20.
At the same time Lucius Cornelius Lentulus the proconsul returned from Spain.
[2]
When he had given the senate an account of his vigorous and successful administration, extending over many years,1 and had asked that he be permitted to enter Rome in triumph, the senate decreed that his achievements deserved the honour,
[3]
but that there was no precedent handed down from antiquity that one who had not been in command as dictator or consul or praetor should celebrate a triumph. He had held the province of Spain as proconsul2 and not as consul or praetor.
[4]
Nevertheless, it was proposed that he enter the city in ovation,3 though
[5]
the tribune Tiberius Sempronius Longus objected that this would be no more in accordance with ancestral custom or any precedent.
[6]
Finally, prevailed upon by the general agreement of the senators, the tribune withdrew his veto, and Lucius Cornelius, by authority of the [p. 61]senate, was allowed to enter the city in ovation. He4 brought home forty-three thousand pounds of silver and two thousand four hundred
[7]
and fifty pounds of gold from the booty, and presented to each of his soldiers a sum amounting to one hundred and twenty asses.
1 Since 206 B.C. (XXVIII. xxxviii. 1).
2 An anachronism is involved in the use of the word proconsul to translate the phrase pro consule. After the time of Sulla consuls and praetors served in administrative and judicial capacities in Rome during their terms of office, but without exercising imperium (cf. the note on iii. 2 above), and were then sent out as proconsuls and propraetors, with the imperium, to govern the territorial provinces. They were thus eligible for triumphs. In the third century, even private citizens, in cases of emergency, could be commissioned to act pro consule, pro praetore, i.e. as substitutes for magistrates. Not being a regularly elected magistrate, exercising command under auspices which he had himself taken, such a person could not be granted a triumph. Scipio had had the same experience in 206 B.C. (XXVIII. xxxviii. 4), although he had cleared Spain of Carthaginian troops.
3 An ovation was a minor dignity conferred on commanders who were adjudged undeserving of triumphs. The conditions of eligibility were probably identical with those for a triumph, and the tribune's position seems to have been technically correct.
4 B.C. 200
Livy. Books XXXI-XXXIV with an English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1935: no copyright notice.
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