Twice ToldValerius Maximus 1.8 ext. 19: Livy's serpent at the Bagrada
- Language
- Latin
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 18 October 2026
Transcribed from pp. 56 to 57 of Kempf’s edition. The asterisk is Kempf’s mark of a gap in the manuscripts after “flumen” (his apparatus: the manuscripts have “magn” and a marginal “serp”; later copyists added “anguem”, and Halm would supply “serpentem” from the first line). Kempf prints “cuore” where sense and every other text have “cruore” (blood); the misprint is kept here and marked [sic], and the translation reads “cruore”.
Quae quia supra usitatam rationem excedentia attigimus, serpentis quoque a T. Liuio curiose pariter ac facunde relatae fiat mentio: is enim ait in Africa apud Bagradam flumen * tantae magnitudinis fuisse, ut Atilii Reguli exercitum usu amnis prohiberet, multisque militibus ingenti ore correptis, conpluribus caudae uoluminibus elisis, cum telorum iactu perforari nequiret, ad ultimum ballistarum tormentis undique petitam silicum crebris et ponderosis uerberibus procubuisse omnibusque et cohortibus et legionibus ipsa Karthagine uisam terribiliorem, atque etiam cuore [sic, for cruore] suo gurgitibus inbutis corporisque iacentis pestifero adflatu uicina regione polluta Romana inde summouisse castra. adicit beluae corium centum et uiginti pedum in urbem missum.
Translation
Since I have touched on things that go beyond the usual order of nature, the serpent too deserves a mention, which Titus Livy reports with both care and eloquence. He says that in Africa, at the river Bagrada, a [gap in the text] was so huge that it kept the army of Atilius Regulus from using the stream. It seized many soldiers in its enormous mouth and crushed several in the coils of its tail. Thrown weapons could not pierce it. At last it was attacked from every side by the ballistae, and went down under the frequent, heavy blows of flint stones. It looked more terrible to all the cohorts and legions than Carthage itself. Even its own blood stained the pools, and the deadly breath of its lying body polluted the neighbouring country, so that it drove the Roman camp away from there. He adds that the beast’s skin, a hundred and twenty feet long, was sent to the city.
Notes
Valerius names Livy as his source, and Livy’s Book 18, where the story would stand, is lost; the summary of that book (Periocha 18) says only that Regulus killed a serpent of portentous size with great loss of soldiers. Stothers (2004, p. 225) notes that Valerius mentions tail coils to show that the creature was a snake.
The subject of the last clause is not marked in the Latin (“Romana inde summouisse castra”). We read it as the serpent, by its blood and breath, driving the Roman camp from the place. The skin is 120 feet long, as in Gellius and Orosius; no temple and no jaws are mentioned.