[137]
This, believe me, is the only path to praise,
and dignity and honour,—to be praised and beloved by men who are
wise and good, and endowed with good dispositions by nature; to become acquainted with the constitution of the state, as it has been most
wisely established by our ancestors, who, when they could no longer endure
the power of a king, created annual magistrates on the principle of making
the senate the perpetual supreme council of the republic, and of allowing
men to be elected into that body by the whole people, and of opening the
road to that supreme order to the industry and virtue of all the citizens.
They established the senate as the guardian, and president, and protector of
the republic; they chose the magistrates to depend on the authority of this
order, and to be as it were the ministers of this most dignified council;
and they contrived that the senate itself should be strengthened by the high
respectability of those ranks which came nearest to it, and so be able to
defend and promote the liberties and interests of the common people.
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, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
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.