42.
In Farther Spain, the Lusitanians having been broken in the last campaign, things were quiet; in Nearer Spain Aulus Terentius among the Suessetani took the town of Corbio with sheds and siegeworks and sold the captives: after that the nearer province too had a quiet winter.
[
2]
The former praetors Gaius Calpurnius Piso and Lucius Quinctius
[p. 355]returned to Rome. To each of them a triumph was
1 decreed by the general consent of the Fathers.
[
3]
First Gaius Calpurnius triumphed over the Lusitanians and Celtiberians: he displayed eighty-three golden crowns and twelve thousand pounds of silver. A few days later Lucius Quinctius Crispinus triumphed over the same Lusitanians and Celtiberians: the same amount of gold and silver was carried in this triumph.
[
4]
The censors Marcus Porcius and Lucius Valerius chose the senate amid suspense mingled with fear;
[
5]
they expelled seven from the senate, one of whom was distinguished by both high birth and political success, Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, a man of consular rank.
2
[
6]
Within the memory of our fathers the custom is said to have arisen that the censors should affix the
nota to the names of those who are expelled from the senate. But in this case there are speeches of Cato
3 and indeed other bitter orations. against those who were either expelled from the senate or whose horses were taken from them,
4 by far the most vehement being that against Lucius Quinctius, and if he had made this speech as an accuser before the
[
7??]
branding rather than as censor after the branding, Lucius Quinctius could not have been kept in the senate even by his brother Titus Quinctius, had he been censor at the time. Among other things he reproached him regarding Philippus, a Carthaginian, a notorius prostitute whom he loved and whom he had attracted from Rome to his province of Gaul by the promise of great gifts.
[
8]
This boy, says Cato, in the course of his playful jesting, used frequently to reproach the consul because just on the
[
9??]
eve of the gladiatorial games he had been
[p. 357]carried off from Rome, that he might sell his favours
5 to his lover.
[
10]
By chance, when they were dining and were by now heated with wine, it was announced in the dining-room that a noble Boian, accompanied by his sons, had come as a deserter; he wished, they said, to meet the consul, that he might obtain a safeguard from him personally. Having been introduced into the tent, Cato continued, he began to address the consul through an interpreter.
[
11]
While he was speaking, Quinctius said to the boy, “Do you wish, since you missed the gladiatorial show, to see now this Gaul dying?”
[
12]
And when he nodded, although not really in earnest, the consul, at the boy's nod, seized the sword that was hanging above his head and first struck the head of the Gaul while he was speaking, and then, as the Gaul was fleeing and calling for the protection of the Roman people and of those who were present, he stabbed him through the side.