United States or British Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The day I write this Drusus has been acquitted on a charge of collusion by the tribuni ærarii, in the grand total by four votes, for the majority of senators and equites were for condemnation. On the same day I am to defend Vatinius. That is an easy matter. The comitia have been put off to September. Scaurus's trial will take place immediately, and I shall not fail to appear for him.
Foreign and expensive dishes were prohibited by the guardians of public morals, as they were by Scaurus's sumptuary law: and the censors of 115, Metellus and Domitius, undertook a scrutiny of the stage which resulted in the complete exclusion from Rome of all complex forms of the histrionic art and its reduction to the simple Latin type of music and song.
His narrow means rather than his principles may have been the reason why his aedileship was not marked by the generous shows to which the people were accustomed and by which their favour was usually purchased; in Scaurus's tenure of that office splendour was replaced by a rigorous performance of judicial duties; but that such an equivalent could serve his purpose, that it should be even no hindrance to his career, proves the respect that his strenuous character had won from the people, and the anticipation formed by the government of the value of his future services.
And when he was sent to Aretas, as an ambassador by Scaurus, because he had lived with him formerly, he persuaded Aretas to give Scaurus a sum of money, to prevent the burning of his country, and undertook to be his surety for three hundred talents. So Scaurus, upon these terms, ceased to make war any longer; which was done as much at Scaurus's desire, as at the desire of Aretas.
That Bestia was blinded by avarice and lost all sense of his own and his country's honour, that Scaurus's sense of respectability and distrust of Jugurtha went down before the golden promises of the king, were beliefs widely held, and perhaps universally, professed, by the democrats who were soon thundering at the doors of the Curia by men, that is, who did not understand, or whose policy led them to profess misunderstanding of, the problem in statecraft, as dishonouring in some of its aspects as such problems usually are, which was being faced by a general and a statesman who were pursuing a narrow and traditional but very intelligible line of policy.
It is difficult to assign a political meaning to this law, as we do not know the practice which prevailed at the time of Scaurus's intervention; but it is probable that the restriction imposed by the censors of 169, who had confined the freedmen to a single tribe, had not been observed, that great irregularity prevailed in the manner of their registration, and that Scaurus's measure, which was a return to the arrangement reached at the end of the fourth century, was intended to restrict the voting privileges of the class.
Word Of The Day