[2]
It is in accordance with the customs and established usages
of our ancestors, O Romans, that those who, by your kindness, have overtaken the images of
their family,1 should, the first time that they hold an assembly of the people,
take an opportunity of uniting thanks to you for your kindness with a panegyric on their
ancestors, and in the speech then made, some men are, on some occasions, found worthy of the
rank of their ancestors. But most men only accomplish this,—namely, to make it seem
that so vast a debt is due to their ancestors, that there is something still left to be paid
to their posterity.
1 “Those Romans who had passed through one of the high offices of aediles, praetor, or consul were allowed to have their likenesses handed down to posterity. These likenesses were, according to Casaubon, busts; but according to Schweighauser, masks; they were kept in the hall of the house, in niches appropriated for their reception, and were brought forth on occasions of funerals, together with their robes of office, to impersonate the dead. Whoever had such images in his possession was nobilis.”—Riddle, Lat. Dict. v. Imago.
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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.