History of Rome

​During those days in which these things were being done, the envoys of the Massilians announced that the praetor Lucius Baebius, while setting out for his province of Spain, had been surrounded by the Ligurians, ​and that, a large part of his companions having been slain, he himself, wounded, had fled with a few attendants without lictors to Massilia, and had died within three days.

​The senate, upon hearing of this matter, decreed that Publius Junius Brutus, who was propraetor in Etruria, having handed over his province and army to whichever of his lieutenants he saw fit, should himself set out for Farther Spain, and that this should be his province.

​This decree of the senate and letters were sent to Etruria by Spurius Postumius the praetor, and Publius Junius the propraetor set out for Spain.

​In which province, some time before his successor arrived, Lucius Aemilius Paulus—who afterwards defeated King Perseus with great glory—although he had conducted affairs with little success in the previous year, having collected a hastily raised army, fought in a pitched battle with the Lusitanians.

​The enemy were routed and put to flight; eighteen thousand armed men were slain; two thousand three hundred were captured, and their camp was taken by storm. The fame of this victory made affairs in Spain more tranquil.

​In the same year, on the third day before the Kalends of January, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, Marcus Atilius Serranus, and Lucius Valerius Tappo, as triumvirs, established the Latin colony of Bononia in accordance with a decree of the senate.

​Three thousand men were led thither; seventy iugera of land were given to each of the cavalrymen, fifty to the other colonists. The land had been taken from the Boian Gauls; the Gauls had expelled the Etruscans.

​In the same year, many distinguished men sought the censorship. This matter, as if it did not in itself contain cause for a sufficiently great contest, excited another much greater contention.

​Those seeking it were Titus Quinctius Flamininus, Publius Cornelius Scipio, son of Gnaeus, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, Marcus Porcius Cato, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, and Manius Acilius Glabrio, who had utterly defeated Antiochus and the Aetolians at Thermopylae.

​Towards him especially, because he had distributed many largesses, by which he had obligated a large part of the people, the favor of the populace was inclining.

​Since so many nobles bore it with impatience that a “new man” should be preferred so far above them, Publius Sempronius Gracchus and Gaius Sempronius Rutilus, tribunes of the plebs, appointed a day of trial for him, on the ground that he had neither carried in his triumph nor returned to the treasury a considerable amount of the royal money and booty captured in Antiochus’ camp.

​There were varying testimonies of the envoys and military tribunes. Marcus Cato was conspicuous as a witness above the others; but his authority, acquired by the unbroken course of his life, was diminished by his white toga.

​He, as a witness, denied that he had seen in the triumph those gold and silver vessels which he had seen in the captured camp among the other royal booty.

​Finally, chiefly to bring odium upon him, Glabrio declared that he was withdrawing from his candidacy, since a competitor, who was equally a “new man,” was attacking him with detestable perjury—a thing at which the noblemen were silently indignant.