184 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT
ary
with its trunk and whirled him aloft, but the soldier did not lose his
presence of mind, and drawing his short, sharp sword, struck at the
encircling trunk, inflicting such a painful wound that the animal
released him and fled, trumpeting wildly.*
The
historic city of Catania in Sicily counts as one of its greatest
adornments La Fontana dell ' Elefante,! a beautiful sculptural work
placed in the plaza before the cathedral. The splendidly modelled
figure of an elephant supports a lofty shaft, and the design suggests
the elephant-borne obelisk erected in Papal Rome in the sixteenth
century. The proximity of Sicily to ancient Carthage, and the
Phoenician settlements on the island in the era of Carthaginian
prosperity, made the elephant a familiar though dreaded figure for the
Sicilian of ancient times, and the Catanian sculpture may be regarded
as a distant echo of Grseco-Roman tradition.
The
rare and interesting old treatise "De Proprietatibus Rerum," by the
English ecclesiastic, Bartolomseus Anglicus, who flourished toward the
middle of the thirteenth Century and was for some years a professor of
theology in the famous University of Paris, the great resort of the
scholars of this period, has a chapter on the elephant, in which the
learned author has gathered together all thè data available from the
works of still older writers. From them he repeats the traditional view
as to the great age to which some of these animals may attain, putting
this at three centuries. Their use in war by the Medes and Persians is
touched upon, and -the custom of placing wooden turrets on their backs
in which were stationed men-at-arms. The queer fancy that the elephant
had a particular dread of the mouse is also chroni-
"Cœsaris, op. cit., 83,84,86.
fThe
great Spanish Encyclopedia now being published in Barcelona figures
this interesting elephant monument twice, once in the article elefante in Vol. XIX, p. 702, and again in the article Catania, Vol. XII, p. 479.
