[37]
There is extant, too, a letter of the
elder Marcus Cato to his son Marcus, in which he writes
that he has heard that the youth has been discharged
by the consul,1 when he was serving in Macedonia in
the war with Perseus. He warns him, therefore, to be
careful not to go into battle; for, he says, the man who is
not legally a soldier has no right to be fighting the foe.
12. This also I observe—that he who would
properly have been called “a fighting enemy”
(perduellis) was called “a guest” (hostis), thus relieving the ugliness of the fact by a softened
expression; for “enemy” (hostis) meant to our ancestors [p. 41] what we now call “stranger” (peregrinus).
This is proved by the usage in the Twelve Tables:
“Or a day fixed for trial with a stranger” (hostis).
And again: “Right of ownership is inalienable for
ever in dealings with a stranger” (hostis). What can
exceed such charity, when he with whom one is at war
is called by so gentle a name? And yet long lapse of
time has given that word a harsher meaning: for it has
lost its signification of “stranger” and has taken on
the technical connotation of “an enemy under arms.”
1 Lucius Aemilius Paulus (B.C. 168).
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.