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The Lex Plotia Agraria and Pompey's Spanish Veterans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

R. E. Smith
R. E. Smith
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

The Lex Plotia Agraria is known to us only by name through a single reference in one of Cicero's letters, from which we can extract nothing more than a terminus ante quern and a very general notion of its probable scope. Gabba in a short article, after reviewing the different hypotheses about this law, decided in favour of a suggestion put forward originally by Zumpt, that it belongs probably to the year 70/69 B.C.; and identifying it with a law referred to in a passage of Dio, he argued that the law was passed on behalf of Pompey's and Metellus Pius' veterans of the Spanish war. Following a suggestion of Niccolini he identified Plotius with the Plotius, tribune 70/69 B.C., who was responsible for the Lex Plotia de reditu Lepidanorum, and the date of his tribunate he put in 70 B.C. With Gabba's reasoning and general conclusions the present writer is in agreement, namely, that the law belongs to 70/69 B.C., and aimed at providing land for the veterans of Pompey and Metellus; the object of this note is to draw attention to a piece of evidence which has hitherto been strangely neglected, and to draw some possible inferences about the scope and fate of the law.

Type
Articles
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 1-2 , January 1957 , pp. 82 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1957

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References

page 82 note 1 Ad Alt. i, 18. 6: ‘Agraria autem promulgata est a Flavio sane levis eadem ferequae fuit Plotia.’

page 82 note 2 La Parola del Passato, 1950, 66 ff.; cf. also the same writer in Athenaeum, N.s. xxix (1951), 226, n. 3. The references to previous scholars will be found in this article.

page 82 note 3 Commentationes epigraphicae, i (Berlin, 1850), 362.Google Scholar It should be noted that Zumpt was followed by Marquardt, Staatsverwaltung, i.3 112.

page 82 note 4 38. 5. 1–2 (for text see note 1, p. 83.).

page 82 note 5 Following a suggestion of Meyer, Caesars Monarchie und das Principat des Pompeius, 2nd ed. 1919, 53, n. 5; cf. Gelzer, , Pompeius, 1949, 143.Google Scholar

page 82 note 6 Fasti, del tribuni delta plebe, 1934, 436.Google Scholar

page 82 note 7 Loc. cit. 68. See also, now, Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, ii, under ‘Tribunes of the Plebs’ for 70 B.C.; R.E., s.v. Plautius, no. 3.

page 82 note 8 Lucullus, 34. 4.

page 83 note 1 38. 5. 1–2:

page 83 note 2 It could be argued that Pompey could not speak thus, if the ‘whole Senate’ to which he refers is the Senate of ten years earlier; the personalities would have changed considerably in the meantime. This would favour identifying Metellus with Metellus Creticus and dating the law to c. 64 B.C. But Pompey is thinking of the Senate as a deliberative body, and claiming that these clauses have on a previous occasion had full Senatorial support; for his purpose it is not important what individuals comprised the Senate on either occasion.

page 83 note 3 The antecedent of lit. ‘by means of which it voted on a previous occasion () etc’; i.e. the terms of the bill were the means by which it gave the land.

page 83 note 4 This is implied also in Pompey's statement that owing to the poverty of the treasury the land was not distributed.

page 83 note 5 Op. cit. 68.

page 83 note 6 Plut. Pomp. 26. 2.

page 83 note 7 See below, p. 84.

page 84 note 1 Plut. Pomp. 23. 3–4.

page 84 note 2 Cf. Gelzer in R.E., s.v. Licinius, no. 104, col. 403.

page 84 note 3 The Optimates tried to prevent Manilius from passing his law, but the pressure of feeling among the people was wholly in favour of Manilius and Pompey.

page 85 note 1 See the very important passage in Sallust, Catiline, 38. 1–39. 3, where this decade is divided into two parts, that after the restoration of the tribunes' rights down to 67 B.C., and that after Pompey's departure from Rome in 67 B.C. In the first period there is mischievous ‘democratic’ activity, in the second repressive Senatorial measures against ‘the plebs’; he outlines the means by which the Senate regained its ascendancy.

page 85 note 2 Floras, 1. 41. 9; App. Mithr. 95; R.E., no. 8; cf. no. 11.