Vibius Sequester, De fluminibus: the entry for the Bagrada

Language: Latin
Read from: Alexander Riese (ed.), Geographi Latini minores (1878), p. 147, lines 12 to 13, in the list of rivers under B; scan leaf n198
Reading: transcribed from the page image
Translation: ours
Retrieved: 18 October 2026

The entry is one sentence in an alphabetical list of rivers, springs and lakes named in poets and historians. Riese’s apparatus has nothing on this line. The work is not dated here; nothing in the entry names a source.

Bagrada Africae iuxta oppidum Musti, ubi Regulus serpentem longum pedibus centum viginti exercitu adhibito interfecit.

Translation

The Bagrada, in Africa, beside the town of Musti, where Regulus, using his army, killed a serpent a hundred and twenty feet long.

Notes

Vibius gives the length of the serpent (“longum pedibus centum viginti”), not of the skin, and says nothing of a skin or a temple. “Exercitu adhibito” says only that the army was used against it; no weapon is named. The place is the novelty: no other text we read names a town. Gsell says the Musti known from inscriptions lay south of the Bagrada, far from it, and asks whether there was another Musti on the river (vol. 3, p. 83, n. 2; vol. 1, p. 133, n. 4).

Cited in

The serpent of the Bagradas: Regulus's monster without a witness