[49]
Oh! but you did not command the Mamertines to
furnish a ship, because they are one of the confederate cities. Thank God, we have a
man trained by the hands of the Fetiales; 1 a man above all others pious and careful in all that
belongs to public religion. Let all the men who have been praetors before you be
given up to the Mamertines, because they have commanded them to furnish ships
contrary to the provisions of the treaty. But still you, O you pious and scrupulous
man, how was it that you commanded the people of Tauromenium, which is also a confederate
city, to furnish a ship? Will you make any one believe that, while the case of both
the states was exactly the same, the law that you administered, and the condition in
which you left each, was so different, without money being the cause of the
difference?
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
1 The Fetiales were a college of Roman priests, who acted as the guardians of the public faith; it was their province to determine the circumstances under which satisfaction was to be demanded from, or hostilities declared against any foreign state. They were the especial arbiters of peace, of war, and of treaties. Their number was probably twenty. They were selected from the most noble families, and their office was held for life. The name is of uncertain derivation—See Smith, Dict. Ant. p. 416, in voce.
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.