[117]
Will you, O priests, sanction this universal and unprecedented tyranny of
every sort, this impudence and audacity and covetousness?
“Oh,” says he, “a priest was
present.” Are you not ashamed, when the matter is being discussed
before the priests, to say that a priest was present, not the college of
priests? especially when, as tribune of the people, you had power to summon
them and even to compel their attendance. Be it so. You did not call in the
whole college. Well. Which of the college was it who was present? For he had
vested that authority in one individual which belongs to all of them;
however, the age and rank of the man invest him with additional dignity.
There was need also of knowledge and although they were all of them learned
men, still no doubt age gives them still more experience.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
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.