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Cicero and Bibulus appear to have been the senior consulares in that position, and with much reluctance Cicero allowed his name to be cast into the urn. He drew Cilicia and Bibulus Syria. He says that his motive was a desire to obey the wishes of the senate.
In 180 B.C. the consul Piso was believed to have been murdered by his wife, and whether the story be true or not, the suspicion is at least significant. In 154 two noble ladies, wives of consulares, were accused of poisoning their husbands and put to death by a council of their own relations.
At last the united Senators determined to implore his grace, and the Consulares rose one after another in their places, and all, with one exception, asked that Marcellus might be allowed to return. Cicero, however, had remained silent to the last. There must have been, I think, some plot to get Cicero on to his legs.
The burgesses, no doubt, at this epoch were still too independent to allow the entire exclusion of non-nobles from the senate, and the nobility were perhaps still too judicious even to wish for this; but, owing to the strictly aristocratic gradations in the senate itself in which those who had been curule magistrates were sharply distinguished, according to their respective classes of -consulares-, -praetorii-, and -aedilicii-, from the senators who had not entered the senate through a curule office and were therefore excluded from debate the non-nobles, although they probably sat in considerable numbers in the senate, were reduced to an insignificant and comparatively uninfluential position in it, and the senate became substantially a mainstay of the nobility.
In the present mood of Rome, all the priests, with the nineteen Consulares, were no doubt willing that Cicero should have back his ground. The Senate had to interpret the decision, and on the discussion of the question among them Clodius endeavored to talk against time. When, however, he had spoken for three hours, he allowed himself to be coughed down.
In these he brightened himself up, and discarded his 'nisi prius' way of speaking, so that he might achieve something more dignified, something more statesman-like. So I have done with these speeches of mine which may be called 'consulares," as having been made not only in his consular year but also with something of consular dignity.
It was for the priests to decide this question. The Senate could decree the restitution of property generally, but it was necessary that that spot of ground should be liberated from the thraldom of sacerdotal tenure by sacerdotal interference. These priests were all men of high birth and distinction in the Republic. Nineteen among them were "Consulares," or past-Consuls.
Brutus and Cassius had published a decree of the Senate, calling all the Senators, and especially the Consulares, to Rome. There was reason to suppose that Antony was willing to relax his pretensions. They had strenuously demanded his attendance, and whispers were heard that he had fled from the difficulties of the times.
This Cossinius, to whom I intrust my letter, seems to me a very good fellow, steady, devoted to you, and exactly the sort of man which your letter to me had described. 15 March. Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus, consul in B.C. 72. As he had not yet been a prætor, he would be called on after the consulares and prætorii. That seems the only point in the quotation.
But his abuse of Clodius is infinitely stronger than his praise of Pompey. For the passages in which he alluded to the sister of Clodius I must refer the reader to the speech itself. It is impossible here to translate them or to describe them. And these words were spoken before the College of Priests, of whom nineteen were Consulares!
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