Marcus Claudius Fronto

Marcus Claudius Fronto (killed in battle AD 170) was a Roman senator and Consul, and a general in the Imperial Roman army during the reigns of emperors Antoninus Pius (r.138-61) and Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-80).

Despite his important military role under Marcus Aurelius, Fronto's existence is only known from two inscriptions, both of which contain a summary of his career:

The lack of mention of Fronto in surviving literary sources for this period is unsurprising, as they are extremely sparse and fragmentary.

Nothing is known about Fronto's early life except that his family originated in Asia Minor and that his father, Tiberius Claudius Fronto, was a Roman senator. Fronto was thus born into the ordo senatorius ("senatorial order"), the highly privileged and wealthy elite of some 600 families which filled most of the major civilian and military posts in the empire. Fronto pursued a typical senatorial cursus honorum (public-service career), a mix of civilian and military posts.

In the civic sphere, Fronto, in his early 20's, served a traditional term as one of the decemviri stlitibus iudicandis ("Committee of Ten charged with adjudicating legal disputes"), a judicial body. He entered the Senate by the normal route, as one of 20 candidates elected by senators as quaestors each year (for which the minimum age was 25). He then served as curule aedile ab actis senatus (in charge of drafting senatorial decrees) and praetor. The culmination of his civilian career was election in 165 or 166 as Suffect Consul.

(NB: These posts were the old magistracies, one-year executive posts of the Roman Republic. In the imperial era, the posts survived due to the official fiction that the state remained a republic, but their function was limited to the administration of the City of Rome. Nevertheless, they remained crucial to career advancement, as they determined seniority in the Senate and eligibility to provincial governorships. The latter were reserved for senators of praetorian rank i.e. those who had held the post of praetor).

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