M. Licinius Crassus, whose life Plutarch has written, was the youngest son of the Censor. The year of his birth is uncertain; but as he was above sixty when he left Rome for his Parthian campaign B.C. 55, he must have been born before B.C. 115. Meyer (_Orator. Roman. Fragment_.) places the birth of Crassus in B.C. 114.] [Footnote 6: Kaltwasser makes this passage mean that Crassus merely took his brother's wife and her children to live with him; which is contrary to the usual sense of the Greek words and readers the following sentence unmeaning. Kaltwasser observes that we do not know that such marriages were in use among the Romans. I know no rule by which they were forbidden. (Gaius, i. 58, &c.)] [Footnote 7: The punishment of a Vestal Virgin for incontinence was death. She was placed alive in a subterranean vault with a light and some food. (Dionysius, ix. 40: Liv. 8. c. 15; Juvenal, Sat. iv. 8.) The man who debauched a Vestal was also put to death. The Vestal Virgins had full power of disposing of their property; they were emancipated from the paternal power by the fact of being selected to be Vestal Virgins (Gaius, i. 130); and they were not under the same legal disabilities as other women (Gaius, i. 145; according to Dion Cassius, 49. c. 38, Octavia and Livia received privileges like those of the Vestals). Another Licinia, a Vestal, had broken her vow, and was punished B.C. 113.] [Footnote 8: See the Life of Crassus, c. 12; and the Life of Sulla, c. 35.] [Footnote 9: This may hardly be a correct translation of [Greek: argurognômonas] ἀργυρογνωμόνας: but it is something like the meaning.] [Footnote 10: King Archidamus of Sparta, the second of the name, who commanded the Peloponnesian war, B.C. 431. Plutarch (Life of Demosthenes, c. 17) puts this saying in the mouth of one Krobylus, a demagogue.] [Footnote 11: Cicero (_Brutus,_ c. 66) speaks of the oratory of Crassus, and commends his care and diligence; but he speaks of his natural parts as not striking. Crassus spoke on the same side as Cicero in the defence of Murena, of Caelius, and of Balbus (Meyer, _Orator. Roman. Fragmenta,_ p. 382).] [Footnote 12: A Roman who aspired to the highest offices of the State, prepared his way by the magnificence of his public entertainments during his curule ædileship, and by his affable manners. An humble individual is always gratified when a great man addresses him by name, and a shake of the hand secures his devotion. Ovidius (_Ars Amat_. ii. 253) alludes to this way of winning popular favour, and judiciously observes that it costs nothing, which would certainly recommend it to Crassus. If a man's memory was not so good as that of Crassus, he had only to buy a slave, as Horatius (1 _Epist_. i. 50) recommends, who could tell him the name of every man whom he met. Such a slave was called Nomenclator. If the nomenclator's memory ever failed him, he would not let his master know it: he gave a person any name that came into his head.]