Sertorius and the Tomb of Antaeus: A Giant's Grave at Tingis

Roman soldiers who followed Quintus Sertorius to North Africa soon after 82 BC were not there to study antiquities. Their commander was a fugitive from Roman civil war, looking for anywhere his small army could survive. Yet the most memorable scene in Plutarch’s account of that African campaign has nothing to do with battles. It has the general standing over an opened grave at Tingis, the city we call Tangier, looking at a body far larger than any human being.

The story is short, and it is reported at second hand by every ancient author who tells it. That makes it less useful as evidence for a giant than as evidence for how Greeks and Romans thought about big bones, local heroes and the politics of North African kingship.

A fugitive general in Mauretania

Sertorius had sided with Marius and Cinna in the civil wars of the 80s BC. When Sulla became master of Rome, an event the Loeb editor dates to 82 BC, Sertorius was already in Spain trying to build a refuge for his faction.¹ Sulla’s commander Caius Annius forced him out. Sertorius took ship from New Carthage, landed briefly in the territory of the Maurusii (the Moors of the Mauretanian kingdom), was driven off, and spent some time at sea with allied Cilician pirates.¹

Plutarch says the pirates then sailed to Africa to restore a deposed Mauretanian ruler, Ascalis son of Iphtha. Sertorius went too, but to fight against Ascalis. He beat him in battle, killed a Roman officer named Paccianus whom Sulla had sent to help Ascalis, took over Paccianus’s troops, and forced the surrender of Tingis, where Ascalis and his brothers had taken refuge.¹ Bill Thayer’s note on the LacusCurtius edition identifies Tingis as modern Tangier, a Phoenician foundation long associated with the Pillars of Hercules.¹

What Plutarch says was in the grave

The key sentences come in chapter 9. “In this city the Libyans say that Antaeus is buried,” Plutarch writes, using “Libyans” in the old Greek sense of the native peoples of North Africa. Sertorius had the tomb dug open because he did not believe the locals about its size. When he reached the body and found it to be “sixty cubits long, as they tell us,” he was astonished, made a sacrifice, had the tomb filled in again, and “joined in magnifying its traditions and honours.”¹

Two details in the Greek deserve attention. The word for what Sertorius found is σῶμα (here in the form σώματι), “body,” not a word for bones. And the measurement carries a hedge: ὥς φασι, “as they say.”² Plutarch, writing well over a century later (his life ran from about AD 45 to 127), does not vouch for the number. He passes it on.³

The number is enormous. A Greek cubit was a foot and a half, so sixty cubits comes to roughly ninety feet, though local units varied. No ancient reader needed a ruler to see that this was a giant of myth and not a tall man. The more interesting part of the scene may be what Sertorius did next. A Roman commander who had just taken the town by force did not carry off the remains or mock the local story. He offered sacrifice, reburied the body, and added his own prestige to the cult of the grave.¹

A second witness, and a skeptic

Plutarch is not the only ancient author to mention the episode. In his description of Mauretania, the geographer Strabo complains about writers who fill their accounts of the region with wonders. Among them is “Gabinius also, the Roman historian,” who “does not abstain from telling marvellous stories of Maurusia.” Gabinius, Strabo says, told of a tomb of Antaeus near Lynx and a huge skeleton that Sertorius uncovered and then covered with earth again. Strabo files this beside Gabinius’s claims that elephants make war on fire and send out scouts before battles.⁴ The Loeb editor, H. L. Jones, adds a note pointing to Plutarch’s Sertorius.⁴

The two reports agree on the essentials but differ in ways worth noting. Strabo’s version puts the tomb near Lynx, not Tingis. Earlier in the same chapter Strabo mentions a town the natives call Tinx, which Artemidorus called Lynx and Eratosthenes called Lixus, and Jones comments that Strabo is confusing Tingis (Tangier) with Lixus, a separate site farther down the Atlantic coast.⁴ Strabo’s Greek also speaks of a σκελετόν, a skeleton, where Plutarch has a body.⁵

On the size, the reports agree more closely than an English reader would guess. Jones’s translation gives “sixty feet,” but Strabo’s Greek reads πηχῶν ἑξήκοντα, sixty cubits, exactly Plutarch’s figure.⁵² Matching numbers suggest that both authors drew, directly or indirectly, on a common written account, perhaps Gabinius himself. That is an inference: neither author names his source for the measurement, and Strabo tells us nothing else about Gabinius.

Who was Antaeus, and why Tingis?

Antaeus was an old figure in Greek myth long before Sertorius. In a victory ode of the fifth century BC, Pindar describes Heracles going “to the house of Antaeus in grain-bearing Libya” to stop him from “roofing Poseidon’s temple with the skulls of strangers.”⁶ The mythographer Apollodorus calls Antaeus a son of Poseidon who ruled Libya and “who used to kill strangers by forcing them to wrestle.” Heracles lifted him off the ground and crushed him, since Antaeus grew stronger whenever he touched the earth, which is why, Apollodorus adds, some called him a son of Earth.⁷

The myth’s geography moved. Pindar and Apollodorus place Antaeus loosely in “Libya,” meaning North Africa. Roman authors fixed him in particular towns on the Atlantic edge of Mauretania. Pliny the Elder records that Tingi was “formerly founded by Antæus.” Farther down the Atlantic coast he places Lixos, “the subject of such wondrous fables,” where storytellers located Antaeus’s palace, his wrestling match with Hercules, and the gardens of the Hesperides.⁸

The geographer Pomponius Mela adds a landscape detail. On the outer coast of Mauretania, he says, where Antaeus is said to have ruled, people point to a “collis modicus resupini hominis imagine iacentis,” a modest hill in the shape of a man lying on his back, which the inhabitants call his burial mound. When any part of it is dug away, rain falls, and it keeps falling until the hole is filled.⁹ Mela does not mention Sertorius, but his hill shows that a grave of Antaeus was a known local landmark, guarded by a belief that disturbing it had consequences. In Plutarch’s version the Roman commander does disturb it, and then repairs the damage with sacrifice and reburial.

A story told to please a king

Plutarch follows the tomb scene with a second local tradition, and here he tells us directly what he thinks of it. The people of Tingis, he writes, say that after Antaeus died his widow Tinga had a son, Sophax, by Heracles. Sophax became king and named the city after his mother. His son Diodorus ruled many Libyan peoples with a Greek army of Olbians and Mycenaeans settled there by Heracles. Plutarch’s verdict is that the tale “must be ascribed to a desire to gratify Juba, of all kings the most devoted to historical enquiry,” because Juba’s ancestors were said to descend from Sophax and Diodorus.¹

Juba II (52 BC to AD 23) was a North African prince, orphaned in 46 BC by Julius Caesar’s war and paraded through Rome as a child. He was raised and educated as a Roman and later installed as king of Mauretania under Augustus, where he became known as an antiquarian and writer.³ Andrew Kenrick’s study of Juba notes that the king “considered himself descended from Hercules,” that numerous statues of the hero have been found at his capital, Caesarea, and that Hercules appears on many of the kingdom’s coins. Hercules, Kenrick observes, had long been tied to north-west Africa through the stories of his labors.³ Kenrick also reports Duane Roller’s suggestion that Juba’s own writings were among Plutarch’s sources.³

This matters for the tomb story. The Sertorius episode took place some three decades before Juba was born, but in Plutarch’s text it sits directly beside a Mauretanian tradition in which the local giant’s grave, Heracles’ victory over him and the descent of the royal line from Heracles all fit together. On one reading, which is an inference and not something the sources state, a gigantic Antaeus made Heracles’ victory the more impressive, and a Roman general’s respectful reburial gave the grave a Roman endorsement. We cannot show that Juba or his court shaped the account of the tomb itself. Plutarch makes that charge only about the genealogy. But the same circle of stories surrounds both.

Giant bones in the ancient imagination

The Tingis grave belongs to a wider ancient habit of reading large remains as the bodies of heroes or giants. Herodotus tells of a smith at Tegea who dug a well and found a coffin seven cubits long (Godley’s translation turns this into “twelve feet”), with a corpse as long as the coffin. “I could not believe that there had ever been men taller than now,” the smith says; he measured the body and reburied it, and a Spartan visitor decided it was the hero Orestes.¹⁰ The pattern is close to Plutarch’s: disbelief, measurement, reburial.

Pausanias, writing in the second century AD, collects several such cases. He reports a corpse on an islet off Miletus said to be at least ten cubits long. In Lydia a storm broke open a hillside and exposed bones whose shape suggested a human being, “but from their size one would never have thought it.” Local people first called them the remains of Geryon. When Pausanias objected, the guides said they belonged to Hyllus, a son of Earth.¹¹ The bones stayed the same; their identity shifted to fit the local stories.

Modern scholars have asked whether some of these finds were the fossil bones of large extinct animals. Bill Thayer, in his note to the LacusCurtius Plutarch, remarks that many ancient and medieval giants’ bones turned out to be mammoth or dinosaur remains, and that Adrienne Mayor’s book The First Fossil Hunters gives the Sertorius episode a prominent place in its case for ancient encounters with fossils.¹¹² Fossil remains did attract attention in other ancient cultures, as with the heavy animal bones stored in old tombs at Qau el-Kebir in Egypt. For Tingis, though, no ancient source describes the material in a way that allows identification, and no find from the site is known to us. Fossil bones are one possibility among several, not a finding.

What can be said with confidence

The evidence comes down to two brief literary reports, written long after the event, which disagree on where the grave lay and which both depend on what others said. Plutarch qualifies the measurement with “as they say,” and Strabo cites the same story as an example of a historian’s taste for marvels.²⁴ Several explanations remain open. The anecdote may have been invented or improved in later telling. Sertorius may have opened a burial mound and found ordinary remains that tradition then enlarged. Or diggers may have exposed large animal bones that local belief already credited to Antaeus. The sources do not allow a choice between these.

What is better documented is the setting. A grave of Antaeus existed in local tradition in north-western Mauretania, and Mela shows it was protected by belief.⁹ Greek myth had long placed Antaeus in North Africa.⁶⁷ A later Mauretanian king had good reasons to keep Heracles and his conquered giant prominent.³ Within that world, the story of a Roman general who doubted, dug, was astonished and then honored the grave did useful work for everyone who told it. It is a different kind of giant story from the one told about the emperor Maximinus Thrax, whose size was claimed for a living man. At Tingis the giant was always already dead, and his size depended on the authority of those who said they had seen him.

Footnotes

1. Plutarch, Sertorius 6.1-2, 7, 9.1-5, trans. Perrin, with Perrin’s note on 82 BC and Thayer’s notes a and b. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Plutarch, Sertorius 9.3, Greek text (Perseus grc2). ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Kenrick 2023, abstract and pp. 20, 55. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Strabo 17.3.2 and 17.3.8, trans. Jones, with Jones’s notes. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Strabo 17.3.8, Greek text ed. Meineke (Perseus). ↩ ↩²

6. Pindar, Isthmian 4, lines 50-55 (Perseus numbering), trans. Svarlien. ↩ ↩²

7. Apollodorus, Library 2.5.11, trans. Frazer. ↩ ↩²

8. Pliny, Natural History 5.1 (Bostock and Riley). ↩

9. Pomponius Mela 3.106 (Latin Library, section [91]). ↩ ↩²

10. Herodotus 1.68, trans. Godley. ↩

11. Pausanias 1.35.6-8, trans. Jones and Ormerod. ↩

12. Mayor 2011 (catalog record). ↩