Three notes on Asconius

Abstract

This article deals with three passages from Asconius’ commentary on Cicero’s speeches. In the first of these fragments, Asconius reports that Cicero’s daughter Tullia died after childbirth in the house of her husband P. Lentulus. This version stands in contrast to the communis opinio in the scholarship (albeit rested on indirect evidence), according to which Tullia passed away at the Tusculan villa of Cicero after she had given birth to her son in Cicero’s house in Rome. Asconius’ testimony is compared with the account of Plutarch (Cic. 41. 7–8) who tells the same story as the commentator of Cicero. The author concludes that the reports of two ancient writers are based on a common source, namely Cicero’s biography composed by Tiro, in which only the place of birth of Tullia’s son, but not the place of her death was given. Based on this information, Asconius and Plutarch independently of each other came to the logical but wrong conclusion that Tullia died in the house belonged to her ex-husband. In the second passage Asconius mentions that M. Licinius Crassus sat on the jury upon the trial of C. Cornelius de maiestate in 65. In the same year Crassus held the censorship. However, office-holding magistrates were excluded from juries. Since the trial of Cornelius can be dated to the late spring or the first half of summer, we are to assume that Crassus gave up the office by this time. In the third part of the paper Asconius’ account on the murder of Lucretius Afella is examined. According to Asconius, Afella was killed by a L. Bellienus, whereas Plutarch reports that Afella was murdered by one of Sulla’s centurions. The identicalness of L. Bellienus and the anonymous centurion mentioned by Plutarch is usually called into doubt in the scholarship, but the author comes to conclusion that the ancient authors write about the same man.

Keywords:

Asconius, Cicero, Plutarch, Late Roman Republic, criminal courts, prosopography