21.
[9]
The consuls up to this time had not set out to their province1 because they would not yield to the senate in passing a decree regarding Marcus Popilius, and the Fathers were determined to allow no other decree to have precedence over it.
[2]
The ill-will against Popilius was increased again by dispatches in which he reported that as proconsul he had fought a second time with the Ligurian Statellates and had killed six thousand of them; because of the injustice done in this war the rest of the Ligurian peoples also took up arms.
[3]
Then indeed not the absent Popilius alone was reproached in the senate because he had made war on surrendered tribes contrary to justice and right, and had roused [p. 351]pacified people to rebellion, but the consuls as well,2 because they did not go to their province.
[4]
Prompted by this harmony among the Fathers, Marcus Marcius Sermo and Quintus Marcius Scilla, tribunes of the people, first proclaimed that they would lay a fine upon the consuls if they should not go to their provinces, and then read in the senate the motion which they proposed to offer regarding the surrendered Ligurians.
[5]
It was proposed that in case anyone of the surrendered Statellans had not been restored to liberty before the Kalends of August following, the senate should decree on oath3 what officials should investigate this matter and punish the person by whose malice the aforesaid person had become a slave. Then, on the authorization of the senate, they published this decree. Before the consuls set out, an audience before the senate was granted to Gaius Cicereius, praetor of the preceding year, in the temple of Bellona.
[6]
[10]
When he had set forth his achievements in Corsica4 and had vainly demanded a
[7??]
triumph, he celebrated his triumph on the Alban Mount, which had now become customary5 in order to permit the celebration of a triumph without the authorization of the state. The plebeian assembly voted and ordered the Marcian proposal regarding the Ligurians with complete unanimity.
[8]
In accordance with this legislation the praetor Gaius Licinius consulted the senate as to whom they would choose to investigate under that bill. The Fathers ordered Licinius himself to conduct the investigation. [p. 353]
1 The narrative continues from x. 15 above.
2 B.C. 172
3 Cf. XXVI. xxxiii. 14, XXX. xl. 12. On each of these occasions the matter seems to have been referred by the popular assembly to the senate “with power”; since the senate was in theory only an advisory body (and had on occasion been hostile to the commons), the oath perhaps was meant to bind the senators to the utmost scrupulousness and impartiality in making these delegated and final decisions.
4 Cf. vii. 1-2 above.
5 This statement cannot be verified from Livy's narrative, in which no triumph in monte Albano has been mentioned since XXXIII. xxiii. 8. In that passage, the triumphing consul cites the precedent of “many famous men,” but Livy mentions only one, XXVI. xxi.
Livy. Books XL-XLII With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1938: published without copyright notice.
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