Looking through a coffee-table book on ancient Roman art (sigh yes, I was bored) today at Barnes & Noble inspired a couple of questions regarding the mythical story of Remus & Romulus suckling the she-wolf.
First of all, do female animals in the wild ever take pity (ugh, anthropomorphising) on an orphaned critter of another species and allow it to suckle?
Secondly, hypothetically: could lupine mammary secretions keep a human baby or two alive for any length of time?
Third: do babies automatically suck on any breast-shaped thing that’s put in their vicinity? IOW, could the boys (R&R, that is), in their infant states, have been able to differentiate the she-wolf’s breast from that of a human mother?
:rolleyes: The things one thinks of when one can’t get to sleep at 12:45 A.M. and the Melatonin hasn’t kicked in yet…
I am quite sure a human baby would suckle from the teat of a wolf but I am also quite sure the wolf would rather think the human baby would make a delicious meal for her and hers.
I can give some input on the second and third questions, anyway. In the days before baby care books with recipes for infant formulas (which in turn was before commercial breastmilk substitutes were available), if human milk was absolutely unavailable, adults would try to give a baby whatever other mammalian milk they could get their hands on - often that of a sheep, goat, or cow. (I had borrowed a book that claimed that this was normal at one time in Iceland, but I’ve returned the book to the lactation consultant I borrowed it from, and don’t remember any further details.) Anyway… these children had, not surprisingly, a horrible fatality rate, but some survived. So it’s not totally impossible that milk from a wolf could keep a human baby alive, if not exactly in optimum health.
In answer to question three, newborn babies will suckle on anything. “Vaguely breast-shaped” doesn’t even come into the equation here… they will happily suckle on adult fingers, their own fists, pacifiers and bottle nipples, none of which really resemble a breast. If a wolf’s teat got close enough to the infant’s mouth, yes, he would suckle. I don’t remember if R&R were supposed to be newborns or older, but even an older baby would likely attempt to suckle if he was hungry. (Semi-off-topic comment: although a nursing baby creates a powerful suction, he’s really not sucking. That’s why I used the word “suckling”.)
My Latin teacher told us that this story was actually perpetrated by the Greeks, long time rivals of the Romans. It was his understanding that the latin for wolf, lupus, is actually a word for “whore” in greek. In effect they were saying that the Romans were sons of whores!
Your Latin teacher was talking through his hat. The Romulus and Remus legend is entirely native (which is not to say that there is any degree of truth to it). It’s worth noting that “Romulus” is easily derived from “Roma”, which in turn is coincidentally similar to the Latin word for “teat” (ruma) so that the origin of the legend is fairly transparent. Additionally, making the not-implausible assumption that the initial “r” in “Remus” is due to association in the legend with Romulus, we get his name as [sup][/sup]iemus*, a version of “twin”, and myths about divine or semi-divine twins are found among almost all Indo-European-speaking peoples (cf. Castor and Pollux, the best-known example).
Livy did indeed claim that lupa was slang for “whore” (in archaic Latin, not Greek), and that the babes were suckled and raised by a prostitute, but Livy had the same knowledge of 8[sup]th[/sup] century BCE Latin slang that I do; viz., none whatsoever.
Every once in a while I see a news item about a domesticated dog or cat adopting an animal of another species and suckling it. I’m guessing this might also happen in the wild, but probably it is much more rare, and also less likely to be witnessed by us humans. But a wolf suckling a human baby? It seems highly unlikely.