Avdaces: A Study in Political Phraseology

Abstract

‘Audax venali comitatur Curio lingua’ wrote Lucan in a familiar line of his Bellum Civile, at a time when C. Scribonius Curio the younger had been a hundred years in his grave. Lucan was not the first to describe Curio as audax; Velleius Paterculus did so before him: ‘bello autem civili … non alius maiorem flagrantioremque quam C. Curio tribunus plebis subiecit facem, vir nobilis, eloquens, audax,’, 11, 48, 3. It seems, indeed, that the attribute audax was traditional for Curio and, if this is so, the tradition may well have originated in Curio's own time. His title to a place in Roman history rested on the fact that he changed sides at a critical juncture—‘momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum’ (Lucan IV, 819). And what earned him, whether in his lifetime or posthumously, the derogatory attribute audax was, I think, his political career, notably the record of his tribuneship, no less, if not more, than his character. Audax, as originally applied to Curio, was very probably a conventional partisan appellation which classified him more effectively as a political type than it characterized him as an individual. For the derogatory audax, as I shall presently try to show, belongs in the late Republican period to the current phraseology of political backbiting and it carries a distinctly political connotation. It is the purpose of this paper to consider what audax denotes in the vocabulary of Roman political life in the late Republic as well as who are regarded as audaces in Roman politics.