This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
[7]
For a dictator cannot be chosen either by the people or by the senate, but one of the consuls or praetors comes before the assembled people and names as dictator the one whom he himself decides upon. And for this reason the one so named is called
‘dictator,’ from the Latin
‘dicere,’ to name or declare. Some, however, say that the dictator is so named because he puts no question to vote or show of hands, but ordains and declares of his own authority that which seems good to him; for the orders of magistrates, which the Greeks call
‘diatagmata,’ the Romans call
‘edicta.’
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1917. 5.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.