CHAP. 20.—HISTORICAL ANECDOTES CONNECTED WITH THE FIG.
1 The mention by Cato of the variety which bears the name
of the African fig, strongly recalls to my mind a remarkable
fact connected with it and the country from which it takes
its name.
Burning with a mortal hatred to Carthage, anxious, too, for the
safety of his posterity, and exclaiming at every sitting of the
senate that Carthage must be destroyed, Cato one day brought
with him into the Senate-house a ripe fig, the produce of that
country. Exhibiting it to the assembled senators, "I ask you,"
said he, "when, do you suppose, this fruit was plucked from the
tree?" All being of opinion that it had been but lately gathered,
—Know then," was his reply, "that this fig was plucked at
Carthage but the day before yesterday
2—so near is the enemy
to our walls." It was immediately after this occurrence that
the third Punic war commenced, in which Carthage was
destroyed, though Cato had breathed his last, the year after this
event. In this trait which are we the most to admire? was it
ingenuity
3 and foresight on his part, or was it an accident that
was thus aptly turned to advantage? which, too, is the most
surprising, the extraordinary quickness of the passage which
must have been made, or the bold daring of the man? The
thing, however, that is the most astonishing of all—indeed, I
can conceive nothing more truly marvellous—is the fact that a
city thus mighty, the rival of Rome for the sovereignty of the
world during a period of one hundred and twenty years, owed
its fall at last to an illustration drawn from a single 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
4
of Rome, a fig-tree is carefully cultivated, in memory of the
consecration which took place on the occasion of a thunderbolt
5 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
6 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.
7
There was another fig-tree also, before the temple of Saturn,
8 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,
9 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,
10 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
11 which
he gave in the Forum.