Romans may have conducted industrial-scale whaling

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Ancient Romans Hunted ‘Sea Monsters.’ Were They Whales?

By Nicholas St. Fleur

• July 16, 2018

There’s an ancient Greco-Roman poem that tells the tale of brave fishermen who harpooned a sea monster. Once they hooked the beast, the men reeled it in from their rowboats near the shore and hauled it onto the beach. The text, which is dated to the second or third century, describes one onlooker as standing on a cliff and beholding the “tremendous toil of the men in this warfare of the sea.”

But was this “sea monster,” or “cetus” as it is called in Latin, actually a whale?

A study published Wednesday provides the first direct evidence that two whale species, the gray 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.