User:T8612/sandbox/Gaius Aurelius Cotta (consul 252)

Gaius Aurelius Cotta was a politician of the Roman Republic. He had a great career, being the first of his family to reach the consulship in 252, and again in 248 BC. He fought Carthage during the First Punic War, and was notably awarded a triumph for his capture of the Lipara Islands in 252 BC. He was also censor in 241 BC.

Family background
Aurelius is the first recorded member of the gens Aurelia, a plebeian family at Rome. The name Aurelius means golden and may therefore refer to blond hair. Festus tells that it was the Sabine word for the Sun, perhaps alluding to the origin of the family, although most noble Roman families invented their ancestry to enhance their prestige.

Aurelius' ancestry is given by the Fasti Capitolini, his father and grandfather were respectively named Lucius and Gaius, but nothing is known on them.

Career
Aurelius ' early career is not known as Livy's books on the period are lost. His first known magistracy is therefore his first consulship of 252. His colleague was the patrician Publius Servilius Geminus. Despite being from a much less prestigious family, Cassiodorus—who relied on Livy—describes Aurelius as the consul prior, which means the Centuriate Assembly elected him before Servilius. This election made him a novus homo, the first consul of his gens; five "new men" are recorded during the First Punic War, an unusually high number. By 252, this war had already been going for 12 years and most of the land battles were waged in Sicily, where the two consuls were sent.

Stemma of the Aurelii Cottae
Stemma made from Münzer and Badian.

Ancient sources

 * Titus Livius (Livy), History of Rome.
 * Sextus Julius Frontinus, Strategemata (Stratagems).
 * Cassiodorus, Chronica.

Modern sources

 * George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, 1897.
 * Friedrich Münzer, Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families, translated by Thérèse Ridley, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 (originally published in 1920).
 * Lily Ross Taylor and T. Robert S. Broughton, "The Order of the Two Consuls' Names in the Yearly Lists", Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 19 (1949), pp. 3–14.
 * T. Robert S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, American Philological Association ,1952.
 * Ernst Badian, Studies in Greek and Roman History, Blackwell, 1964.
 * Michael Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage, Cambridge University Press, 1974.
 * T. P. Wiseman, "Legendary Genealogies in Late-Republican Rome", Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Oct., 1974), pp. 153–164.