The Republic and The Laws (Oxford World's Classics)

by Cicero

  ATTICUS: I absolutely agree,* and I think your account is the 34 most convincing. But let us have the rest.

  MARCUS: I shall indeed, as briefly as I can. We next come to the law governing war.* In my law I have enacted that in beginning, waging, and ending a war justice and good faith should be the most influential factors, and that there should be official spokesmen in connection with such matters. As for the soothsayers’ rites, expiations, and atonements, I think they have been set down clearly enough in the law itself.

  ATTICUS: I agree; all the pronouncements in question have to do with religion.

  MARCUS: But I do wonder, Titus, how you can agree with what comes next, or how I can refute you.

  ATTICUS: And what, may I ask, is that?

  MARCUS: The provision about women’s nocturnal sacrifices.

  ATTICUS: But I do agree with that, especially as in the law itself you make an exception of the regular official sacrifices.

  MARCUS: What, then, will become of our Iacchus and Eumolpidae* and their solemn mysteries if we abolish nocturnal rites? For we are framing laws, not just for the Roman people, but for all good and stable communities.

  ATTICUS: I take it you make an exception of those rites into which we ourselves have been initiated.

  36

  MARCUS: Yes, I shall do so. For I think your beloved Athens has brought to birth, and contributed to human life, many outstanding and divine creations, and nothing better than those mysteries. Thanks to them we have become mild and cultivated, moving from a rough and savage life to a state of civilization; we have learned from so-called ‘initiations’ things which are in fact the first principles of life, and we have been taught a way of living happily and also of dying with brighter hopes. What I dislike about nocturnal festivals is illustrated by the comic poets.* Had such licence existed in Rome, what, one wonders, would that fellow* have done—the one who, with lustful intentions, intruded on a sacrifice where not even an involuntary glance was permitted?

  ATTICUS: By all means bring in such a ban for Rome, but do not take our (Athenian) laws away from us.

  MARCUS: I return, then, to mine. We must certainly take great care to ensure that the good name of women is safeguarded by the clear light of day when many eyes are upon them, and that they shall be initiated into the mysteries of Ceres according to those rites which are practised in Rome. Our ancestors’ strictness in such matters is shown by the old senatorial resolution about the Bacchanalia,* and by the consuls’ inquiry and punishments, supported by military force. In case we may perhaps seem rather harsh, the Theban Diagondas in central Greece suppressed all nocturnal rituals by law in perpetuity. Strange gods, and the ceremonies in their honour which turned night into day, were satirized by Aristophanes, the wittiest poet of the Old Comedy. In his work* Sabazius and other foreign deities were prosecuted and banished from the state.

  37

  To resume: an unintentional infringement must be carefully atoned for; in this way the official priest should relieve the offender from anxiety. But he should condemn and denounce as sacrilege (outrageous and deliberate breaches of religious law).

  Next, as the public games are divided between theatre and racecourse, athletic contests should take place on the race-course in running, boxing, and wrestling, and also in chariot-racing until undisputed winners emerge. The theatre should be alive with song, accompanied by strings and pipes, provided such performances are kept within due bounds as the law requires. I agree with Plato* that nothing can so easily influence young and impressionable minds as the variety of vocal sounds. One can hardly express what an enormous power that exerts for better or worse. It animates the sluggish and calms the excited; now it relaxes the emotions, now it makes them tense. In Greece many states would have benefited from retaining the old-fashioned manner of singing. As it was, their characters changed along with their singing and degenerated into effeminacy. Either they were corrupted, as some think, by the sweet seductiveness of the music, or, after their sternness had been subverted by other vices, their ears and souls became changed, leaving room for this musical change too.

  38

  That is why Greece’s greatest thinker and by far her most learned scholar was very worried about this deadly infection. He maintains that the laws of music* cannot be changed without bringing a change in the laws of the state. I myself do not think the phenomenon is so alarming, nor yet do I think it should simply be waved aside. I do notice how in theatres which once used to be filled with the agreeable plainness of Livius’ and Naevius’ tunes audiences now rock to and fro jerking their necks and eyes in time with the inflexions of the singer’s voice. Ancient Greece used to punish that sort of thing severely. It foresaw far in advance that the deadly plague, gradually creeping into the citizens’ minds and infecting them with pernicious crazes and pernicious ideas, would suddenly bring about the collapse of entire states—if, indeed, it is true that Sparta, which was famed for its severity, ordered every string which Timotheus had on his instrument beyond the number seven to be cut out.

  Next in the body of law is the provision that ‘the best of the ancestral rites’ should be observed. When the Athenians consulted Pythian Apollo* about what ceremonies in particular they should retain, the following reply was given: ‘those which were customary amongst your ancestors’. When they returned, saying that their ancestral custom had often changed, and asking what custom out of the many they should choose to follow, they were told ‘the best’. It is certainly true that whatever is best should be considered the oldest and the nearest to God.

  40

  I have abolished all collections except the one which is devoted specifically to the Idaean Mother and lasts just a few days.* Such practices fill a man’s mind with superstition and empty his pocket.

  A person who commits sacrilege is liable to punishment. This means not only one who has stolen ‘a sacred object’ but also one who has stolen ‘an object lodged in a sacred place’. Nowadays too deposits are frequently made in temples. When in Cilicia, Alexander* is supposed to have put money in a shrine at Soli. And they say that the eminent Athenian, Cleisthenes,* when he was apprehensive about his fortunes, placed his daughters’ dowries in the care of Juno at Samos.

  41

  As for perjury and incest, I assume there is no need for any comment here.

  Impious men are not ‘to dare to placate the gods with gifts’. They should pay attention to Plato,* who forbids anyone to doubt what God’s reaction to this will be; after all, no good man is prepared to accept gifts from a villain.

  Enough has been said in the law about the need to be scrupulous in fulfilling vows. (For nothing is more binding than) the contract by which we are tied to God by vows. There is surely no justified objection to the penalty imposed* for breaking a holy promise. I need not adduce here examples of wicked men; tragedies are full of them. Instead I shall mention briefly actual events of which everyone is aware. I suspect that the instance which I am about to recall may seem to lie beyond the scale of an ordinary person’s experience; still, since I am talking to you, I shall reveal everything in the hope that what I say will seem welcome to the immortal gods rather than objectionable to men.

  On my departure* all the laws of religion were sullied by vile and criminal citizens. My domestic gods were cast down; in their place a temple of Licence* was erected; the man who had watched over their shrines was expelled. Consider for a moment (there is no point in mentioning names) the results which ensued. When all my property had been seized and destroyed, I refused to allow the deity who was the guardian of the city* to be desecrated by unholy men; I conveyed her from my house to the house of the Father himself. For doing so I won from the Senate, from Italy, and from every nation in the world the verdict that I had saved my country. And what more splendid experience than that could a man have? As for those who by their crimes cast down and trampled on religion, some of them are broken up and scattered in obscurity. The ringleaders in those crimes, who outdid the rest in the
profanation of all that was sacred, suffered every kind of agony and disgrace in their lives, and in addition were deprived of a burial and of proper funeral rites.

  42

  QUINTUS: Yes, I’m aware of all this, Marcus; and I’m duly grateful to the gods. Yet all too often we see things turning out rather differently.

  43

  MARCUS: That is because we have false notions, Quintus, about the nature of divine punishment. We lapse into common misconceptions and fail to notice the truth. We gauge human unhappiness by death, or physical pain, or mental suffering, or an adverse verdict. I grant that these are normal human experiences which have happened to many good men. But crime involves a grim retribution—one which is intrinsically of the utmost severity over and above the legal consequences. I have seen men who would never have been my enemies had they not loathed their country, consumed by greed or fear, or the guilty knowledge of what they were doing, at one moment fearing, at another despising, religion and the courts which they had also subverted by bribing not gods but men.

  I shall stop there and not pursue the indictment further, especially as I have obtained a greater revenge than I sought. I shall just put the matter briefly in this way: divine punishment is twofold; it involves harassing the minds of the guilty during life and, when they are dead, attaching such infamy to them that the living not only accept but also rejoice at their destruction.

  44

  Fields are not to be consecrated. I entirely agree with Plato, who uses roughly the following language, if I can translate him: ‘The earth, then, like a domestic hearth, is sacred to all the gods; so no one should consecrate it twice over. Gold and silver in cities, whether in private houses or temples, arouse envy. Again, ivory, taken as it is from an animal’s carcass, is not sufficiently clean for a god. Bronze and iron are the paraphernalia of war, not of a temple. Whatever wooden object one wishes, however, may be dedicated in public temples, provided it is made of a single piece of wood; a stone object is also permissible, and so is a piece of textile, provided it has not taken more than a month’s work on the part of a woman. White is the colour most appropriate to a god in all offerings, and especially in the case of textiles. Dyed material should be avoided except for military insignia. The most holy gifts are birds, and pictures painted by one artist in a single day. Other gifts, too, should be along similar lines.’ Those are Plato’s wishes.* But in general I do not prescribe such narrow rules, for I make concessions to people’s shortcomings and the resources available in our day. And I suspect that agriculture will decline if any superstition develops in regard to the use of the land and its subjection to the ploughshare.

  45

  ATTICUS: I’ve grasped all that. It now remains for you to deal with ‘perpetual observances’ and ‘the rights of the spirits of the dead’.

  MARCUS: What an astonishing memory you’ve got, Pomponius! I’d forgotten those points.

  ATTICUS: No doubt you had; but I remember them and I’m waiting to hear them discussed, especially because they have to do with both pontifical and civil law.

  46

  MARCUS: That’s true. Great experts have delivered many oral and written opinions about these matters. During this talk I mean to take up as best I can what our civil law says about every branch of law to which our discussion leads me. But I shall only go so far as to clarify the point on which each part of the law is based. In this way it will not be difficult (at least for anyone of normal intelligence) to grasp the law governing whatever new case or problem occurs, because he will know under what heading to look it up.

  But legal experts, whether to cause confusion and so give the appearance of having a wider and deeper knowledge than they do, or (more probably) through their incompetence at putting the subject across (for an art is not just a matter of knowing something; it is also a matter of communication) often endlessly subdivide a thing which is based on a single idea. In the case of this very subject, for example, how vast it is made by the two Scaevolas, both of whom are pontiffs and at the same time experts in law! Publius’ son* says, T often heard my father maintain that no one makes a good pontiff unless he knows civil law.’ The whole of civil law? Why so? What has a pontiff to do with regulations about party-walls or the water supply or anything else except what is concerned with religion? And think how small an area that is. It is confined, I take it, to rituals, vows, festivals, graves, and other such things. Why, then, do we make so much of this topic, when all the other related matters are so very small, and when even the area of ritual, which is of wider consequence, is covered by one provision, namely that these ceremonies should be preserved for ever and handed down within families generation by generation, and, in the words of my law, ‘should be continued in perpetuity’? These regulations decreed by the pontiffs ensure that the observances should not be forgotten when the father of a family dies; for they require that such observances should be continued by those who have benefited financially from the father’s death.

  47

  48

  When this simple rule had been laid down—a rule which is quite adequate for understanding the system—countless others appeared, filling the books of the legal experts. An attempt has been made to determine who should be obliged to carry out the rites. In the case of heirs,* the answer is entirely reasonable, for they are the deceased’s immediate next of kin. Then comes the person who, as a result of the man’s death or will, receives as much as all the heirs put together. He, too, should accept the obligation, for that is in line with the intention of the rule. In the third place, if there is no heir, the duty devolves upon the man who has acquired by possession the greatest amount of the deceased’s property at the time of his death. Fourthly, if no one has acquired anything, the duty falls on the creditor who retains the largest part of the estate. Last of all is the person who owed money to the deceased and did not repay it to anyone; he should be treated as if he had received that money from the estate.

  49

  We have learned these categories from Scaevola. The ancients distinguished them differently. They presented the law in these terms: the obligation to conduct rites is imposed in three ways— by inheritance, or by receiving the greater part of the property, or, if the greater part of the property has been distributed in bequests, by receiving anything from that source. But let us follow the pontiff.* You notice that everything is based on one principle, namely the pontiffs’ wish that the rites should go with the deceased’s property, and their opinion that holidays and rites should be held by the same people. The Scaevolas add that, when an estate is divided, if no deductions have been stipulated* in the will, and the legatees have voluntarily received less than has been left to all the heirs together, they should not be obliged to perform the rites. In the case of a gift* they interpret the rule in a different way. Where a gift has been made by a person who is under the authority of the head of the family, that gift is valid if made with the approval of the latter. If it was made without his knowledge, it is not valid, unless he gives his retrospective approval.

  50

  From these provisions many minor problems arise. But surely an intelligent person will easily see his way through them if he bears in mind the fundamental principle. Suppose, for instance, a man accepted* less to avoid the obligation of performing the rites, and later one of this man’s heirs collected on his own account the sum which had been waived by the man whose heir he was; and suppose that this sum, combined with the earlier sum acquired, came to no less than had been left to all the other heirs together, then the man who had collected the money would be bound to perform the rites on his own, without his co-heirs. The authorities have even provided that, where someone has received a larger bequest than he can accept without incurring religious duties, he should formally declare* through bronze and balance that the heirs’ obligations under the will have been discharged. In that situation the estate has been freed from liability to pay, and it is as though there had never been a legacy in the first place.

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  Regarding this situation and many others, I would like to ask the Scaevolas, who were supreme pontiffs and, in my view, extremely shrewd men: why do you want to add a command of civil law to a knowledge of the law of the pontiffs? By the former you tend to cancel out the latter. Rites go with the deceased’s property by the authority of the pontiffs, not by any law. So if you were only pontiffs, the pontiffs’ authority would be upheld; but being at the same time great experts in civil law, you use this knowledge to circumvent that authority. It was the opinion of the supreme pontiffs Publius Scaevola and Tiberius Coruncanius, and of the others too, that those who received bequests of as large an amount as all the heirs put together should be obliged to perform the rites. I grasp the pontiffs’ ruling. What is added from the sphere of civil law? The section on the division of the estate has been carefully drafted to allow the deduction of one hundred nummi;* thus a device was discovered for relieving the estate of the burden of performing the rites. As if the testator had not wished to forestall such a manœuvre, this legal expert, Mucius himself, who is also the supreme pontiff, advises the legatee to accept less than the sum left to all the heirs. They always used to say* that the legatee was bound to perform the rites, whatever he received. Once again, such men are freed from that obligation.