The purpose of this paper is twofold: to advocate for the addition of one item passed over by Broughton's valuable register of candidates for office who were defeated, withdrew or were prevented from competing;Footnote 1 and to affirm the range of dates that Broughton provided for the unsuccessful consular candidacy of L. Rupilius ‘in some year between 132, when his brother, P. Rupilius ([RE] 5), was consul, and the death of Scipio Aemilianus in 129’. That range of dates was challenged by F.X. Ryan.Footnote 2 Both items revolve around the unusual (perhaps extraordinary) career of P. Rupilius, almost certainly a nouus homo, who rose from an engagement with commercial enterprise in Sicily to the consulship, at the relatively advanced age of fifty-two (or thereabouts), in which latter office he played a decisive role in the same province.Footnote 3 Ernst Badian asserted that Rupilius was ‘the first attested consul from the ranks of the publicani’Footnote 4—though his circumstances may have been even more remarkable than that. One source seems to indicate that he emerged from the ranks of the publicani (qui quondam ex publicano factus consul postea);Footnote 5 another that he had worked for them.Footnote 6 While it is not difficult to imagine that the second of those observations was circulated (if not originated) in hostile polemic aimed against the man during the campaigning for the consulship in 132 and that the same might be true of the first, neither datum need be disregarded simply on those grounds.
If certainty is demanded, only the names of the two successful candidates are known: P. Popillius C.f. P.n. Laenas and P. Rupilius P.f. P.n.Footnote 7 The elections had been conducted in the aftermath of unprecedented violence. Whether this muted or exacerbated political competition in the short term is not covered by the surviving evidence—and speculation cannot be reviewed at any length in this paper.Footnote 8 The suggestion of electioneering slander might presume that there was competition, but another item provides firmer ground. Cicero has ‘Laelius’ say that Rupilius had been elected with the support of Scipio Aemilianus; more than that, Scipio ‘made’ Rupilius consul (Cic. Amic. 73), implying that Scipio's auctoritas and gratia, albeit exercised from afar (Scipio was investing Numantia at the time), tipped the balance.Footnote 9 This clearly implies competition, if Scipio was to take any credit for the outcome—unless potential opponents had simply been ‘encouraged’ to leave the field.Footnote 10
1.
Ancient testimony (Dio [24], fr. 83.8 = Exc. Const. V 72 [page 622]) supplies the identity of at least one potential contender: an old political antagonist of Scipio, and not one to have been easily ‘dissuaded’ by the latter:
ἐπεχείρησε καὶ ἐς τὸ ἐπιὸν ἔτος μετὰ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ δημαρχῆσαι καὶ τὸν πενθερὸν ὕπατον ἀποδεῖξαι, μηδὲν μήτ᾿ εἰπεῖν μήθ᾿ ὑποσχέσθαι τισὶν ὀκνῶν.
[Tiberius Gracchus] attempted also to be a tribune in the following year [sc. 132] with his brother, and to appoint his father-in-law consul, not refraining from saying or promising anything to anybody.
The father-in-law was, of course, the high-profiled Appius Claudius Pulcher, patrician, consularis of ten years standing (cos. 143), censorius, triumphator and princeps senatus, but this thwarted second consulship on the part of one of Rome's leading political actors at that time—whether frustrated by withdrawal, disqualification or failure at the polls—is not listed in any of the relevant registers of ‘also-rans’. Friedrich Münzer accepted the item without hesitation, and was followed cautiously by Donald Earl and Alan Astin:Footnote 11 reason enough, one would have thought, for the possibility of a frustrated candidature to be registered, even if open to challenge (as this item is). If Appius had run for office, his failure must have been viewed as quite an ‘upset’. John Briscoe tentatively suggested that Appius may have been disqualified by virtue of a law putatively in place at the time (and interdicting the tenure of a second consulship) and that he may have failed to secure the requisite special dispensation—though if such legislation was in nominal existence at the time, it had been lifted in favour of Scipio Aemilianus when the latter had been elected, in absentia no less, to the consulship of 134.Footnote 12 This matter had been dealt with by Earl, and, as Gianpaolo Urso rightly pronounces, the Claudian candidacy (whether or not it was a fact) ‘is not in itself improbable’.Footnote 13
The item is rejected (by some) for a number of reasons—among them, that (i) Dio's fragmentary account is (according to them) unreliable (and jarring with other accounts), (ii) its transmission is suspect, and/or (iii) it derives from hostile polemic. All of these issues have been covered by others and need not be rehearsed here, but the number of apparent anomalies allow critics, all too easily, to dismiss as ‘highly improbable’ the data Dio apparently recorded,Footnote 14 a judgement reinforced (in some minds) by the fact that the material surviving from Dio's third decade has been transmitted through a Byzantine filter, more often than not in the form of extracts conveyed in the Excerpta Constantiniana; in this specific case, the Περὶ ἀρετῆς καὶ κακίας (= De uirtutibus et uitiis). On that body of work, scholarly opinion is divided, some characterizing the contents as ‘not really fragments but crudely condensed excerpts’, others seeing near verbatim extracts;Footnote 15 such morsels as these anthologies convey require individual critiques.Footnote 16
Doubts as to the soundness of the information will remain, but do not authorize exclusion. A firmer basis for omission would be supplied if the datum could be shown to be a fabrication; Erich Gruen suggested, as had Plinio Fraccaro, a tendentious tradition (arguing that a rumour to the effect may have circulated as part of ‘anti-Gracchan propaganda’).Footnote 17 This is plausible, though Gruen's observation that ‘success in either of these [candidatures of C. Gracchus and Ap. Claudius] would have been a constitutional anomaly’ is, of course, neither technically applicable to the Roman Republic nor a convincing argument that it could not have been a part of contemporary political strategies.Footnote 18 The question to be asked is not whether what we have of Dio's account compels belief, but whether it is incredible. It is not.Footnote 19 This is a consular candidacy (of whatever duration) attested by an ancient source that is not contradicted by any ancient source; nor is it implausible (as noted above).Footnote 20
2.
We come now to our second item, which derives from Cicero's advice on the electoral support due to friends (Cic. Amic. 73):
tantum autem cuique tribuendum, primum quantum ipse efficere possis, deinde etiam quantum ille, quem diligas atque adiuues, sustinere. non enim tu possis, quamuis excellas, omnes tuos ad honores amplissimos perducere; ut Scipio P. Rutilium potuit consulem efficere, fratrem eius Lucium non potuit.Footnote 21
In the first place, moreover, you must render to each friend as much aid as you can, and, in the second place, as much as he whom you love and assist has the capacity to bear. For however eminent you may be, you cannot lead all your friends through the various grades to the highest official rank, as Scipio was able to do when he made P. [Rupilius] consul, though he could not accomplish this result in the case of his brother, Lucius (transl. W.A. Falconer, modified).
If the conventional emendation of that passage is followed,Footnote 22 this is a reference to the divergent fortunes of the Rupilian brothers, indicating that L. Rupilius sought the consulship unsuccessfully within a few years of his brother (since Scipio died in 129). And if the customary amalgamation of testimonia (Cic. Tusc. 4.40, citing Fannius’ Annales, fr. 5 Cornell [= fr. 6 Peter and Chassignet] coupled with Plin. NH 7.122) holds good (once again, with the texts duly emended),Footnote 23 the news of his brother's electoral loss in a consular election prompted P. Rupilius’ sudden death.Footnote 24
When did these two episodes occur? Robert Broughton dates them to ‘some year between 132, when … P. Rupilius was consul, and the death of Scipio Aemilianus in 129’.Footnote 25 Ryan finetuned the terminus ante quem. The consular elections in which L. Rupilius was disappointed, he argues, could not have been those held in 129, his reasoning being that ‘Scipio died in the first half of the year’ and that ‘[the] elections are likely to have been held later in the year at that time’—and, with qualifications, Ryan's point can be taken.Footnote 26 That leaves the consular elections held in 132, 131 and 130. Ryan wishes to tighten that timeframe by eliminating the first of those years, which he judges to be the most supported in modern scholarship but ‘the least likely’. Scholars tentatively subscribing to that date would see L. Rupilius aiming to succeed his brother as consul and remark on the significance of his failure against P. Licinius Crassus Mucianus the avowed Gracchan (and member of the agrarian commission).Footnote 27 This scenario would project a significant swing in the mood of the comitia centuriata.Footnote 28 Ryan's argument for the elimination of this option is that Pliny's account has the forlorn brother dying promptly on receipt of the news of the repulsa, presumably within the same year (a fair assumption), which in turn would mean that P. Rupilius (cos. 132) died in office, ‘an accomplishment [Ryan notes] not among those recorded [for] P. Rupilius’. This is surely asking too much of the patchy evidence that survives for the man, but Ryan offers more: ‘In the fasti lapidei his name is not followed by the tag “in m. m. e.”’—by which he refers to the formula in mag(istratu) m(ortuus) e(st). Of such documentary evidence, only the fasti Capitolini are relevant (surviving at this point in fragments), and the line drawing and photograph of the surviving stones show that here there is a considerable lacuna, more than enough to accommodate the formula.Footnote 29 The year 132, along with 131 and 130, ought to be retained as a possibility for Scipio's failure to secure a consulship for his friend's brother, and for the death of P. Rupilius (who may have died in office).Footnote 30
Open access
