4L0 Proceedings of the Roijal Iriah Acade»ii/. 



proposed by Mr. Tyrrell in Hermathena i. 205ff. and reprinted in 

 ''Cicero's Correspondence," III. p. 306, have, as it would seem, been 

 overlooked by critics, and yet appear to be in all essentials correct, it 

 may not be out of place to reproduce them. 



In the De Repullica, according to Macrobius [in Somn. Scip. i. 4. 

 2), Cicero makes Laelius express regret mdlas Nasicae statuas in 

 publico in interfecti tyranni remunerationem locatas. This vras P. 

 Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, who slew Tiberius Gracchus. Now 

 Metellus, great-grandson of Serapio, drew the attention of Atticus to 

 what be conceived to be a mistake of Cicero's, and referred to a statue 

 of (as be supposed) Serapio, which be bad placed near the temple of 

 Ops, apparently baving got a loan from Atticus to enable him to exe- 

 cute the work (hence per te). 



Cicero replied that tbe statue adduced was not one of Serapio, 

 because Serapio had never been Censor. The line of argument which 

 he advances to prove this cannot be understood until we state what 

 emendation of the passage (which confessedly requires emendation) 

 appears most satisfactory. The emendation proposed is to read cos 

 for CENs (as nearly all commentators do now), and to read cos cens 

 for cos. 



True, says Cicero, the statue at the temple of Ops has no other 

 inscription but cos, and so might have been that of Serapio ; but 

 that statue is (as Metellus knows) a mere replica of the statue 

 near the Hercules of Polycles, and this statue has the inscription 

 eos CENS, which shows that it represented a man who had been 

 Censor. It, therefore, was not a statue of Serapio, but of Africanus. 

 When I saw the former statue I thought that the non-addition of 

 CENs was a blunder of the stone-cutter; but I find that it is Metellus 

 who had made the bad mistake of supposing that Serapio had been 

 Censor. 



Mr. Tyrrell supposed that, under the second statue, the inscription 

 was CENS only ; that accordingly the copyist just transposed cens and 

 cos. But it would be unusual, if not unprecedented, to have a elogium 

 with CENS only, for virtually all Censors had been Consuls (cf.Mommsen, 

 StaatsrecM i*. 530) ; nor do we find any such example in the Elogia 

 in C. I. L., Vol. 1. Again, nihil habuit aliud inscriptum nisi cos ea 

 statua qtiae ad Opis would point to a somewhat fuller inscription on the 

 other statue : and a copyist would be more likely to leave out one of 

 two very similar abbreviations than alter what he found. Probably 

 the elogia were simply P. Coknelivs Scipio cos and P. Coenelivs 

 SciPio cos cens. 



