Panthera Tigris

Not long ago, we acquired our own aqvila legionis - an eagle, the most important sign, standard or emblem of every Roman legion (we'll write sth about it in one of our next posts).

So we were looking for an animal skin for a pelt for our aqvilifer (an eagle bearer)



We have had two bears already, aquired from the zoo, so we decided that the next skin ought to be a skin of a big cat.
Not an easy task because all big cats are species protected under CITES and the sale of their skins is restricted by international and domestic law.
But there was no other choice. Historical sources features only the pelts of bears (a frontier stella and a passus from Vegetius), which of course are also protected animals, and of big cats (a lot of reliefs, mostly from Trajan's column).
What kind of big cats? We don't know exactly. Fur patterns are not preserved on reliefs. Sometimes pelts have small manes - it may point to an Asiatic male lion or a young African male lion. Sometimes they don't. Thus, sculptors could have portraited a lioness, a tiger, a leopard or other pantherae.

Our primary and ambitious choice was not a lion or a leopard, but a truly apex predator, the fiercest and biggest of them all, a real RAPAX - a TIGER. A beast majestic and unique enough to match the importance of an aqvilifer.

We believe that no other legion in the world has such a pelt (oh, those reenactment vanity fairs ;)). And, what is most important, we could get a tiger's skin from a befriended zoo. As it should be, there is no other legal source of the parts of protected animals as tigers under CITES. You cannot legalize a skin of an animal killed by filthy poachers or contrabanda. Therefore, the one and only allowed way is to acquire a skin of a tiger that died of natural causes at a zoo.

That plan has prompted a question: would it be historically correct to wear a skin of a tiger, an animal from the Far East, within the borders of the Roman Empire during 1st century A.D.? After a short research we have found a definite answer: yes!

First of all, the historical tiger range reached the borders of the Roman Empire in its Asiatic parts. Tigers have still lived in Eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and Northern Mesopotamia even by the late 19th century A.D. So the Romans did not need to import them for games and menageries. That was their "home" animal.



There are dozens of Roman mosaics and paintings showing tigers, e.g. this Sicilian mosaic of a tame or captured tigress or this beautiful and dramatic scene from Hadrian's villa and mosaics from Lod in Israel.

As you can see, even Hollywood sometimes shows something historically correct in its super movies ;)

We hope to present our tiger in the spring when it will be prepared and ready to march at the head of the XXI Rapax together with the aqvila.

PS:
We have got TWO! :))))