35. While I was administering my thirteenth consulship [B.C. 2], the Senate and equestrian order and the Roman people with one consent greeted me as Father of my Country, and decreed that it should be inscribed in the vestibule of my house, and in the Senate house, and in the Forum Augustum, and under the chariot which was there placed in my honour in accordance with a senatorial decree.
When I wrote this I was in my seventy-sixth year [A.D. 13-14].
FOOTNOTES
[1] Ad capita bubula. Lanciani (Remains of Ancient Rome, p. 139) says that this was the name of a lane at the eastern corner of the Palatine. Others have thought it to be the name of the house, as the ad malum Punicum in which Domitian was born (Suet., Dom. 1). So later we hear of a house at Rome quæ est ad Palmam (Codex Theod., p. 3). The house may have had its name from a frieze with ox-heads on it, like the tomb of Metella, which came to be called Capo-di-bove. It seems less easy to account for a lane being so called. See also p. 205.
[2] C. I. L., vol. i. p. 279.
[3] Cicero, ad Q. Fr. 1, 1, 21; 1, 2, 7. Velleius Pat., 2, 59; Sueton., Aug. 3.
[4] The plebeian Atii Balbi do not seem to have been important. M. Atius Balbus was prætor in B.C. 62 (with Cæsar), governor of Sardinia B.C. 61-60, and in B.C. 59 was one of the XX viri under the Julian land law (Cic., ad Att. ii. 4).
[5] These and other stories will be found in Sueton., Aug. 94, and Dio, 45, 2. Vergil makes skilful use of them in Æn., vi. 797, sqq.
[6] Antony, when he wished to depreciate Augustus, asserted that his great-grandfather had a rope-walk at Thurii; and some such connection of his ancestors with that place may account for the cognomen, which would naturally be dropped afterwards (Suet., Aug. 7).