Duronia

plebeian. Of this obscure gens no cognomen, and only four members are known, viz.

1. Duronia, the mother of P. Aebutius. Her second husband was T. Sempronius Rutilus, who seems to have had a dislike to his stepson Aebutius. His mother, perhaps with a view to get rid of him m some way, wanted to get him initiated in the Bacchanalian orgies at Rome; but Aebutius betrayed the Bacchanalia to the consuls, who protected him against his mother, and Duronia was thus the cause of the discovery and suppression of those orgies, in B. C. 186. (Liv. 39.9, 11, 19.)

2. L. Duronius, was praetor in B. C. 181, and obtained Apulia for his province, to which the Istri were added, for ambassadors from Tarentum and Brundusium had complained of the piracy of the Istri. He was at the same time commissioned to make inquiries concerning the Bacchanalia, of which some remaining symptoms had been observed the year before. This commission was in all probability given him for no other reason but because those symptoms had been observed in the districts which had been assigned to him as his province. Subsequently he sailed with ten vessels to Illyricum, and the year after, when he returned to Rome, he reported that the Illyrian king Genthius was the cause of the piracy which was carried on in the Adriatic. (Liv. 40.18, 19, 42.)

3. M. Duronius, a Roman senator, who was ejected from the senate in B. C. 97 by the censors, M. Antonius, the orator, and L. Valerius Flaccus; for Duronius in his tribuneship (probably in the year B. C. 98) had abolished a lex sumptuaria, and had used very frivolous and reckless expressions on that occasion. In revenge he brought an accusation for ambitus against the censor M. Antonius. (V. Max. 2.9.5; Cic. de Orat. 2.68; comp. 64.)

4. C. Duronius, is mentioned by Cicero (Cic. Att. 5.8) as a friend of Milo. [L.S]

DURO´NIA a city of Samnium, mentioned only by Livy (Liv. 10.39), who tells us that it was taken by the Roman consul L. Papirius in B.C. 293; and from the amount of booty taken, and number of persons put to the sword, it would seem to have been a considerable town. Its site is supposed by Italian topographers to be occupied by a place called Civita Vecchia, 10 miles N. of Bojano (Bovianum), and 3 from Molise, beneath which flows a small stream, said to be still called the Durone, a tributary of the Trigno or Trinium. (Galanti, Descr. delle Due Sicil. lib. 9.100.4; Romanelli, vol. 2. p. 472.) This locality was, certainly that of an ancient city, but the evidence to connect it with Duronia is far from satisfactory.

A town in Samnium, in Italy, west of the Caudine passes (Liv.x. 39).