Twice ToldPliny the Elder, Natural History 8.37, on the serpent of the Bagrada
- Language
- Latin
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 18 October 2026
The passage opens with Pliny’s account of Indian and Pontic serpents (the last words of section 36 and all of section 37 are on pp. 89 to 90). The text is transcribed from the page images of Mayhoff’s Teubner edition, with his capitals and punctuation; the apparatus under the text (variant readings, for example “haustu” against “haustus”, and “suctu” as Schneider’s correction) is not reproduced. Perseus prints the same words in lower case.
Megasthenes scribit in India serpentes in tantam magnitudinem adolescere, ut solidos hauriant cervos taurosque, Metrodorus circa Rhyndacum amnem in Ponto, supervolantes ut quamvis alte perniciterque alites haustu raptas absorbeant. nota est in Punicis bellis ad flumen Bagradam a Regulo imperatore ballistis tormentisque, ut oppidum aliquod, expugnata serpens CXX pedum longitudinis; pellis eius maxillaeque usque ad bellum Numantinum duravere Romae in templo. faciunt his fidem in Italia appellatae bovae in tantam amplitudinem exeuntes, ut Divo Claudio principe occisae in Vaticano solidus in alvo spectatus sit infans. aluntur primo bubuli lactis suctu, unde nomen traxere.
Translation
Megasthenes writes that in India serpents grow so large that they swallow whole stags and bulls; Metrodorus, that around the river Rhyndacus in Pontus they suck in and swallow birds flying overhead, however high and fast. Well known is the serpent of a hundred and twenty feet that, in the Punic wars at the river Bagrada, was stormed by the general Regulus with ballistae and siege engines, as if it were a town. Its skin and jaws lasted at Rome, in a temple, until the Numantine war. The boas, as they are called, in Italy lend these stories credit: they grow so big that when one was killed on the Vatican hill in the reign of the deified Claudius, a whole child was seen in its belly. They are fed at first by sucking cow’s milk, and that is where they got their name.
Notes
Pliny gives no source for the serpent and no temple. “Nota est” means “is well known”; the tradition is presented as common knowledge, with Megasthenes and Metrodorus named only for the Indian and Pontic serpents before it. The verb “expugnata” is the one used for storming a town, and “ut oppidum aliquod” says the serpent was attacked like a town. The Bohn translation by Bostock and Riley (1855), the one the leads file points to, renders it “taken … being besieged, like a fortress”; ours follows the Latin more closely.
“Duravere” is past tense: by the time Pliny wrote, the skin and jaws were gone, and he dates their end only by the war at Numantia, which ended in 133 BC (Stothers 2004, p. 224). Pliny does not say he saw them or that anyone he knew did.
In Mayhoff’s numbering this is book 8, section 37. The Bohn translation on Perseus numbers the same text as book 8, chapter 14, and Perseus’s own Latin page calls it chapter 16.