crassus, arrest, people's tribune

[frankq]

Many of you are familiar I

[M. Porcius Cato]

Good question. I don't think so, and I know of no precedent in which auguries were legally binding. Do you?

[Primus Pilus]

Many of you are familiar I

[frankq]

Good question. I don't think so, and I know of no precedent in which auguries were legally binding. Do you?

 

No. I'm still doing my homework on this. What I do know is that Ateius was definitely later (50BC) held accountable by the censors for publicly damning Crassus and saying that his expedition would lead to ruin for the Roman people. Technically speaking, he was alerting the gods about the matter and there was some case, which Cicero records, in which the utterer was deemed innocent and the doer (Crassus) the sole guilty party.

 

I was alerted to this by a paper written in the 30's that states that Plutarch and the others got their facts wrong and that Ateius didnt do wild incantations at the city gate. The only contemporary source, Cicero, sticks to the facts that the auguries about the Parthian expedition were all negative and Ateius used this to publicly damn Crassus. The "Pompey escorted Crassus to the city gate" echoes too much of anecdotal Plutarch and it alerted me and I couldn't quite buy that a tribune would try to pull this kind of legal rank on someone leaving the city. Plutarch's way out was to have other tribunes veto the arrest.

[frankq]

Primus, good point.

 

Here's a link, scroll down:

 

http://www.shc.ed.ac.uk/classics/undergrad...TUREHandout.pdf

 

It runs over the case mentioned by Cicero.