The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 · the Elder Pliny
CHAP. 20.—HISTORICAL ANECDOTES CONNECTED WITH THE FIG.
Thus did this fig effect that which neither Trebia nor Thrasimenus, not Cannæ itself, graced with the entombment of the Roman renown, not the Punic camp entrenched within three miles of the city, not even the disgrace of seeing Hannibal riding up to the Colline Gate, could suggest the means of accomplishing. It was left for a fig, in the hand of Cato, to show how near was Carthage to the gates of Rome! In the Forum even, and in the very midst of the Comitium[1902] of Rome, a fig-tree is carefully cultivated, in memory of the consecration which took place on the occasion of a thunderbolt[1903] which once fell on that spot; and still more, as a memorial of the fig-tree which in former days overshadowed Romulus and Remus, the founders of our empire, in the Lupercal Cave. This tree received the name of “ruminalis,” from the circumstance that under it the wolf was found giving the breast—_rumis_ it was called in those days—to the two infants. A group in bronze was afterwards erected to consecrate the remembrance of this miraculous event, as, through the agency of Attus Navius the augur, the tree itself had passed spontaneously from its original locality[1904] to the Comitium in the Forum. And not without some direful presage is it that that tree has withered away, though, thanks to the care of the priesthood, it has been since replaced.[1905]
There was another fig-tree also, before the temple of Saturn,[1906] which was removed on the occasion of a sacrifice made by the Vestal Virgins, it being found that its roots were gradually undermining the statue of the god Silvanus. Another one, accidentally planted there, flourished in the middle of the Forum,[1907] upon the very spot, too, in which, when from a direful presage it had been foreboded that the growing empire was about to sink to its very foundations, Curtius, at the price of an inestimable treasure—in other words, by the sacrifice of such unbounded virtue and piety—redeemed his country by a glorious death. By a like accident, too, a vine and an olive-tree have sprung up in the same spot,[1908] which have ever since been carefully tended by the populace for the agreeable shade which they afford. The altar that once stood there was afterwards removed by order of the deified Julius Cæsar, upon the occasion of the last spectacle of gladiatorial combats[1909] which he gave in the Forum.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.