Gaius Mucius Scaevola

Gaius Mucius Scaevola held his right hand in a fire until it burned away, to show a besieging king what he would be fighting. The story belongs to the siege of Rome by Lars Porsenna of Clusium in 508 BC, in the first year or two of the republic, when the expelled Tarquins were trying to get back in with Etruscan help. Mucius, in the telling, crossed the Tiber into the Etruscan camp meaning to kill Porsenna, and killed the king's secretary by mistake because the two men were dressed alike and the secretary was the one paying the troops. Taken and threatened with burning, he put his own hand into the altar fire and let it char without moving or speaking, and told Porsenna that three hundred young Romans had sworn the same oath and that he was merely the first. Porsenna, according to Livy, let him go and opened negotiations. None of this is history in the sense of something that can be checked. The earliest accounts are four hundred years after the date, the cognomen Scaevola means left-handed and the story reads as an explanation invented for a family name rather than the other way round, and the archaeological picture suggests Porsenna may in fact have taken Rome. What the legend is for is clearer than what happened. The Romans told three stories about that siege - Horatius holding the bridge, Cloelia swimming the river, Mucius and the fire - and each one turns on a single citizen choosing the city over their own body. That is the civic virtue the republic wanted taught, and it was taught for two thousand years afterwards in schoolrooms that had no other Roman history at all. His dates are not recorded and are not guessed at here.

• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: military