[109]
But if any one establishes any new regulation on any points of
civil law, does he allow everything which has been previously done to remain
unaltered? Look at the Atinian law, at the Furian law, at the Voconian law itself,
as I said before; in short, at every law on the subject of civil rights; you will
find in all of them that regulations are established which are only to come into
operation after the passing of the law. Those who attribute the greatest importance
to the edict, say that the edict of the praetor is an annual law. You embrace more
in an edict than you can in a law. If the first of January puts an end to the edict
of the praetor, why does not the edict have its birth also on the first of January?
Or, is it the case that no one can advance forward by his edict into the year when
another man is to be praetor, but that he may retire back into the year when another
man has been praetor? And if you had published this edict for the sake of right, and
not for the sake of one man, you would have composed it more carefully.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
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.