16.
Thereafter despatches from Quintus Marcius the consul were read, describing his crossing over into Macedonia, by forcing the pass;
[2]
in Macedonia he had procured supplies in advance of winter from [p. 141]various localities, and in particular had received1 twenty thousand bushels of wheat and ten thousand of barley from the Epirotes, so that payment for this grain should be arranged with their envoys at Rome.
[3]
Clothes, said the consul, should be sent to the army from Rome; there was need for about two hundred horses, especially Numidians, and he had no supply of them where he was. A decree of the senate was passed to carry out these requests of the consul.
[4]
Gaius Sulpicius the praetor2 let a contract for transporting to Macedonia six thousand togas,3 thirty thousand tunics, and two hundred horses, and for depositing them where the consul chose. Sulpicius also paid the envoys of the Epirotes the price of the grain, and brought before the senate Onesimus, son of Pytho, a Macedonian noble.
[5]
He had always been a proponent of peace to the king, and had advised him to adopt frequently, if not regularly, the practice which his father Philip had begun and continued to the last day of his life —namely, that of reading through twice daily the treaty he had made with the Romans. After Onesimus had been unable to discourage the king from war, Onesimus began at first to withdraw on one excuse or another, so as not to be associated with projects of which he disapproved.
[6]
Finally, when he saw that he was an object of suspicion and that occasionally he was being charged by innuendo with treachery, he deserted to the Romans and made himself very useful to the consul.
[7]
On being introduced to the senate, he recited these facts, and the senate ordered that he be enrolled in the category of allies, that a residence and entertainment [p. 143]be provided for him, that two hundred acres of the4 public land of the Roman people in the district of Tarentum be given him, and that a house be bought for him at Tarentum.5 Gaius Decimius the praetor6 was entrusted with the execution of these orders.
[8]
The censors conducted the census on the thirteenth of December more strictly than before. Many were deprived of their rank of knights, among them Publius Rutilius who as tribune of the commons had violently assailed the censors; he was also removed from his tribe and disenfranchised.7
[9]
As half the revenues of the year had by decree of the senate been assigned by the quaestors to the censors for the construction of public works, Titus Sempronius, out of the funds assigned to him, bought for the
[10??]
state the house of Publius Africanus behind the Old Shops in the direction of the statue of Vortumnus, as well as the butcher's stalls and the shops adjacent, and saw to the construction of the basilica which afterward received the name of Sempronian.8
[11]
1 B.C. 169
2 He was the city praetor, cf. XLIII. xv. 3. Under Sulpicius' sponsorship as praetor, Ennius produced his Thyestes (Cicero, Brutus 78), and in his consulship, Terence produced his Andria; for Sulpicius' prediction of an eclipse, see below, xxxvii. 5.
3 For this use of a civilian garment by soldiers, cf. XXII. liv. 2 and the note.
4 B.C. 169
5 For similar rewards, cf. II. xvi. 4-5; XXIII. xlvi. 6-7; XXVI. xxi. 9-13.
6 He was praetor in charge of aliens, XLIII. xv. 3.
7 Severity to knights was previously mentioned, XLIII. xvi. 1; either the process was interrupted by the objections there described, or the censors conducted a new review at this later date. Rutilius was now open to their attack, because he had left the tribunate four days before on December 9.
8 Africanus was the father-in-law of the censor. The Old Shops had been built in 209 B.C., cf. XXVII. xi. 16, and were so called to distinguish them from some built in 194 B.C. The bronze statue of the Etruscan god Vortumnus stood in the Vicus Tuscus some distance south-west of the Forum, but visible from it; the statue is mentioned by Cicero, in Verrem II. I. 59, 154, and Propertius V. (IV.) 2. The god, whose name seems to be good Latin, was in charge of turning or exchange, and received a temple in Rome after the overthrow of his home town of Volsinii in 264 B.C. The Basilica Sempronia was later supplanted by the Basilica Julia.
Livy. Books XLIII-XLV With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1951: published without copyright notice.
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