The Tentacled Turncoat of Carthage

Right, so let’s talk about the Second Punic War. Forget everything you learned from that tweed-wearing gasbag Plinkett. The real story isn’t about Hannibal and his fancy-ass elephants, it’s about a glutinous Carthaginian senator named Bomilcar the Moist—a man whose primary contribution to history was being incredibly, stupendously bad at keeping his pets secure.

Now, Bomilcar, like many a powerful man with a flaccid legacy, was into some weird shit. The *Annales Turgentibus*—a primary source I definitely didn’t just invent—claims he kept a highly intelligent octopus named Paulus in a giant amphora in his study. He’d allegedly “trained” it for espionage, which in Bomilcar’s case probably meant teaching it to fetch him grapes or fondle his mistresses. But Paulus was smarter than his lard-assed owner. He’d learned to read basic Punic by watching Bomilcar trace invasion routes on wax tablets, because what the fuck else is an octopus gonna do all day?

One night, during a particularly tedious senate banquet that devolved into a drunken orgy (as they do), Paulus made a break for it. Squeezed his gelatinous ass through a sewage grate and flopped right into the Mediterranean. Now, your boring-ass historians will tell you this is impossible, but fuck ‘em. Paulus was on a mission, probably just trying to get laid, and he swam his eight-limbed body all the way to a Roman fishing village in Sicily. There, he was promptly netted by a fishmonger named Garus—a simple man whose biggest ambition was to not die of dysentery.

As Garus was about to introduce Paulus to the business end of a meat cleaver, the octopus—in a last-ditch, “please-don’t-turn-me-into-calamari” plea—started frantically arranging seashells on the dock. He wasn’t writing a message, the poor bastard was just recreating the last thing he saw: Bomilcar’s top-secret schematics for the weakest points in Carthage’s walls. Garus, thinking the squid was possessed, dragged a local magistrate over. The magistrate, who’d served in the first war, nearly shit his toga. This wasn’t divine madness; this was the military equivalent of a nude selfie from the enemy’s queen.