Did the ancient Romans hunt whales?

There’s an ancient GrecoRoman poem that tells the tale of brave fishermen who harpooned a sea monster. The men reeled it in from their rowboats near the shore and hauled it onto the beach.

The text, dated to the second or third century, describes one onlooker as beholding the “tremendous toil of the men in this warfare of the sea.” But was this “sea monster,” or “cetus” in Latin, actually a whale?

A study published this month provides the first direct evidence that two whale species, the grey whale and the North Atlantic right whale, may have lived near Mediterranean shores some 2,000 years ago. Today these whales are not found in the Mediterranean Sea. The finding, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, expands the historical range of the whale species and suggests they once roamed the same waters as the ancient Romans.

The authors also believe the finding could mean that the Ro- mans, who had more than 200 fish processing plants on the European and African coasts of the western Mediterranean, may have conducted industrialscale whaling.

Rodrigues and her colleagues obtained 10 suspected whale bones collected from sites in Spain and Morocco near the Strait of Gibraltar.

The team genetically analyzed the DNA from the bones and found that two belonged to grey whales and three belonged to right whales.

Most of the other bones be- longed to creatures that live in the Mediterranean today, such as a fin whale, a sperm whale, a long-finned pilot whale and a dolphin. Unexpectedly, one belonged to an African elephant.

Unlike the other whale species discovered during the research, grey whales and North Atlantic right whales are known to swim near the shoreline to reproduce and birth their calves, which could have made them targets for Roman hunters.