In the early 520s, little more than a decade before the Vandals of North Africa vanished in the wake of Count Belisarius’ invasion from Byzantium, the poet Luxorius of Carthage wrote a short jeu d’esprit which, in its sole surviving context, the Latin Anthology, is entitled Archilochium de apro mitissimo in triclinio nutrito (‘epigram on a most tame boar fed in the dining room’). The pig is described eating quietly among gilded colonnades. Unlike other swine, he refrains from muddying the furniture, and is called a beast no longer of Mars but of Venus. Luxorius’ subject belongs to a long Latin literary tradition in which wild animals such as lions and boars are hailed as tamed. This type of poetry is popular in the Latin Anthology, in which many aberrant or untypical humans are also described. Luxorius, a grammaticus (‘teacher of Latin’), was also styled vir clarissimus et spectabilis (‘most notable and respectable citizen’), possibly in recognition of a teaching award. Yet for all his learning, most poems in Luxorius’ Liber epigrammaton (‘book of epigrams’) dwell on the buzz of Carthage, on the people of parks and villas, and on parties, pantomimes and chariot-racing in the circus. His bestial novelties are part of this. Although the vogue for this type of writing began with Martial's epigrams in the reign of Domitian (AD 81–96), Luxorius’ poems show that nobody had tired of it in Carthage, second city of the western empire, four centuries later. In the poem before the one on the boar, Luxorius writes of a fish which fearlessly inhabits the lacunas regias ‘royal ponds’ (no. 5, line 1). Elsewhere he pictures birds who prefer the garden of a Vandal patron, Fridamal, to their old home by the sea (no. 16), as well as a monkey taught to sit on the back of a dog that it fears:

Here the beasts in question might prompt an uneasy comparison, perhaps one between half-Roman Hilderic of Carthage and his Vandal relatives.