24.
But if by that most severe Servilian law, the chief men of the city, men of
the greatest dignity, citizens of the most profound wisdom, allowed this
road to the freedom of the city to be opened, in accordance with the
resolution of the people, to the Latins, that is to say to the federate
states, and if this was found no fault with by the Licinian and Mucian law,
especially when the very nature and name of a prosecution, and the reward
which no one could obtain except through the misfortune of some
senator,1 could not be over pleasant either to
a senator or to any virtuous man; was it possible to doubt that the
decisions of our generals were to be of force with respect to that kind of
reward in which the decisions of the judges had already been ratified? Do we
suppose, then, that the sanction of the Latin tribes was given to the
Servilian law, or to the other laws in which the reward of the freedom of
the city was held out to men of the Latin towns, as an encouragement to such
and such conduct?
[55]
Listen now to the decision of the senate, which has at all times been
approved of by the decision of the people. Our ancestors, O
judges, ordained that the sacred rites of Ceres should be performed with the very strictest religious
reverence and the greatest solemnity; which, as they had been originally
derived from the Greeks, had always been conducted by Greek priestesses, and
were called Greek rites. But when they were selecting a priestess from
Greece to teach us that Greek
sacred ceremony, and to perform it, still they thought it right that it
should be a citizen who was sacrificing for citizens, in order that she
might pray to the immortal gods with knowledge, indeed, derived from a
distant and foreign source but with feelings belonging to one of our own
people and citizens. I see that these priestesses were for the most part
Neapolitans or Velians, and those are notoriously federate cities. I am not
speaking of any ancient cases, I am only mentioning things that have
happened lately, as, for instance, that before the freedom of the city was
conferred on the Velians, Caius Valerius Flaccus being the city praetor,
did, in accordance with a resolution passed by the senate, submit a motion
to the people concerning a woman of Velia, called Calliphana, mentioning her expressly by name,
for the purpose of making her a Roman citizen. Are we then to suppose that
the Velians ratified the law which was then passed about her; or that that
priestess was not made a Roman citizen; or that the treaty was violated by
the senate and people of Rome?
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
1 Orellius considers all this sentence corrupt and unintelligible.
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.