American Journal of Philology

THE RACE FOR THE CENSORSHIP of 189 became the setting for one of the most dramatic domestic political disputes of the early second century. ¹ M. Porcius Cato (cos. 195) was seeking the censorship, and among his competitors was another homo novus, M.' Acilius Glabrio (cos. 191). Now, Cato had served as tribunus militum under the consul Glabrio during the campaign of 191 against Antiochus III in Greece. Cato had led a flanking expedition to decide the battle at Thermopylae, at the conclusion of which the king's camp was invaded and plundered. ² Cato said that after the battle, Glabrio had embraced him and cried out that neither he nor the Roman people could repay his good services. ³ Glabrio sent Cato home with news of the victory. ⁴

Now, in the race for the censorship of 189, public opinion was inclining in favor of Glabrio because he had conducted a lavish distribution of congiaria--vessels, perhaps precious, filled with wine or oil. The nobles among the competitors took umbrage at his being preferred to them, and two tribunes, P. Sempronius Gracchus and C. Sempronius Rutilus, brought Glabrio to trial on the charge "that there was some amount of the royal money and booty taken in the camp of Antiochus which he had neither carried in the triumph nor deposited in the treasury." ⁵ Legates and military tribunes were called to testify, and most visible among them was Cato, who had a reputation for integrity, but [End Page 549] because he was testifying against an opponent in a political race, his influence was diminished. The substance of Cato's testimony, as Livy summarized it, was that he had seen some gold and silver vessels among the royal booty at the sack of the camp, and had not seen them in the triumph.

Glabrio withdrew from the race after a fine had been proposed and twice argued, and the case lapsed. He vilified Cato as a perjurious hypocrite for attacking a fellow homo novus for something the nobles usually passed over in silence. ⁶

We have a fragment of a speech Cato gave against Glabrio, and his trial is the only appropriate occasion which is known to us. The fragment itself is clearly designed to set up a contrast between Cato and Glabrio, but the text is corrupt. The codex Farnesianus of Festus has the following entry (Fest. p. 268L):

Penatores: qui penus gestant. Cato adversus M.' Acilium quarta: "postquam nativitas ex navibus eduxi, non ex militibus atque nautis piscatores penatores fici, sed arum dedi."

First there are several problems which are relatively minor and no longer yield much controversy. The word quarta indicates there were at least four speeches "against Acilius." More often than not, this is dismissed as a simple error. ⁷ The word nativitas is clearly foreign to the context, and was long ago emended to navitas, as a poetic and archaic variant on nautas. ⁸ The transmitted fici is regularly and reasonably emended to feci. ⁹ [End Page 550]

The more difficult question centers on the phrase sed arum dedi. André Dacier, in an early modern edition of Festus (Amsterdam 1700), emended arum to aurum. ¹⁰ Much later, Theodor Mommsen offered the conjecture arma. ¹¹ This is now the prevailing reading, accepted most significantly by Enrica Malcovati (1953, 39) in the authoritative edition of the Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta. ¹² Maria Teresa Sblendorio Cugusi (1982, 77), following Lindsay (1913, 268), printed and obelized arum, but in her commentary (1982, 215) considered Mommsen's emendation preferable to Dacier's because the latter "appears inconsistent with the context." I intend to show that this is rather the opposite of the case, and we ought to accept Dacier's emendation. ¹³

With Mommsen's conjecture, the passage reads: "When I brought sailors off the ships, I didn't make fishers and provisioners out of soldiers...