BOOK XV. XX. 75-77 



fresh ; so he said, ' O well, it was picked the day 

 before yesterday at Carthage — so near is the enemy 

 to our walls ! * And they promptly embarked on the 

 third Punic war, in which Carthage rvas brought down, 

 although Cato had been taken from us the year after 

 the incident narrated. What should we chiefly 

 wonder at in this ? ingenuity or chance coincidence ? 

 rapidity of transit or manly force of character ? 

 The crowning marvel, which I for my part think 

 wonderful beyond parallel, is that so mighty a city, 

 which for one hundred and twenty years had com- 

 peted for the sovereignity of the world, was over- 

 thrown by the evidence of a single fruit — an achieve- 

 ment which not Trebbia or Trasimene, not Cannae 

 with the tomb of Ilome's glory, not the Carthaginian 

 camp pitched three miles from the city and Hannibal 

 in person riding up to the ColHne gate were able to 

 achieve : so much nearer did Cato bring Carthage to 

 us by means of a single fruit ! 



A fig-tree growing in the actual forum and Famouaflg- 

 meeting-place of Rome is worshipped as sacred be- Romt. 

 cause things struck by hghtning are buried there, 

 and still more as a memorial of the fig-tree under 

 which the nurse of Romulus and Remus first 

 sheltered those founders of the empire on the 

 Lupercal Hill — the tree that has been given the 

 name of Ruminalis, because it was beneath it ihat 

 the wolf was discovered giving her rumis (that was the 

 old word for breast) to the infants — a marvellous 

 occurrence commemorated in bronze close by, as 

 though the wolf had of her own accord passed across 

 the meeting-place while Attus Naevius was taking the 

 omens. And it is also a portent of some future event 

 when it withers away and then by the good offices of 



341 



