[35]
Doubts may be raised as to whether the mover is
legally in a position to propose a law, as happened in
the case of Publius Clodius, whose appointment as
tribune of the plebs was alleged to be unconstitutional.1 Or the legality of the proposal itself may
be impugned in various ways; it may for instance be
urged that the law was not promulgated within
seventeen2 days, or was proposed, or is being proposed on an improper day, or in defiance of the
tribunicial veto or the auspices or any other legal
obstacle, or again that it is contrary to some existing law.
1 Clodius was a patrician and got himself made a plebeian by adoption to enable him to hold the tribunate. The question of the legality of this procedure is discussed by Cicero in the de Domo, 13–17.
2 Lit. within the space of three market-days. nundinum =9 days, the second market-day being the ninth, and forming the last day of the first nundinum and the first of the second. Similarly the third market-day is the last day of the second nundinum and the first of the third.
Quintilian. With an English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1920.
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.