Then Lælius said: I see, my Scipio, that on the subject of the Greek institutions, which you censure, you prefer attacking the customs of the most renowned peoples to contending with your favorite Plato, whose name you have avoided citing, especially as * * *
V. So that Cicero, in his treatise on the Commonwealth, says that it was a reproach to young men if they had no lovers.
Not only as at Sparta, where boys learn to steal and plunder.
And our master Plato, even more than Lycurgus, who would have everything to be common, so that no one should be able to call anything his own property.
I would send him to the same place whither he sends Homer, crowned with chaplets and anointed with perfumes, banishing him from the city which he is describing.
VI. The judgment of the censor inflicts scarcely anything more than a blush on the man whom he condemns. Therefore as all that adjudication turns solely on the name (nomen), the punishment is called ignominy.
Nor should a prefect be set over women, an officer who is created among the Greeks; but there should be a censor to teach husbands to manage their wives.
So the discipline of modesty has great power. All women abstain from wine.
And also if any woman was of bad character, her relations used not to kiss her.
So petulance is derived from asking (petendo) wantonness (procacitas) from procando, that is, from demanding.
VII. For I do not approve of the same nation being the ruler and the farmer of lands. But both in private families and in the affairs of the Commonwealth I look upon economy as a revenue.
Faith (fides) appears to me to derive its name from that being done (fit) which is said.
In a citizen of rank and noble birth, caressing manners, display, and ambition are marks of levity.
Examine for a while the books on the Republic, and learn that good men know no bound or limit in consulting the interests of their country. See in that treatise with what praises frugality, and continency, and fidelity to the marriage tie, and chaste, honorable, and virtuous manners are extolled.
VIII. I marvel at the elegant choice, not only of the facts, but of the language. If they dispute (jurgant). It is a contest between well-wishers, not a quarrel between enemies, that is called a dispute (jurgium).
Therefore the law considers that neighbors dispute (jurgare) rather than quarrel (litigare) with one another.
The bounds of man's care and of man's life are the same; so by the pontifical law the sanctity of burial * * *
They put them to death, though innocent, because they had left those men unburied whom they could not rescue from the sea because of the violence of the storm.
