Carrying barbed lances, the fishermen sailed into the Mediterranean, “praying to the blessed gods . . . that they may capture the dread monster”. Sighting their quarry, they launched harpoons — each attached to a float made of animal hide. The “monster” dived but could not pull down the floats.
Eventually, wrote Oppian, the second century poet, “drunk with pain his fierce heart is bent with weariness”. That was when they attacked and “the infinite water boils with the blood of the beast”.
Was this how two of the Mediterranean’s whale species became extinct? Scientists have uncovered the bones of right and grey whales, neither of which were thought to exist in that region, at a Roman fish processing plant.
Conventionally, archaeologists believe that whale