that helped structure literary and political expression in Rome’s Republic and Principate