Submitted for award of PhD September 2006. - King's College London

quinquennalis or quaestor. Mommsen dated it to the Samnite administration, Onorato to
the transitional period, and Degrassi to the early colony, but none of these interpretations
is convincing. 773 A viable dating needs to accommodate several facts, as noted by
Mouritsen: the inscription is in Latin, contains the letter q, the magistrate was a member
of an illustrious Pompeiian gens, archaeological evidence suggests that the portico is
later than 100 BC and the inscription is similar to other early Latin inscriptions from
Pompeii. 774 Mouritsen's argument that the letter q stands for the office of quaestor is the
most likely. 775 Nevertheless, this inscription does not suggest that the quaestorship
continued to exist in Roman Pompeii: Mouritsen argued that the portico was begun
before the Roman conquest but finished afterwards, which explains why was the
inscription is in Latin. This text therefore attests that V. Popidius son of Epidius held the
quaestorship at the time of the dedication of the building. This probably happened
between 100 and 80 BC, which suggests that the office of the quaestor could have
continued into the transitional period of the town.
A handful of electoral inscriptions in Latin also contain the letter q. 776 Three
inscriptions, all belonging to the programmata antiquissima, mention Q. Caecilius. The
fourth, which belong to the more recent inscriptions from Pompeii, mentions C.
Laecanius Successus. Mommsen's argument that the letter q stands for the quaestorship
and that the text should be dated to the transitional period has been discarded. Castren
and Lo Cascio suggested that it stood for quattuorvir, but this view does not convince in
the light of the previously mentioned argument that the term quattuorvir was a collective
772 = 12 1627 = ILS 5538 = ILLRP 640
773 CIL X p. 96; Onorato (1951) 116-40; Degrassi (1967) 145-8.
774 Mouritsen (1988) 72-3.
ns Mouritsen (1988) 72-4.
776 CIL IV 29,30,36 and 7014
232