Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
At length the Romans resolved to send the right man to Greece. This
was Lucius Aemilius Paullus, son of the consul of the same name that
fell at Cannae; a man of the old nobility but of humble means, and
therefore not so successful in the comitia as on the battle-field,
where he had remarkably distinguished himself in Spain and still more
so in Liguria.
The people elected him for the second time consul in
the year 586 on account of his merits--a course which was at that
time rare and exceptional.
He was in all respects the right man: an
excellent general of the old school, strict as respected both himself
and his troops, and, notwithstanding his sixty years, still hale and
vigorous; an incorruptible magistrate--"one of the few Romans of that
age, to whom one could not offer money," as a contemporary says of
him--and a man of Greek culture, who, even when commander-in-chief,
embraced the opportunity of travelling through Greece to inspect its
works of art.
