Ficus Ruminalis - History

History

A statue of the she-wolf was supposed to have stood next to the Ficus Ruminalis. In 296 BC, the curule aediles Gnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius placed images of Romulus and Remus as babies suckling under her teats. It may be this sculpture group that is represented on coins.

The Augustan historian Livy says that the tree still stood in his day, but his younger contemporary Ovid observes only vestigia, "traces," perhaps the stump. A textually probematic passage in Pliny seems to suggest that the tree was miraculously transplanted by the augur Attus Navius to the Comitium. This fig tree, however, was the Ficus Navia, so called for the augur. Tacitus refers to it as the Arbor Ruminalis, an identification that suggests it had replaced the original, either cultivated as an offshoot, or symbolically. The Ficus Navia grew from a spot that had been struck by lightning and was thus regarded as sacred. Pliny's obscure reference may be to the statue of Attus Navius in front of the Curia Hostilia: he stood with his lituus raised in an attitude that connected the Ficus Navia and the accompanying representation of the she-wolf to the Ficus Ruminalis, "as if" the tree had crossed from one space to the other. When the Ficus Navia drooped, it was taken as a bad omen for Rome. When it died, it was replaced. In 58 AD, it withered, but then revived and put forth new shoots.