Marcus Porcius Cato (consul 36)

Marcus Porcius Cato was a Roman senator active during the Principate. He was suffect consul in the latter half of AD 36 as the colleague of Gaius Vettius Rufus.[1] Although he shares the identical name of several members of the Republican Porcii, Ronald Syme expressed reservations that he is related to that famed family.[2] Stephen Dyson has cataloged 56 people living in the provinces of Roman Spain who took on the gentilicum "Porcius", who were either clientes or descendants of clientes of Cato the Elder while he was proconsul of Spain, which makes Syme's suspicions plausible.[3]

Life

The historian Tacitus mentions Cato in his Annales. At the beginning of the year 28, during the ascendancy of the powerful prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus, Titus Sabinus, an eques of the highest rank, was imprisoned due to his friendship with the deceased Germanicus, an enemy of Sejanus. "He had indeed persisted in showing marked respect towards [Germanicus'] wife and children," writes Tacitus, "as their visitor at home, their companion in public, the solitary survivor of so many clients." Cato, along with three other ex-praetors -- Latinus Latiaris, Petitius Rufus, and Marcus Opsius -- managed to elicit treasonable comments from Sabinus, which they then passed on to Tiberius. The emperor accepted the evidence at face value, and had Sabinus executed.[4]

Apparently in the lost books of his Annales Tacitus recounts Cato's execution, for, at the conclusion of a passage about the condemnation of Titus Sabinus, Tacitus admits to wanting to describe the deaths of those who had informed against him. The historian remarks that some were executed after Caligula came to power, while others perished at Tiberius' command. After noting how these informants mattered so little to Tiberius that "he frequently, when he was tired of them and fresh ones offered themselves for the same services, flung off the old", Tacitus promises to describe their fates at the appropriate section.[5] None of these men are mentioned again in the surviving portions of his work, yet Frontinus reports that Cato was cura aquarum in the year 38, so it is safe to conclude that Caligula had Porcius Cato executed between that year and the year of his own death (AD 41).[6]

While the name of his wife is not yet known, Cato was survived by a daughter, Porcia, a cousin of Gellius Rutilius Lupus.[7]

Notes
  1. Alison E. Cooley, The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy (Cambridge: University Press, 2012), p. 460
  2. Syme, The Augustan Aristocracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 223 n. 30
  3. Dyson, "The Distribution of Roman Republican Family Names in the Iberian Peninsula", Ancient Society, Vol. 11/12 (1980/1981), pp. 238-263
  4. Tacitus, Annales, IV.68-70
  5. Tacitus, Annales, IV.71
  6. Frontinus, de Aquis, 102
  7. Steven Rutledge, Imperial Inquisitions: Prosecutors and informants from Tiberius to Domitian (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 260
Political offices
Preceded by
Sextus Papinius Allenius,
and Quintus Plautius		 Consul of the Roman Empire
36
with Gaius Vettius Rufus		 Succeeded by
Gnaeus Acerronius Proculus,
and Gaius Petronius Pontius Nigrinus
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