Political Power in Mid-Republican Rome Tusculanorigin,withlandsintheSabinecountry,cavalry-menratherthan
(asyet)‘‘equestrians,’’mighthavestoodforoffice,andthenperhapshavebeen
enrolled in the Senate.The notion of that body as an ‘‘aristocracy’’ in the
modernsensehasconfusedthestudyoftheRepublicfordecades.
Buttherewereofcoursefamilieswhichwereindeedrelatively‘‘aristo-
cratic.’’OnewasthatoftheCorneliiScipiones,andheretoowecanseehow
afamilyhistorywasrepresentedintheearlysecondcentury.Inthefamily
tombontheAppianWayanearlierinscriptiononthesarcophagusofL.Cor-
neliusScipioBarbatus,consulin,censorin(?),waserased,andanew
one created, addressed to passers-by. See J. van Sickle, ‘‘The Elogia of the
CorneliiScipionesandtheOriginofEpigramatRome,’’AJPh():;
J.vanSickle,‘‘TheFirstHellenisticEpigramsatRome,’’inN.Horsfall,ed.,
Vir Bonus Discendi Peritus: Studies in Celebration of Otto Skutsch’s Eightieth Birth-
day,BICSsuppl. (), ; F. Coarelli,Il sepulchro degli Scipioni a Roma
().Thenewinscriptionread:
CorneliusLuciusScipioBarbatus
sonofGnaeus/,abraveandwiseman,
whoselooksmatchedhisvirtue/
hewasconsul,censor,aedileamongstyou,
hecapturedTaurasiaCisauna?/inSamnium,
reducedthewholeofLucaniaandtookhostages.IncidentsfromtheRomanconquestofsouthernItalyofaboutacenturybe-
forewere thus rehearsed, as was the holding of civil offices, as censorand
aedile,inthecommunity—‘‘apudvos.’’Thisformofaddressisofsomesig-
nificance,aswillbeseenlater.
It would thus be needlessly hypercritical not to accept that, at least in
broad outline, the major stages of Roman history back to around ..
werewithinrecallwhenRomanhistoriographybegan.Butwecancertainly
go beyond that. For whether laterannalists could,or we nowcan, recon-
structvalidyear-by-yearnarrativesequences,ornot,whichfranklymatters
little, it remains beyond question that a range of important developments
canbeseentohaveoccurredinthefourthandearlythirdcenturies,which
formed the background of the great campaigns at the end of that period,
above all Pyrrhus’ invasion and the outbreak of the First PunicWar.That
istosaytheemergenceof RomefromwithintheframeworkoftheLatin
League,thefoundationoffurther‘‘Latin’’colonies,theextensionofRoman
fullorhalfcitizenship,andthesubjugationorbringingintoallianceofall
thecommunitiesorpeoplesinthesoutherntwo-thirdsoftheItalianpenin-
sula. However hypercritical we are, this process cannot be argued to have