Columna Rostrāta
A column adorned with the beaks (
rostra) of captured
ships, originally set up in the Roman Forum to commemorate the
naval victory of Duilius (q.v.) over the Carthaginians (B.C. 260). This monument
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Columna Rostrata. (Restoration by Canina.)
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was destroyed by lightning during the interval between the Second and Third Punic
Wars. A new column was erected by the emperor Claudius and an inscription placed upon it.
Mommsen (
Corp. Inscript. Lat. i. 40) holds that either the original column had
no inscription at all, or else a short and simple one. At any rate, the inscription on the
column of Claudius, part of which was excavated in 1566 in the Forum, is not a copy of the
first one, as many of the verbal forms contained in it are too antique, while others are too
modern, for the age in which it professes to have been written. Thus, the form c is used for g; -et for it; ablatives in -d, elsewhere unknown (
dictatored, navaled）—all of which are too archaic; while, on the other hand,
s and m at the end of words are never
omitted in it, and in or en is used for
endo. A portion of the Columna Rostrata is now in the Palazzo dei
Conservatori on the Capitol at Rome. See Wordsworth,
Fragments and Specimens of Early
Latin, pp. 170, 412-414; Ritschl,
Inscriptio quae fertur Columnae
Rostratae Duilianae (Berlin, 1852); Mommsen,
Corp. Inscript.
Lat. i. 195, pp. 37-40; and Allen,
Remnants of Early Latin, pp. 67- 68.
