Lex Annales
Lex Annales were those statutes which determined at what age a man might be a candidate for the several magistracies: if he was elected to one at the earliest possible age, he was said to become praetor, consul, &c., anno suo
(Cic. de Off. 2.1. 7, 59; Philip. 5.17, 47 sq.; Tac. Ann. 11.22). The first of them was a Lex Villia, proposed by L. Villius, a tribune, B.C. 180 (Liv. 25.2, 40.44), by which a man could be elected quaestor at the age of thirty-one, aedile at thirty-seven, praetor at forty, and consul at forty-three. There seems to have been a Lex Pinaria on the same subject carried by one M. Pinarius Rusca, a tribune, circ. 134 B.C. (Cic. de Orat. 2.65, 261): see Wex, Rhein. Museum, 1845, pp. 276-288; Hofmann, Röm. Senat. pp. 172-177.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.