Paulus
or
Paullus,
Aemilius.
1.
Marcus, consul B.C. 302, and
magister equitum to the dictator Q. Fabius Maximus Rullianus in 301.
2.
Marcus, consul 255 with Ser. Fulvius Paetinus
Nobilior, about the middle of the First Punic War.
3.
Lucius, son of No. 2, consul B.C. 219, when he conquered
Demetrius off the island of Pharos in the Adriatic, and compelled him to fly for refuge to
Philip, king of Macedonia. He was consul a second time in 216 with C. Terentius Varro. This
was the year of the memorable defeat at Cannae. (See
Hannibal.) The battle was fought against the advice of Paulus; and he was one of the
many distinguished Romans who perished in the engagement, refusing to fly from the field when
a tribune of the soldiers offered him his horse. Hence we find in Horace (
Carm. i. 12)
animaeque magnae prodigum Paulum, superante
Poeno. Paulus was a stanch adherent of the aristocracy, and was raised to the
consulship by the latter party to counterbalance the influence of the plebeian Terentius
Varro.
4.
Lucius, afterwards surnamed
Macedonĭcus, son of the last, was born about 230 or 229,
since at the time of his second consulship (B.C. 168) he was upwards of sixty years of age.
He was one of the best specimens of the high Roman nobles. He would not condescend to flatter
the people for the offices of the State, maintained with strictness severe discipline in the
army, was deeply skilled in the law of the augurs, to whose college he belonged, and
maintained throughout life a pure and unspotted character. He was elected curule aedile in
B.C. 192; was praetor in 191, and obtained Further Spain as his province, where he carried on
war with the Lusitani; and was consul in 181, when he conquered the Ingauni, a Ligurian
people. For the next thirteen years he lived quietly at Rome, devoting most of his time to
the education of his children. He was consul a second time in 168, and brought the war
against Perseus to a conclusion by the defeat of the Macedonian monarch, near Pydna, on the
22d of June. Perseus shortly afterwards surrendered himself to Paulus. (See
Perseus.) Paulus remained in Macedonia during the
greater part of the following year as proconsul, and arranged the affairs of Macedonia in
conjunction with ten Roman commissioners, whom the Senate had despatched for the purpose.
Before leaving Greece he marched into Epirus, where, in accordance with a cruel command of
the Senate, he gave to his soldiers seventy towns to be pillaged because they had been in
alliance with Perseus. The triumph of Paulus, which was celebrated at the end of November,
167, was the most splendid that Rome had yet seen. It lasted three days. Before the triumphal
car of Aemilius walked the captive monarch of Macedonia and his children, and behind it were
his two illustrious sons, Q. Fabius Maximus and P. Scipio Africanus the younger, both of whom
had been adopted into other families. But the glory of the conqueror was clouded by family
misfortune. At this very time he lost his two younger sons; one, twelve years of age,
died only five days before his triumph, and the other, fourteen years of age, only three days
after his triumph. The loss was all the severer, since he had no son left to carry his name
down to posterity. In 164 Paulus was censor with Q. Marcius Philippus, and died in 160, after
a long and tedious illness. The fortune he left behind him was so small as scarcely to be
sufficient to pay his wife's dowry. The
Adelphi of Terence was brought out at
the funeral games exhibited in his honour. Aemilius Paulus was married twice. By his first
wife, Papiria, the daughter of C. Papirius Maso, consul 231, he had four
children—two sons, one of whom was adopted by Fabius Maximus and the other by P.
Scipio, and two daughters, one of whom was married to Q. Aelius Tubero, and the other to M.
Cato, son of Cato the censor. He afterwards divorced Papiria; and by his second wife, whose
name is not mentioned, he had two sons, whose death has been recorded above, and a daughter,
who was a child at the time that her father was elected to his second consulship.
5.
Iulius. A Roman jurist of high repute in the beginning of the
third century A.D., contemporary with Papinianus and Ulpian. With the former he was legal
assessor to the emperor Septimius Severus. With the latter he was
praefectus
praetorio under Alexander Severus, after he had been sent into exile by Elagabalus. He
was most productive as a legal author, but in literary skill and finish stood far below his
two contemporaries. The extracts from his numerous monographs or more comprehensive works
form a sixth part of the
Digest. Besides these extracts, his
Sententiae, a very popular compendium of undisputed principles on the most
frequent points of law, has been preserved in a shortened form.
6.
Paulus Diacŏnus. The Latin name of Paul Warnifrid, a
Lombard who became a monk at Monte Casino about A.D. 775. He wrote a history of the Lombards;
compiled a Roman history largely from Eutropius; and abridged the glossary of Festus which
was itself epitomized from the lexicon of Verrius Flaccus. He also wrote ecclesiastical
works. His Roman history was in sixteen books, but was subsequently
(about A.D.
1000) enlarged by Landolfus Sagax, who drew upon various sources for his additions,
especially upon Orosius and St. Jerome. This enlarged work got the name
Historia
Miscella, by which it is now known. On the abridgment of Festus, see
Festus;
Verrius Flaccus.
