Romans

The Rhodian deputies said, “You Romans profess to believe that your wars are successful, because they are just:

” Indeed the form which was prescribed for the Roman heralds to use in declarations of war, bears exactly the same import.

The Romans too made the passage of the Rhine a source of tribute, and Seneca relates that a toll was paid for going over bridges.

For most of them are Romans, and who would lay hands on these?

and, yielding to the Romans in all else, you did not think fit to yield in this one thing, the choosing nothing shameful for the sake of gain.

For do not think the Romans so dull and ignorant as to choose nothing of what is under them to be free and noble, but to wish rather to rule over slaves.

We never know the Romans except as subject to one of the strongest of central governments, which armed the law courts with the force at its command.

It is impossible to determine how much new law there was in the Laws of Solon, or in the Twelve Tables of Rome, or in the Laws of Alfred and Canute, or in the Salic Law which is the oldest of the so-called Leges Barbarorum, but in all probability the quantity was extremely small.

As in several other instances, the legal dignity of this description of property among the Romans appears to answer to its religious dignity among the Hindoos.

From these corruptions the Romans were protected by their code.

It is remarkable that a Will never seems to have been regarded by the Romans as a means of disinheriting a Family, or of effecting the unequal distribution of a patrimony.

I regard, therefore, the Roman horror of Intestacy as a monument of a very early conflict between ancient law and slowly changing ancient sentiment on the subject of the Family.

On the other hand, the comparatively scanty Roman evidence concerning the sacra privata would seem to show that they dwindled in importance and popular respect.

Fustel de Coulanges was the first modern writer to bring into full light, in his brilliant book ‘La Cité Antique,’ the hitherto little observed importance of the private or family worship of the Greeks and Romans.

We know in fact that at Rome a Slave could perform the family sacrifices on his master’s death;

and which the Romans, in many respects barbarous, and whose savage virtue has been too much admired, reserved for the slaves alone.

These truths were known to the Roman legislators, amongst whom, as I have already observed, slaves, only, who were not considered as citizens, were tortured.

if the example of the Romans;

But it is by superstition that we are reckoned a third race, not by nation, so that there are Romans, Jews, and then Christians.

The Romans' deities are increased by her dignity.

you demand from heaven I know not what shades, incorporeal, lifeless, and names from things, and you sanction them, dividing the whole state of man among single powers, even from the very conception in the womb:

when the people has been bereft of a just king, 'a longing holds their hearts for long,' as Ennius says, 'after the death of the best of kings';

"Then you see also this—of which, as my discourse goes on, I think I shall say more—that, Tarquinius expelled, the people exulted with a certain wondrous arrogance of liberty;

But as that man who sails, when the sea suddenly begins to grow rough, and that sick man, when his disease grows heavy, implore the help of one—so our people in peace and at home commands and threatens its very magistrates, refuses, appeals, calls them to account;

The Romans long resisted the avarice of the senate, vainly depended upon elective tribunes to abolish frauds in which they participated, and at length fled from the avarice of many, to the avarice of one.

The senate of Rome was converted into a despicable body of men by uniting legislation and patronage.

and these, instead of being units like those of Lacedemon, are above ten times as numerous as were the sovereign conscript fathers of Rome.

Earlier than some of its own gods is the woodland Rome;

Therefore the Romans were not religious before they were great;

As many, then, are the sacrileges of the Romans as their trophies;

and everywhere proclaiming that I have become unworthy of the empire of the Romans.

Indeed, since by my labours, toils, and perils in public life I think I have not deserted the post in which the Roman people stationed me, I surely owe it, so far as I am able, to labour at this too:

For who is so hostile, almost, to the very name of Rome as to scorn or reject the Medea of Ennius or the Antiopa of Pacuvius, on the ground that, though he delights in the same plays of Euripides, he hates Latin letters?

There are many things, too, in our institutions drawn from them;

In many respects, Brutus, I am wont to admire the talents and virtues of our countrymen, but most of all in those studies which, sought very late, they carried over into this state from Greece.

Who, while they committed other things to writing — some the civil law, some their own speeches, some the monuments of their ancestors — pursued this most ample of all the arts, the discipline of living well, by their life rather than by their writings.

and the Romans sacrifice to Heracles the Fly-averter, and to Fever and to Fear, whom they too enroll among the company of Heracles.

And the Romans, ascribing their greatest successes to Fortune, and reckoning her the greatest goddess, carried her into the privy and dedicated her there, assigning the latrine to the goddess as a fitting temple.

And among the Romans the things done over wills have their order — those scales and asses and acts of redemption and the touchings of the ears that are done for justice' sake — some that they may be done justly, some for the apportioning of the honour, and one that the bystander, as though some weight were laid upon him, may stand and hear and take the rank of a witness.

And have not the Romans described for us in the most exact way the greater part of Ceylon?

Neither can the Portuguese by any possible means claim to have discovered India, a country which was famous centuries and centuries ago!

Again, as we read in Tacitus, the Germans accused the Romans of ‘preventing all intercourse between them and of closing up to them the rivers and roads, and almost the very air of heaven’.

Come, give to those bodies, to those minds that know nothing of dainties, luxury, and riches, give them reason, give them discipline—to say nothing more, we shall certainly need to recall the Roman character.

any such variation was to early Roman ears not only futile but almost blasphemous.

As the Romans put it, imperitia culpae adnumeratur.

In whom have the nations believed — the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, and those who dwell in Mesopotamia, Armenia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and those who inhabit Pontus and Asia and Pamphylia, those who reside in Egypt, and those who inhabit the region of Africa beyond Cyrene, Romans and resident foreigners, and then the Jews in Jerusalem, and the other nations — as now the various tribes of the …

These shall be our bodies, which he beseeches the Romans to exhibit a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God.

The Scythians overflow the Persians, the Phoenicians belch forth into Africa, the Phrygians bring forth the Romans, the Chaldaean seed is brought up into Egypt;

But when the urn of worldly lots was changed, and God preferred the Romans, the sister city, indeed, by her own decision hastened to change, so that, when Scipio landed, she had already before greeted him from her dress, anticipating the Roman early.

We are therefore buried with him through baptism into death, that, as Christ rose from the dead, so we too may walk in newness of life.

The Greek and Roman laws were nothing like the Oriental codes, but still they were far more meddlesome and despotic than anything we have known in our day.