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XVIII

[18arg] What is meant by pedari senafores, and why they are so called; also the origin of these words in the customary edict of the consuls: “senators and those who are allowed to speak in the senate.”

THERE are many who think that those senators were called pedarii who did not express their opinion in words, but agreed with the opinion of others by stepping to their side of the House. How then? Whenever a decree of the senate was passed by division, did not all the senators vote in that manner? Also the following explanation of that word is given, which Gavius Bassus has left recorded in his Commentaries. For he says 1 that in the time of our forefathers senators who had held a curule magistracy used to ride to the House in a chariot, as a mark of honour; that in that chariot there was a seat on which they sat, which for that reason was called curulis; 2 but that those senators who had not yet held a curule magistracy went on foot to the House: and that therefore the senators who had not yet held the higher magistracies were called pedarii. Marcus Varro, however, in the Menippean Satire entitled ῾ιπποκύων, says 3 that some knights were called pedarii, and he seems to mean those who, since they had not yet been enrolled in the senate by the censors, were not indeed senators, but because they had held offices by vote of the people, used to come into the senate and had the right of voting. In fact, even those who had filled curule magistracies, if they had not [p. 303] yet been added by the censors to the list of senators, were not senators, and as their names came among the last, they were not asked their opinions, but went to a division on the views given by the leading members. That was the meaning of the traditional proclamation, which even to-day the consuls, for the sake of following precedent, use in summoning the senators to the House. The words of the edict are these: “Senators and those who have the right to express their opinion in the senate.”

I have had a line of Laberius copied also, in which that word is used; I read it in a mime entitled Stricturae: 4

The aye-man's vote is but a tongueless head.
I have observed that some use a barbarous form of this word; for instead of pedarii they say pedanii.

1 Frag. 7, Fun.

2 For currulis, from currus. This derivation is given by Thurneysen, T.L.L. s.v., with the suggestion that the name, as well as the seat itself, was of Etruscan origin.

3 Frag. 220, Büchcler.

4 v. 88, Ribbeck3, who reads: sine lingua caput peddrii senténtias, and gives other versions.

The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. With An English Translation. John C. Rolfe. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1927.

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load focus Introduction (John C. Rolfe, 1927)
load focus Latin (John C. Rolfe, 1927)
hide References (4 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (3):
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), JUDEX PEDA´NEUS
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), SELLA
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), SENATUS
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
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