He held a number of positions during the reigns of emperors Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Didius Julianus, which included suffect consul and Urban prefect of Rome.
[2] Leunissen is one of many scholars who suggest that a headless and fragmentary inscription recovered in El Kef in Tunisia[3] provides details of Repentinus' cursus honorum.
[4]) Leunissen argues that this inscription not only confirms that Repentinus was consul and urban prefect, but that during the co-reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, Repentinus was curator of the Via Flaminia (which would be between 177 and 180), then after an unknown appointment (possibly commander of a legion) he served as governor of the imperial province of Lusitania.
When the emperor Pertinax was murdered on 28 March, according to the Historia Augusta, Julianus and Repentinus were outside the senate house where they had been summoned, finding the doors were locked.
Two tribunes informed the pair that Titus Flavius Claudius Sulpicianus was at the camp of the Praetorian Guard seeking their support to become emperor; Repentinus was one of a group who encouraged Julianus to compete for the purple, and the tribunes led them to the camp where Julianus outbid Sulpicianus and became emperor.