19.
Then another decree of the senate, allied to this, was passed on the motion of the consul Quintus Marcius, that the entire question of those whose services as informers the consuls had enjoyed should be referred to the senate when Spurius Postumius should have returned to Rome after completing the investigations.
[2]
Minius Cerrinius the Campanian they voted should be sent to Ardea for imprisonment, advance notice being given to the magistrates of the Ardeans that they should keep especially close guard over him, not only to prevent his escape but also to allow him no opportunity to commit suicide.1
[3]
Spurius Postumius returned to Rome a considerable time later: on his motion with reference to the rewards for Publius Aebutius and Hispala Faecenia, because it was through their information that the Bacchanalia had been discovered, a decree of the senate was passed that to each of them one hundred thousand asses2 should be paid by the city quaestors out of the treasury;
[4]
and that the consuls should take up with the tribunes of the people the matter of their presenting to the assembly at the earliest possible moment proposals that Publius Aebutius should be rated as having performed his military service,3 that he should not serve in the [p. 275]army except by his own act, that the censor should4 not assign him a public horse without his consent;5
[5]
that Hispala Faecenia should have the rights of bestowing and alienating property,6 of marriage outside her gens,7 and choice of a tutor just as if her husband had given it to her by his will;8 that she should be permitted to marry a man of free birth, nor should any fraud or disgrace on this account attach to a man who should have married her;
[6]
that the consuls and praetors who were at this time in office and those who should follow them should have a care that no injury should be done to this woman and that she should be secure. The senate, they were to say, wished and judged it proper that this should be done.
[7]
All these motions were presented to the assembly and passed in accordance with the decree of the senate; with respect to the impunity and rewards of the rest of the informers discretion was left to the consuls.
1 The ultimate fate of Cerrinius is not recorded.
2 This was the sum required for assignment to the first census-class.
3 The proposal to exempt Aebutius from his military obligations is genuine, so far as one can see, but nevertheless odd at this period, when military service was still a recognized part of the citizen's duty. It cannot be determined whether the exemption carried with it immediate eligibility to office, since Aebutius had no political ambitions.
4 B.C. 186
5 The assignment of an equus publicus (cf. xlii. 6 and xliv. 1 below and the notes) would make Aebutius liable to service and so cancel the exemption just granted. Service as a volunteer would be performed in the capacity of an eques equo publico.
6 The interests of a patronus in the property of his libertus were well protected by Roman law. Although the patronus of Faecenia was dead his interests survived, descending in this case to his gens, and the senate therefore bestows upon her the right to give away or otherwise alienate her property irrespective of gentile rights (datio may be synonymous with alienatio, the term employed by later jurists). The proposal of some scholars to understand capitis with deminutio, which would grant her the right to accept inferior civic status, seems to be self-contradictory. But it is not certain that Livy understood what he wrote.
7 The conditions surrounding gentis enuptio are only vaguely known. It is clear, however, that Faecenia is to have the maximum of privilege allowed to women.
8 A wife in manu might be granted this privilege by her husband's will. By the bestowal of these four rights Faecenia acquired a legal status at least not inferior to that of free women generally.
Livy. Books XXXVIII-XXXIX with an English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1936: published without copyright notice.
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