A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

called in many editions of Cicero C. STALE'NUS, one of the judices at the trial of Oppianicus in B. C. 74. It was believed that he had at first received money from the accused to acquit him, but afterwards voted for his condemnation, because he had received a still larger sum from the accuser Cluentius. (Cic. Ver. 2.32, with the note of Zumpt.) Cicero, in his oration for Cluentius, in B. C. 66, in which he is anxious to remove from the minds of the judges the bad impressions that existed against his client, dwells at length upon the fact that Oppianicus had bribed Staienus, and also represents the latter as the agent employed by Oppianicus to bribe the other judges. According to Cicero, Staienus was a low-born contemptible rascal, who called himself Aelius Paetus, as if he had been adopted by some member of the Aelia gens, and who had assumed the cognomen Paetus, in preference to that of Ligur, another cognomen of the Aelii, because the latter would have reminded the people that he had sprung from Liguria. His oratory was characterized by vehemence and fury, but was sufficiently popular to have raised him to the honours of the state, had he not been condemned of majestas, in consequence of exciting a mutiny among the troops during his quaestorship.