Quintus Fabius Maximus (Consul 213 BC)

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Quintus Fabius Maximus († between about 207 and 203 BC), the son of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, came from the ancient Roman patrician family of the Fabians and was 213 BC. Chr. Consul .

Life

Fabius Maximus Verrucosus was an elderly man during the Second Punic War that Rome waged against Hannibal , one of the most influential senators and important personalities in Rome. The career of his son Quintus Fabius Maximus also coincided entirely with the fight against Hannibal.

Quintus Fabius Maximus appears in the sources for the first time in 217 BC. When he was militarily active under the dictatorship of his father. These mentions are two anecdotes that are not mentioned by the oldest and most credible author of the Second Punic War, Polybius . According to the first story, the dictator had agreed to an exchange of prisoners with Hannibal, whereby the Romans were supposed to pay money for all those prisoners they got back more than the Punians. Since the Senate had not been asked for permission beforehand, it did not consent to this agreement. The dictator therefore instructed his son to finance the payment obligation by selling his own goods. Furthermore, Quintus Fabius Maximus is told that he had pleaded for an expedition because of the few expected losses, but that his father reprimanded him with the remark that he wanted to be one of the few soldiers who lost their lives.

In the battle of Cannae (216 BC), which ended in a devastating defeat for the Romans , Quintus Fabius Maximus served as the military tribune . He was able to escape to the Apulian city ​​of Canusium (today Canosa di Puglia ). Then he rose unusually quickly to the highest offices of the cursus honorum , apparently less because of his own achievements than because of the influence of his father. 215 BC He exercised the office of a curular aedile . In the next year he was in the function of a praetor in the military in Apulia, where he moved his position first in Luceria , then in Herdonia .

Quintus Fabius Maximus reached the climax of his career in 213 BC. BC, in which year he held the consulate together with Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus . He was assigned Apulia as a province and replaced his father as commander in chief of the Roman troops there. He is said to have demanded the respect due to him as consul from his father; this request also met with the complete approval of the former dictator. The consul achieved a significant achievement with the recapture of the Apulian city of Arpi , which took place in 216 BC. Chr. Had changed to Hannibal's side.

Quintus Fabius Maximus probably still held out in 212 BC. BC as the commander of a troop contingent in Arpi, even though he had handed over the command of his army to the new consul. In the next few years he must have suffered from an illness, since since then he has rarely appeared on important state affairs and died before his father. When this 209 BC He held the highest office of the state for the fifth time in the 3rd century BC, he ordered his son to transfer troops from Etruria to the proconsul Marcus Valerius Laevinus in Sicily . In the following year, Quintus Fabius Maximus was then for some time in command of the army of Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who was also killed in his fifth consulate . At the end of the summer of 207 BC He came to Rome with the message to the Senate that the consul Marcus Livius Salinator and his army wanted to return home soon after the decisive success against Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal in the battle of Metaurus . Since there is evidence of a grandson of Fabius Maximus Verrucosus who had the same name as the son treated here, the last-mentioned commission in particular, according to the ancient historian Friedrich Münzer, could also have been carried out by this grandson (and not by Verrucosus' son).

After the death of Quintus Fabius Maximus (before 203 BC) his father gave him a funeral speech published by him, but now lost, which the Roman orator and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero may have known from his own reading.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Livy 22, 23, 7f .; Valerius Maximus 4, 8, 1; Plutarch , Fabius 7, 7f .; Frontinus , Strategemata 1, 8, 2; Cassius Dio , fragment 56, 15.
  2. ^ Frontinus, Strategemata 4, 6, 1; Cassius Dio, fragment 56, 11; Silius Italicus 7, 539ff.
  3. ^ Livy 22, 53, 1.
  4. ^ Friedrich Münzer : Fabius 103). In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume VI, 2, Stuttgart 1909, column 1789.
  5. ^ Livy 24: 9, 4; 24, 11, 3; 24, 12, 6; 24, 20, 5ff.
  6. ↑ Livy 24, 43, 5 and 9; among others
  7. ↑ Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius , fragment 57 from Book 6 of the Annals in Aulus Gellius , Noctes Atticae 2, 2, 13; Livy 24, 44, 9f .; Plutarch, Fabius 24, 1-4 (imprecise); among others
  8. ↑ Livy 24:45, 1-47, 11; Frontinus, Strategemata 3, 9, 2; Appian , Hannibalica 31 (different from Livius).
  9. ↑ Silius Italicus 12, 481f.
  10. ↑ Livy 25, 3, 3.
  11. ^ Livy 27: 8, 13.
  12. ↑ Livy 27:29 , 4.
  13. ^ Livy 28: 9, 1.
  14. ^ Friedrich Münzer: Fabius 103). In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume VI, 2, Stuttgart 1909, column 1790.
  15. ↑ Cicero, Cato maior de senectute 12; de natura deorum 3, 88; Tusculanae disputationes 3, 70; epistulae ad familiares 4, 6, 1; Plutarch, Fabius 1, 8 and 24, 6.
personal data
SURNAME Fabius Maximus, Quintus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maximus, Quintus Fabius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Roman consul 213 BC Chr.
DATE OF BIRTH 3rd century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH before 203 BC Chr.