Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus
The senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus ("senatorial decree concerning the Bacchanalia") is a notable Old Latin inscription dating to 186 BC. It was discovered in 1640 at Tiriolo, in Calabria, southern Italy. Published by the presiding praetor, it conveys the substance of a decree of the Roman Senate prohibiting the Bacchanalia throughout all Italy, except in certain special cases which must be approved specifically by the Senate. When members of the elite began to participate, information was put before the Senate by Publius Aebutius and his lover and neighbour Hispala Faecenia, who was also a well-known  prostitute, as told in the "Ab Urbe Condita Libri" of Livy. The cult was held to be a threat to the security of the state, investigators were appointed, rewards were offered to informants, legal processes were put in place and the Senate began the official suppression of the cult throughout Italy. According to the Augustan historian Livy, the chief historical source, many committed suicide to avoid indictment. The stated penalty for leadership was death. Livy stated that there were more executions than imprisonments. After the conspiracy had been quelled the Bacchanalia survived in southern Italy. The Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus  can be seen as an example of "realpolitik", a display of the Roman senate's authority to its Italian allies after the Second Punic War, and a reminder to any Roman politician, populist and would-be generalissimo that the Senate's collective authority trumped all personal ambition. Nevertheless, the extent and ferocity of the official response to the Bacchanalia was probably unprecedented, and betrays some form of moral panic on the part of Roman authorities; Burkert finds "nothing comparable in religious history before the persecutions of Christians". Text. The surviving copy is inscribed on a bronze tablet discovered in Calabria  in Southern Italy (1640), now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The text as copied from the inscription is as follows. Translation into classical Latin. The following passage uses classical reflexes of the Old Latin lexical items: Orthography. The spelling of the text of the "Senatus consultum" differs in many predictable ways from the spelling of Classical Latin. Some of these differences are merely orthographical; others reflect archaic pronunciations or other archaisms in the forms of words. Geminate consonants. In Classical Latin, geminate (or long) consonants are consistently written with a sequence of two letters: e.g., "cc", "ll", "ss" for  [kː], [lː], [sː]. These geminate consonants are not represented in the "Senatus consultum": Consonant clusters. Archaic gn- is found for n- at the beginning of the verb "nosco" The prefix "ad" appears as AR before V and F: The consonants "bl" appear as PL in POPLICOD "publicō" (15:10), recalling its origin from "populus". Diphthongs. AI is usually used instead of Classical "ae" in: EI became Classical "ī" in: EI at the end of a word often corresponds to Classical short "i" or to no vowel at all. However, in many cases such as "sibī", "utī", archaizing Classical forms ending in  ī are also found, especially in poetry. OV normally became Classical "ū" in: OI normally became Classical "ū" in: OI exceptionally became Classical "oe" in: Archaisms. The archaic ending -ce added to some forms of the pronoun "hic" is reduced to -c in Classical Latin in most cases: The ending -d, found on some adverbs and ablative singulars of nouns and pronouns, is lost in Classical Latin: The last two words AGRO TEVRANO (30:7-8) omit the final -d, despite containing the same ablative ending elsewhere written -OD; this fact suggests that at the time of writing, the final -d  was no longer pronounced in ordinary speech. In Classical Latin the prefixes "ex-" and "dis-" become "ē-" and "dī-" before voiced consonants. In the "Senatus consultum", they are still written EX and DIS: Archaic morpheme variants. The archaic passive infinitive ending -ier (instead of Classical "-ī") is used The archaic third-declension genitive singular ending -us (instead of Classical "-is") is used in NOMINVS (7.9) (instead of "nōminis"). The ending "-us" comes from the Indo-European genitive singular ending *-os, the o-grade variant of the genitive singular suffix for consonant-stem nouns (while Classical -is comes from the e -grade variant *-es of the same suffix). Translation into English. The inscription was translated by Nina E. Weston as follows.