Book 4
14
As I was reading the ninth book of the Miscellany of Ateius Capito, entitled On Public Decisions, Fr. 1, Huschke; 1, Bremer. one decree of the tribunes seemed to me full of old-time dignity. For that reason I remember it, and it was rendered for this reason and to this purport. Aulus Hostilius Mancinus was a curule aedile. The date is uncertain. He brought suit before the people against a courtesan called Manilia, because he said that he had been struck with a stone thrown from her apartment by night, and he exhibited the wound made by the stone. Manilia appealed to the tribunes of the commons. Before them she declared that Mancinus had come to her house in the garb of a reveller; that it would not have been to her advantage to admit him, and that when he tried to break in by force, he had been driven off with stones. The tribunes decided that the aedile had rightly been refused admission to a place to which it had not been seemly for him to go with a garland on his head; That is, as a reveller coming from a drinking-bout. An aedile might visit such a place officially in the course of his duty of regulating taverns and brothels. therefore they forbade the aedile to bring an action before the people.
15
The defence of a passage in the historical works of Sallust, which his enemies attacked in a spirit of malicious criticism.
