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The Flight and Exile of Marius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

T. F. Carney
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Extract

It must occur to anyone who reads Plutarch's account of Marius' flight and exile to wonder how much of this thrilling and romantic tale is historically true. There is indeed much to cause disquietude. Historiography of Plutarch's day had no distinct genre for the romantic novel, as Perrin so well points out, and consequently included much that history proper would exclude. Incidents in the flight and exile have in fact been described as ‘fairy-tale-like’ and ‘out.of the Arabian nights’. The debating points of the schools of rhetoric have had their influence too, involving Marius in several dilemmas which seem to have been invented for suasoriae (e.g. Marius and the slave-herdsmen, 36. 3; and the shipowners, 37. 2; and the old fisherman, 37.4; and Sextilius' envoy, 40. 3–4; the deliberations before the grove of Marica, 39. 4, are another example).

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , October 1961 , pp. 98 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1961

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References

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page 110 note 6 Cf. my article, ‘The Death of Marius’, Acta Classica, i (1958), 119–20.Google Scholar

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