In the lives of the three Gordians, Roman emperors from 238 to 244, which form part of the Historia Augusta, the supposed author, Julius Capitolinus, describes a picture of `a remarkable wild-beast hunt' of Gordian I's, in which the animals included `stags of Britain, thirty wild horses, a hundred wild sheep [oves ferae] ...'. There is nothing to suggest that these last animals were other than what they appear to be, still less that they were giraffes. The Scriptores Historiae Augustae II, trans. D. Magie (Loeb, 1960), 384-5 (Tres Gordiani III. 7).