This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
*** What order is that? There have been plenty of tribunes in our numerous legions in so many years. [14] Among them he has distributed the lands of Semurium. The Campus Martius was all that was left, if he had not first fled with his brother. But this allotment of lands was put an end to a little while ago, O Romans, by the declaration of his opinion by Lucius Caesar, a most illustrious man and a most admirable senator. For we all agreed with him and annulled the acts of the septemvirs. So all the kindness of Nucula2 goes for nothing; and the patron Antonius is at a discount. For those who had taken possession will depart with more equanimity. They had not been at any expense; they had not yet furnished or stocked their domains, partly because they did not feel sure of their title, and partly because they had no money. [15] But as for that splendid statue, concerning which, if the times were better, I could not speak without laughing, “To Lucius. Antonius, patron of the middle of Janus.”3 Is it so? Is the middle of Janus a client of Lucius Antonius? Who ever was found in that Janus who would have lent Lucius Antonius a thousand sesterces?
1 After the year B.C. 403, there were two classes of Roman knights; one of which received a horse from the state, and were included in the eighteen centuries of service; the other class, first mentioned by Livy (v. 7) in the account of the siege of Veii, served with their own horses, and instead of having a horse found them, received a certain pay (three times that of the infantry), and were not included in the eighteen centuries of service. The original knights, to distinguish them from these latter, are often called equites equo publico, sometimes also flexumines or trossuli. Vide Smith, Dict. Ant. p. 394-96, v. Equites.
2 He had been one of the septemvirs appointed to preside over the distribution of the lands.
3 Janus was the name of a street
near the temple of Janus, especially frequented by bankers and usurers. It
was divided into summus, medius and imus. Horace
says:—“
“Haec Janus summus ab imo
Edocet
* * *
Postquam omnis res mea Janum
Ad medium fracta est.”
”
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.