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

term for the aediles and duoviri. 777 Mouritsen argued that the letter should be interpreted
as quinquennalis, an office that was held every five years. This would also explain why
it occurs so rarely in Latin inscriptions.
To return to the argument about the constitutional standing of Pompeii in the
transitional period of the town, Castren described the status of Pompeii between 89 and
80 BC as interregnum. 778 His theory was based on a number of programmata
antiquissima inscriptions in which the abbreviation inter appears, but the word itself is
never complete and so is open to interpretation. Several scholars have rejected Castren's
view: Mouritsen pointed out that the word inter appears only in relation to C. Popidius,
and argued that it was a reference to the extraordinary position of interrex, which would
probably have been filled through appointment by the local ordo rather than by popular
election. 779
Onorato suggested that the municipium formed by the native inhabitants of the
town, continued to co-exist with the colony for some time, creating `a double
community' at Pompeii, each with its own administrative institutions. Onorato's
argument was partly based on the distinction between the Pompeiani and the coloni,
which appears in a passage in Cicero. 780 In this passage, Cicero mentions that his client,
P. Sulla, was accused of exploiting a quarrel between the Pompeiani and the coloni in
order to gain power over the community to make them join Catiline's plot. Onorato
argued that Pompeiani refers to the old inhabitants of the town who formed the
municipium while coloni refers to the colonists of Sulla. Several historians have rejected
Onorato's view by pointing out that the dissensio among the coloni and the Pompeiani
"' Castr6n (1951) 51.
778 Castren (1975) 51-2,60,122,174.
779 Mouritsen (1988) 74-5.
780 Cic. Pro Sulla 21.60-2.
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