21.
Manius Juventius Thalna, the praetor with jurisdiction over suits between citizens and aliens, was stirring up the people against the Rhodians and had announced a motion to declare war against Rhodes
[2??]
and to choose from the magistrates of this year one to be sent to this war with a fleet (Juventius hoped that he would be the one designated). Such action was opposed by Marcus Antonius and Marcus Pomponius, tribunes of the people.
[3]
But not only had the praetor in the first place undertaken the matter in a novel and dangerous fashion, because he
[4??]
was proposing entirely on his own initiative, without previously consulting the senate or notifying the consuls, to put to the people the question, whether it was their will and command that war should be declared against the Rhodians, whereas previously the senate had always been consulted first about war, and then the question brought before the people
[5??]
on the authority of the senate,1 but the tribunes also were in the same position, since the custom was that no one should veto a law until opportunity was given to private citizens2 to argue for and against the law;
[6]
in this way it had often turned out either that those [p. 315]who had not announced that they would exercise the3 veto did so when the faults of the law had been called to their attention by the speeches of those who opposed the law, or that those who had come intending to veto were overborne by the prestige of those who argued for the law.
[7]
On this occasion the praetor and the tribunes vied with each other in doing everything in the wrong order; the tribunes by their premature veto . . . the haste of the praetor . . .
[8??]
till the arrival of the general . .4
1 There was precedent, however, for action by the assembly over senatorial opposition, see XXI. lxiii. 3; XXXVIII. xxxvi. 8, and the note. A constitutional question is involved: war was regularly declared by the centuriate assembly, the oldest and least democratic gathering; but could the praetor summon this assembly, except for judicial purposes? The decision to relieve Messana which opened the First Punic War is a near parallel, though one faction of the senate led the appeal to the commons (Polybius I. 11. 1-3).
2 Not excluding magistrates; Livy takes it for granted that they might address a meeting; for examples, see XXXIV. i. 7; v. 1; XLIII. xvi. 8.
3 B.C. 167
4 Polybius XXX. 4.6 says that Antonius, who had removed the praetor Juventius from the Rostra, introduced the Rhodians to the senate; Philophron spoke first, then Astymedes; Livy undertakes to reproduce the speech of the latter, though it is not found in Polybius, who criticized its tone adversely.
Livy. Books XLIII-XLV With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1951: published without copyright notice.
The Annenberg CPB/Project 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.