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The Flight and Exile of Marius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
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).
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References
page 98 note 1 The major sources (Plut. Marius 35. 5–43. 3Google Scholar and Appian, B.C. i. 57. 1–70. 7)Google Scholar will not be cited in what follows for evidence taken from them except for special points.
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