Quintus Fulvius Flaccus

Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, son of Marcus Fulvius Flaccus (consul 264 BC), Quintus was consul in 237 BC, fighting the Gauls in northern Italy. He was censor in 231 BC, again consul in 224 BC, when he subdued the Boii. He was a praetor in 215 BC and in the following year Master of Horse. Consul again 212 BC, fighting the Second Punic War, he was defeated by Hannibal at the first Battle of Capua, then won a victory over Hanno the Elder, capturing his camp at Beneventum, then captured Capua in 211 BC while serving as proconsul. In his fourth term as consul, (209 BC) he retook Lucania and Bruttium. He opposed the African expedition of Scipio Africanus Major in 205 BC, and died sometime not long thereafter. Quintus Fulvius Flaccus was one of the three candidates for the position of Pontifex Maximus circa 212 BC, when he and another senior candidate Titus Manlius Torquatus (consul 235 BC), both former censors, were pipped at the post by a younger man, Publius Licinius Crassus who was not yet a curule aedile and thus probably aged in his middle thirties. Nevetheless, Flaccus made the new Pontifex his own Master of the Horse some years later. Flaccus was known for his severity towards the disloyal citizens of Capua, of whom he had the senior men executed and the rest of the citizenry condemned to slavery for their disloyalty to Rome. According to Livy, the Capuans complained of his behavior to the Roman Senate which however ruled that Flaccus was within his rights. More interestingly, Flaccus's grandson was the Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, consul in 125 BC, who was an ardent supporter of the Brothers Gracchi. He attempted to warn Tiberius Gracchus of the plots against his life on the day that he was killed; in 121 BC, having supported Gaius Gracchus in his reform program and tried to lead an armed resistance against the Senate, he and his elder son were tracked down and executed (beheaded) without trial on the orders of the consul Lucius Opimius; a youngest son, too young to have participated in any plotting or armed revolt, died in prison, again without trial. (Another son was apparently the father of Fulvia, third wife of Mark Antony). The grandfather, a stern conservative, could probably never have imagined the fates of his descendants.