As early
as 176 B.C. the senate had tried to limit this personal expenditure,
for Ti. Sempronius Gracchus as aedile had that year spent enormous
sums on his ludi, and had squeezed money (it does not appear how) out
of the subject populations of Italy, as well as the provinces, to
entertain the Roman people.[478] But naturally no decrees of the
senate on such matters were likely to have permanent effect; the great
families whose younger members aimed at popularity in this way were
far too powerful to be easily checked. In the last age of the Republic
it had become a necessary part of the aedile's duty to supplement the
State's contribution, and as a rule he had to borrow heavily, and thus
to involve himself financially quite early in his political career. In
his _de Officiis_,[479] writing of the virtue of _liberalitas_, Cicero
gives a list of men who had been munificent as aediles, including the
elder and younger Crassus, Mucius Scaevola (a man, he says, of great
self-restraint), the two Lueulli, Hortensius, and Silanus; and adds
that in his own consulship P.
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