Last week, we discussed the Ruminal fig tree, and its life on the slopes of the Palatine hill, outside the Lupercal. There, it was a geographical marker of where Romulus and Remus were washed up, and it may even have been there from that time. By the first century CE, however, the tree had died, and was being preserved as a dead natural monument.
This could not go on.
And so, a plan was devised. Or may have been. These things are never certain.
Augustus, the first Roman emperor, built a house on the site of the Lupercal. The tree on the Lupercal vanishes from history at this point, and reappears in the Forum Romanum, outside of the senate house. Whether a fig tree stood there before this reappearance, some time in the first century BCE is unclear.
But when the tree moved to Rome's heart, it stayed there for at least the next hundred years. In a manner of speaking...
Of course, history is never quite so neat.
The first mention we have of a fig tree outside the senate house in the city of Rome is in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian writing in the first century BCE. He's not actually writing about the Ruminal fig tree, and is instead telling his (presumably riveted) audience about another early Roman myth, of a priest named Attus Navius. After Navius split a whetstone with a razor, defying a king, and proved his skills of divination, a statue of the man himself was set up in the Forum, 'in front of the senate house, and near to the sacred fig tree' (Roman Antiquities, 3.71.5). Dionysius is the only surviving account of this story that we have that includes a tree, and this tree has become known in modern scholarship as the ficus Navia.
At almost the same time, a mythographer (people who write about myths) named Conon was writing a brief account of Romulus and Remus, and how they were rescued. He tells us that the wild fig tree 'in front of the senate house' is a memorial to the original fig that caught the twins in its roots (Narrations 48). This tree, he tells us, is sacred, and fenced in by some bronze latticework. It may be that this tree, and its composition, with the fencing, is what we can see on the Plutei of Trajan, a carving of the Forum Romanum from the second century CE, above.
In between the account of Conon and the sculpting of the Plutei, there are two more written accounts of this tree of shifting identities. Pliny the Elder, compiler of the Natural History, has a similar account to that offered by Conon, places the tree near a statue of Attus Navius, and adds a new element: whenever the tree dies, it is replaced and replanted by an unknown body of priests, and the tree's death brings terrible news with it (Natural History 15.38). Tacitus, a famously grim Roman historian, relates a near-death experience for the tree, towards the end of the Emperor Nero's turbulent reign. Like Tolkien's White Tree of Gondor (in the LOTR films, not the books)--
Apologies for my inner nerd, but Tolkien and the ancient world are so easily compatible. The relationship between the two has even been examined in trees already: see Kenneth J. Reckford (1972) 'Some Trees in Tolkien and Virgil'. Anyway, back to it.
--the tree withers, it nearly dies, and then it miraculously rejuvenates (Annals 13.58). Both of these authors identify the tree in the Forum, outside of the senate house, as the Ruminal. Neither call it the ficus Navia.
Then, in the second century CE, we finally get the name, in an epitome (shortened version) of an earlier reference work, Sextus Pompeius Festus writes 'Also, the fig tree in the Comitium (an area of the Forum Romanum just outside the senate house) is named Navia, after the augur, Attus Navius' (169 Lindsay edition). This is the only time that any fig tree in the ancient world is explicitly called the Navia.
It's always important to know when to stop when you're writing about history. Normally, it's when the evidence stops. When you have no more evidence, you have to draw a dotted line underneath everything, brush your hands, and declare that you don't know the answer. I don't know if the ficus Navia was in the forum first. We can't know.
And there we go. The tree of the week. The ficus Navia. Maybe. Or it could be the ficus Ruminalis, moved to a new location, near to an old statue.