Written in 55 BCE, carmen 113 seemingly uses the first two consulships of Pompey to measure a decline in moral standards, with one unfortunate woman as the yardstick of sexual profligacy. It closes with a focus on marital infidelity. The epigram should be read as a savage attack upon Mucia, the one-time wife of Pompey. This paper affirms her identity by postulating a punning wordplay on Mucia and C(a)ecilia that made this identification clear to the poet's readership. No textual emendation is required. It is also proposed that the observation regarding adultery, no mere aphorism, queried the legitimacy of one or more of Pompey's children.

In 133 BC, when Scipio Aemilianus heard of the violent death of his cousin and brother-in-law, Ti. Gracchus, he uttered a line from Homer: ‘Thus perish all who attempt such.’ In effect, this endorsed the lynching of Gracchus. At a deeper level, it cast Gracchus (in the Homeric context of that quotation) as the tyrant Aegisthus. It may also have suggested an image of moral turpitude, Aegisthus having debauched his cousin Agamemnon’s wife. By analogy (if intended), that would have suggested an adulterous union between Gracchus and his sister Sempronia. It is further suggested that gossip arising from this extraordinary insinuation might have prompted a special reading of the claims circa 102 BC of L. Equitius to be the bastard son of Gracchus.

Plutarch records calumny directed at Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, though he offers no detail as to its content. This article speculates that Cicero's reference to rhetorical misgivings concerning her marriage offers a clue. References by Pliny and Solinus to the ominous nature of Cornelia's postnatal condition prompt the further speculation that enemies of the Gracchi were able to claim that both her marriage and the birth of her children had run counter to divine injunction.