Manius Acilius Glabrio Gnaeus Cornelius Severus

His career is known through a surviving inscription, CIL XIV, 4237. It records a cursus honorum that Edward Champlin considered unusual for a patrician,^[6] and Ronald Syme wrote "presents abnormal features" and elaborates: "The patrician senator never sees an army; he accedes to the fasces at the age of thirty two or soon after; and he may not bother to leave the shores of Italy until the sortition (discretely managed) awards Asia or Africa fourteen or fifteen years later."^[7]

His career as a senator began in a predictable fashion, as a triumvir monetalis, about which Syme notes, "No patrician in this epoch held any of the other three minor magistracies." However, his next office was unusual: Acilius Glabrio saw service as a military tribune of Legio XV Apollinaris. After Trajan became emperor, only one other patrician is known to have served as a military tribune, Publius Manilius Vopiscus Vicinillianus, consul of 114.^[8] Then he was praetorian legate twice—the first as the adjunct to the governor of Crete and Cyrenaica, the other to the proconsul of Africa—prior to becoming quaestor.

Syme examined the context of his posting. He notes that in 137 (the year Syme concludes Acilius Glabrio served with the Legio XV Apollinaris) the governor of the province that the legion was stationed in was Flavius Arrianus, who dedicated his Tacitica to the current emperor, Hadrian; Syme also notes that 137 was an unsettled year towards the end of Hadrian's reign, when intrigue surrounded his selection of a successor. "A prudent father would do well if he removed his young son beyond ... [its] reach."^[9] Syme also notes that while stationed in Cappadocia, Acilius Glabrio granted Roman citizenship to the family of Acilius Diodotus, a sophist from Caesarea (modern Kayseri).^[10]

Little can be said about his time in Crete and Cyrenaica: the governor when he was in the province, 138/139, is not known. However, Syme proposes that when Acilius Glabrio was in Africa, 139/140, the proconsul of Africa at the time was his father, Manius Acilius Glabrio.^[11] Syme concludes his father's influence was present throughout this part of his life.

After his consulship Acilius Glabrio was proconsul of Africa in his own right between AD 164 and 168.^[12] That he was one of the witnesses to the Tabula Banasitana (AE 1971, 534) shows he was still alive on 6 July 177.

According to a partly preserved gravestone CIL XIV, 2484, his wife's name was Faustina; the inscription memorializes two daughters: Faustina Aciliana (died aged 13 years, 2 months and 11 days) and Priscilla Aciliana (also died young). It is possible they had another daughter, Acilia, who was the mother of Tiberius Claudius Cleobulus. They are known to have had two sons, Manius Acilius Glabrio, twice consul;^[13] and Manius Acilius Faustinus, suffect consul in 179.^[14]

Champlin suggests that, based on her name, Faustina was a descendant of the wife of Marcus Annius Verus—more specifically, Ummidia Cornificia Faustina, the niece of Emperor Marcus Aurelius.^[15] However, Syme raises two objections to this identification. His first is that Ummidia Cornificia was much too young to be married to Acilius Glabrio: her parents were married in 136, and her presumed oldest son was consul for the second time in 186. His second is that, "[i]f Glabrio had married a cousin or a niece of Marcus, it is strange that, surviving his consulate by a quarter of a century, he was able to avoid a second tenure of the fasces."^[16]