previous next

[80] And, if he was not, what could be a more audacious thing than your putting his name to that bill? What could be more desperate than your condition, when, even if you told a lie about it you could not get up any more respectable authority? But if he was the first person who voted for it as he easily might have been, as he was a man who, for want of a house, slept all night in the forum, why should he not swear that he was at Cadiz, when you have proved so very distinctly that you were at Interamna? Do you, then,—you, a man devoted to the people,—think that our rights as citizens, and our freedom, ought to he established on this principle; so that when a tribune of the people brings forward a motion, “Do you approve and determine”
* * * *if a hundred Sedulii should say that they do approve and determine, any one of us may lose our privileges? Our ancestors, then, were not attached to the interests of the people, who with respect to the rights of citizenship and liberty established those principles which neither the power of time, nor the authority of magistrates, nor the decisions of judges, nor the sovereign power of the whole people of Rome, which in all other affairs is most absolute, can undermine.


Creative Commons License
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.

load focus Latin (Albert Clark, 1909)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Rome (Italy) (1)
Interamna (Italy) (1)
Cadiz (Spain) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: