Chap. 76.] THE SIZE OE TREES. 419 



martial powers had been in the habit of suspending their arms. 

 In the lapse of time the bark of this tree had closed, and 

 quite concealed these arms from view. Upon it, however, de- 

 pended the fate of the city ; for it had been announced by an 

 oracle, that when a tree there should bring forth arms, the fall 

 of the city would be close at hand : and such, in fact, was th« 

 result, when the tree was cut down and greaves and helmets 

 were found within the wood. 13 It is said that stones found 

 under these circumstances have the property of preventing 

 abortion. 



(40.) It is generally thought that the largest 14 tree that has 

 ever been seen, was the one that was exhibited at Rome, by 

 Tiberius Caesar, as an object of curiosity, upon the bridge of 

 the Naumachia previously mentioned. 15 It had been brought 

 thither along with other timber, and was preserved till the con- 

 struction of the amphitheatre of the Emperor Nero : 16 it was a 

 log of larch, one hundred and twenty feet long, and of an uniform 

 thickness of a couple of feet. From this fact we can form an 

 estimate of the original height of the tree ; indeed, measured 

 from top to bottom it must have been originally of a length 

 that is almost incredible. In our own time, too, in the porticos 

 of the Septa, 17 there was a log which had been left there by M. 

 Agrippa, as being equally an object of curiosity, having been 

 found too large to be used in the building of the vote office ls 

 there : it was twenty feet shorter than the one previously men- 

 tioned, and a foot-and-a-half in thickness. There was a fir, 

 too, that was particularly admired, when it formed the mast 

 of the ship, which brought from Egypt, by order of the Em- 

 peror Caius, 19 the obelisk 20 that was erected in the Vaticanian 

 Circus, with the four blocks of stone intended for its base. It 

 is beyond all doubt that there has been seen nothing on the sea 



13 He takes this account from Theophrastus, Hist. Plant. B. v. c. 3. 



14 The greatest height, Fee says, of any tree known, is that of the 

 palm, known as ceroxylon ; it sometimes attains a height of 250 feet. 

 Adanson speaks of the baobab as being 90 feet in circumference. 



15 In c, 74. 16 See B. six. c. 6. 



17 A spot enclosed in the Campus Martius, for the resort of the people 

 during the Comitia, and .when giving their votes. 



is " Diribitorium." This was the place, probably, where the diribitores 

 distributed to the citizens the tabellne, with which they voted in the 

 Comitia, or else, as "Wunder thinks, divided the votes, acting as " tellers,'' 

 in the modern phrase. 19 Caligula. 20 B. xxxvi. c. 14. 



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