Anyone familiar with the work of Friedrich Münzer knows that he possessed an unrivalled knowledge of the Roman aristocracy of the Republic. On the rare occasion when something escapes Münzer, it is apt to pass altogether unnoticed. The following is one such instance.
In the second book of his Historia Naturalis Pliny presents a brief disquisition on lightning in which he distinguishes according to their properties and effects various types of lightning bolt.Footnote 1
Fulminum ipsorum plura genera traduntur. Quae sicca veniunt, non adurunt, sed dissipant, quae umida, non urunt, sed infuscant. Tertium est quod clarum vocant, mirificae maximae naturae, quo dolia exhauriuntur intactis operimentis nulloque alio vestigio relicto, aurum et aes et argentum liquatur intus, sacculis ipsis nullo modo ambustis ac ne confuso quidem signo cerae. Marcia princeps Romanarum, icta gravida partu exanimato ipsa citra ullum aliud incommodum vixit.Footnote 2
Münzer, who knew Pliny well, was familiar with the anecdote and conjectured that the heavily pregnant Marcia may have been identical with the paternal grandmother of the Dictator Caesar.Footnote 3 Münzer based this inference on Pliny's fondness for recording anecdotes involving the ancestors of Caesar and the description of Marcia as princeps Romanarum, but Marcia's true identity is revealed in a passage Περὶ κεραυνῶν in the De ostentis of Johannes Lydus:
ὁ γὰρ ἐν αὐτοῖς λεγόμενος ἀργής, ὃν καὶ λαμπρὸν ἐξαιρέτως καλοῦσιν οἱ ἀρχαῖοι, πολλάκις ἐμπεσὼν ἐπὶ πίθον ἢ ἄγγος ἁπλῶς ἢ οἴνου ἢ ὕδατος, τὸ μὲν περιέχον ἀπήμαντον τὸ δὲ ἐμπεριεχόμενον ἄϕαντον ἐποίησεν. οὐχ ἥκιστα δὲ καὶ ἐν σκεύεσι χρυσίον ἢ ἀργύριον ϕέρουσιν ἐμπεσὼν τῷ ἴσῳ τρόπῳ τὰ μὲν ἔνδον ἔτηξε, τὰ δὲ ἔξωθεν ἔσωσε. καὶ τὸ δὴ πάντων θαυμασιώτατον ἐπὶ γυναικὸς ἐγκύμονος συμβῆναί ϕησιν ὁ μέγας Ἀπουλήιος, καὶ γυναικὸς οὐκ ἠγνοημένης, Μαρκίας δὴ ἐκείνης τῆς Κάτωνι τῷ τελευταίῳ συνοικησάσης. ἐμπεσὼν γὰρ αὐτῇ κεραυνὸς ὁ λεγόμενος ἀργὴς ἤτοι λαμπρὸς αὐτὴν μὲν παντελῶς ἐϕύλαξεν ἀβλαβῆ, τὸ δὲ ἐν αὐτῇ διεϕόρησεν οὕτως ἀνεπαισθήτως, ὡς μηδὲ αὐτὴν συνιδεῖν ὅ τι γέγονε τὸ ἐν αὐτῇ, καίτοι πρὸς ἔξοδον ἔχον.Footnote 4
And Marcia recurs in the Εἰσαγωγὴ κατὰ μέρος ἀστρονομίας διὰ στίχου dedicated to the emperor Manuel Comnenus (1143–80) by the Patriarch of Constantinople Johannes Camaterus:
Marcia then is none other than the daughter of L. Marcius Philippus (cos. 56) who was the second, and third, wife of M. Porcius Cato Uticensis.Footnote 6 We are told that Marcia was entirely unharmed by the lightning and was totally unaware that the child she was carrying had been adversely affected until it was delivered. The extraordinary phenomenon of intrauterine death due to lightning is not unknown to modern science and death is said to occur in approximately fifty per cent of cases where the mother survives.Footnote 7 Marcia is recorded as having borne Cato three children, two daughters and a son, but this child represents an otherwise undocumented fourth pregnancy.Footnote 8 The omission of this incident from Plutarch's biography of Cato, and the other mainstream sources on Cato's life, becomes the less surprising when it is recalled that stillborn infants and children who died in infancy more often than not pass unremarked in our sources.Footnote 9 And the hapless child was presumably buried without ceremony as the laws of Numa prescribed for anyone unlucky enough to be killed by lightning.Footnote 10
The brilliant bolt of white lightning variously dubbed fulmen clarum or ἀργὴς/λαμπρὸς κεραυνός has an established place in ancient meteorological lore.Footnote 11 Its miraculous ability to evaporate or liquefy the contents of a vessel without damaging the vessel itself is often noted, but the analogous experience of Marcia and her unborn child appears unique. Pliny does not name his source, but Lydus cites the ‘great Apuleius’ who features elsewhere in Lydus as an authority on celestial phenomena,Footnote 12 and is generally and plausibly identified with Apuleius of Madaura (fl. circa a.d. 120/125–180).Footnote 13 It goes without saying that Pliny cannot have been drawing on Apuleius. And despite occasional statements to the contrary,Footnote 14 Apuleius cannot have been simply borrowing from Pliny for where Pliny and Apuleius intersect,Footnote 15 Apuleius contains additional information that is not in Pliny as in the present instance where Pliny fails to name the husband of Marcia. Consequently, the very pronounced similarities between Pliny and Lydus/Apuleius leave no doubt that Pliny and Apuleius were reliant on a common source, but putting a name to that source is a highly speculative venture. Münzer thought that Pliny derived the material surrounding HN 2.137 from Varro, but that the anecdote involving Marcia perhaps came from M. Tullius Tiro or Q. Aelius Tubero.Footnote 16 Kroll, on the other hand, maintained that Posidonius was Pliny's source,Footnote 17 while Beaujeu conjectured that Apuleius may have exploited an unknown compilation of miracula Footnote 18 and Mastandrea identified Varro as the source common to Pliny and Apuleius.Footnote 19 All we can say for certain is that Tiro, Tubero, Posidonius and Varro are all named among Pliny's sources for Book 2, but only Varro and Posidonius demonstrably discussed the phenomenon of the clarum fulmen.
