Seps

Also Known As: Greek σήψ, from the verb for rotting or putrefying; Latin seps; spelled serps by Thomas of Cantimpré and Ceps in the English Bartholomaeus Anglicus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Its venom dissolves the bones along with the flesh, so that a victim leaves no body behind.
Role in Mythos: One of the Libyan serpents bred from Medusa’s blood that attack Cato’s army in Lucan’s Civil War, and afterwards a fixed entry in the snake lists of the medieval encyclopedias and bestiaries.
Relation to Humans: It strikes people who have not seen it, taking the colour of the ground it lies on until a foot or a hand comes close. Every writer who mentions it treats the bite as fatal, and Lucan makes it the one snake that robs its victim of a corpse.

A Roman soldier named Sabellus felt something fasten on his shin, a snake so small it hardly counted as a weight. He tore it off and pinned it to the sand with his javelin. For the space of a breath, that was the whole incident.

Then the wound began to spread. The flesh around the puncture fell away until bone showed pale in the middle of his leg, and the bare patch kept widening. Muscle and sinew ran into liquid. The limbs went, then the membranes that hold the organs in place, then the organs, all of it loosening and soaking down into the sand. Lucan, who told the story in the ninth book of his poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, likened it to snow running in a warm south wind and to wax in the sun, and then made the point that mattered to him. A pyre leaves bones. The seps did not. Among all the pests of Africa, he told the snake, the others take a man’s life, and you alone take the corpse.

The march was Cato’s. After Pompey’s defeat, the younger Cato led what was left of the republican army on foot across the Libyan desert, and Lucan gave a long stretch of the book to what that country did to them. The soldiers die one at a time, each to a different serpent with its own specialised method: Aulus to the dipsas, Nasidius to the prester, Tullus to the haemorrhois, Paulus to the jaculus, Murrus to the basilisk. Sabellus drew the seps.

Lucan explains why Libya teems. Perseus, flying home with the Gorgon’s severed head, crossed the empty desert, and the blood that dripped from Medusa’s neck fell on the sand and bred snakes. In the roll call that follows, the seps receives a single line and a single adjective, tabificus, the wasting seps that dissolves the bones with the body. Nicander of Colophon, writing some two centuries before Lucan, needed no such origin. He simply put the seps in the snow-capped crags of Mount Othrys in Thessaly, among hollow gullies, rough rock and wooded scarps, and called it thirst-provoking, which is not at all what Lucan’s seps does to a man.

Every account starts with its size. After that, the Greek writers agree on colour. Nicander says its hue is never one hue, and that it always takes on the colour of the place where it has made its hole. The ones that live on stony ground and among cairns, he adds, are smaller still, but fierce and quick to anger, and their bite never fails. Elsewhere in the same poem he warns his reader off the seps, which resembles the squat lizards. Aelian, writing in the third century AD, says it changes the colour of its body to match the places it passes through, and he looked closely at the mouth. The four fangs of the lower jaw are hollow, each covered by a membrane like a veil that conceals the opening. When it strikes, the venom runs out through these ducts, the wound festers at once, and death follows very soon. The picture that emerges is short, low and lizard-built, the exact grey or buff of the stone behind it.

On a Thessalian hillside, among the loose stones of a cairn, a seps lies pressed against rock the same colour as its back. The rock holds the day’s warmth long after the sun has gone off it. A shepherd’s foot comes down a hand’s breadth away, sends a little grit sliding, and moves on, and nothing on the hillside stirs.

The Latin writers carried it forward with almost no additions. Solinus gave it one clause: the sting of the seps is followed by putrefaction. Isidore of Seville gave it one sentence in the Etymologies, a small snake that consumes with its venom not only the body but the bones, and the bestiaries copied that sentence word for word. The Rochester Bestiary, made in England around 1230, has it in Isidore’s Latin. Thomas of Cantimpré, spelling it serps and naming Solinus as his authority, called it small in body but enormous and evil in its malice, consuming flesh and bones together. Gerald of Wales placed it in the eastern lands and called it a little reptile whose malignity makes up for its size. Jacques de Vitry, writing of the Holy Land, said its venom inflames flesh and bones. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, in the Elizabethan English of Stephen Batman, spelled it Ceps and made it an adder that slays a man and drives him mad, so that he melts away altogether, and then quoted Lucan’s Latin line outright. It is a small snake with one terrible property. Nobody needed to give it another.

The poets never let it go. In 1820 Shelley reached for it in Prometheus Unbound, where the falling Jupiter feels his whole being dissolve, like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw into a dew with poison.

Everything the seps can do lives in the venom. It has no great size, no coils worth the name, no gaze and no breath. What it has is a bite that keeps working after the killing is done, and a colour that lets it be touched before it is seen. The camouflage is not decoration. It is how the animal gets close enough to matter.

Its limits are just as plain. Sabellus pulled it away with his bare hand and killed it with one thrust, and it died like any small snake pinned to hot ground. It cannot pursue. It has to be trodden on, brushed against or lain down beside. And Libya held a counter to its kind. Later in the march Lucan brings on the Psylli, a desert people immune to snakebite, who tested their newborn children against asps to prove their lineage. They ringed Cato’s camp with chanting and with fires of strong-smelling wood, and when a man was bitten they marked the wound with their spittle, sang over it, and if the song failed, sucked the venom out and spat it on the ground. They came too late for Sabellus. There was nothing of him left to treat.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a seps in mythology?

The seps is a small venomous snake of Greek and Roman tradition whose bite was said to dissolve bone as well as flesh. It appears in Nicander’s Theriaca, in Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals and, most famously, in the ninth book of Lucan’s Civil War. Medieval writers from Isidore of Seville onward repeated its one defining property in their encyclopedias and bestiaries.

What happens to someone bitten by a seps?

In Lucan’s account, the soldier Sabellus is bitten on the shin and his flesh, sinew, limbs and organs dissolve into liquid until nothing of his body is left. Lucan compares it to snow melting in a warm wind and to wax in the sun. He adds that fire leaves bones behind, but the seps takes the corpse as well as the life.

What did the seps look like?

Ancient writers describe the seps as small and able to change its colour to match the ground it lies on or passes over. Aelian says it had four hollow fangs in the lower jaw, each hidden under a thin membrane that lets the venom out when it strikes. Nicander compares it to a squat lizard rather than to an ordinary snake.

Where did the seps come from?

Lucan says the seps and the other serpents of Libya were born from Medusa’s blood. Perseus flew over the Libyan desert carrying the Gorgon’s severed head, and where the blood dripped onto the sand it bred snakes. Nicander, writing earlier, places the seps on Mount Othrys in Thessaly and gives it no origin story.

Could a seps bite be cured?

No cure saved Sabellus, the seps victim in Lucan’s poem, who dissolved within moments of being bitten. Lucan does describe the Psylli, a Libyan people immune to snakebite, who later treated Cato’s soldiers by chanting over their wounds and sucking out the venom. They arrived too late to help Sabellus.