Often enough it is what is familiar that we fail to understand or appreciate, and I must admit failing to recognize fully the character and importance of the Roman imagines or wax masks representing `past family members who had held at least the office of
aedile' (59) until I read [sup.b.Ancestor] Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture,(19) a study of these objects 'as "status symbols" which embodied honour and evoked shame in a traditional aristocratic setting' (15).
16:23 with the
aedile Erastus, donor of a pavement in a well-known inscription from Corinth.
The legal ban on alea which was part of the supervisory duties of the junior magistrates called
aediles was relaxed during the great festivals, especially the Saturnalia in December.(38) Martial evokes the atmosphere: "Now the schoolboy puts away his walnuts and is ordered back by his bullying teacher, and the gambler, badly let down by the harmless-seeming dice-pot, is chucked out of the obscurity of the tavern, drunkenly begging the
aedile for a few more hours.
In his definition of fatherland, Voltaire complained that "he who bums with ambition to become
aedile, tribune, praetor, consul, dictator, cries out that he loves his country and he loves only himself." Yeats returned to the subject in "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." What is this lack of conviction?
After his return to Rome, he was elected quaestor (76) and
aedile (70).
already served as a military tribune, a quaestor and an
aedile, before
Cicero wants to be
aedile and finally a consul but he must be elected to these posts, and he has no money of his own and few influential friends.
They both create caricatures: Zimmerman cites the portraits of petty officials in Apuleius' Pythias (1.24) and Persius' officious
aedile who breaks substandard pints (1.129-30).
One might argue that Favonius was
aedile in 53 and praetor in 51, and that the election he lost in 51 concerned a public priesthood.