Caeso Fabius Ambustus

Caeso Fabius Ambustus was a four-time consular tribune of the Roman Republic around the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries BC.

Caeso was quaestor in 409 BC, the first year the office was opened to the plebs, and three of his colleagues were plebeians.[1] Caeso was consular tribune for the first time in 404,[2][3] again in 401,[4][5] a third time in 395,[6][7] and a fourth time in 390.

Caeso was the son of Marcus Fabius Ambustus, the Pontifex Maximus, and brother to Numerius and Quintus.[8] With his two brothers, Caeso was sent as ambassador to the Gauls, when the latter were besieging Clusium, and participated in an attack against the besieging Gauls. The Gauls demanded that the three should be surrendered to them for violating the law of nations. When the Roman Senate refused to give up the guilty parties, the Gauls marched against Rome, which they sacked after the battle of the Allia.[9][10]

Many scholars believe the entire story of the events at Clusium to be fiction, as Clusium had no real reason to appeal to Rome for help, and the Gauls needed no real provocation to sack Rome. The story, it is hypothesized, exists to provide an explanation for an otherwise unmotivated attack on Rome, and to depict Rome as a bulwark of Italy against the Gauls.[11]

He was the father of Marcus Fabius Ambustus.

  1. ^ Livy, Ab Urbe Condita iv. 54
  2. ^ Livy, iv. 61
  3. ^ Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica xiv. 19. 1
  4. ^ Livy, v. 10
  5. ^ Diodorus Siculus, xiv. 44. 1
  6. ^ Livy, v. 24
  7. ^ Diodorus Siculus,' xiv. 94. 1
  8. ^ Smith, William (1867). "Ambustus (3)". In William Smith (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 141. Archived from the original on 2010-11-20. Retrieved 2010-03-20.
  9. ^ Livy, v. 35, 36, 41
  10. ^ Plutarch Camillus 17
  11. ^ Drummond, Andrew (1996), "Fabius Ambustus, Quintus", in Hornblower, Simon; Spawforth, Anthony (eds.), Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-521693-8, OCLC 45857759