United States or Sweden ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The bulk of British local government must have been carried on through Roman municipalities, through imperial estates, and still more through tribal civitates using a Romanized constitution. The bulk of the landed estates must have conformed in their legal aspects to the 'villas' of other provinces.
Melius quidem adhuc==still better even. For a verb, supply sunt or agunt. Cf. note A. 19: nihil. Eae civitates. Such as the Heruli, among whom the wife was expected to hang herself at once at the grave of her husband, if she would not live in perpetual infamy. At Rome, on the contrary, divorces and marriages might be multiplied to any extent, cf.
While recognizing the necessity of retaining the fundamental institution of a division of the state into civitates, and of governing it by means of the heads of these divisions, he wished to eliminate from these officers all the characteristics of local magnates, and to reduce them to the more easily controlled position of servants, and dependents of the king.
As far as history can carry us back, the whole of Western Europe, namely, Gaul, a part of Spain, Northern Italy, and what we call to-day the British Isles, are found to be peopled by a race apparently of the same origin, divided into an immense number of small republics; governed patriarchally in the form of clans, called by Julius Caesar, "Civitates." The Greeks called them Celts, "Keltai."
Itaque pauci veniunt ad senectutem; quod ni ita accideret, melius et prudentius viveretur. Mens enim et ratio et consilium in senibus est, qui si nulli fuissent, nullae omnino civitates fuissent. Sed redeo ad mortem impendentem.
Thus were re-established, through the action of the Church, the old frontiers of the Celtic tribes, adopted by the Roman "civitates," long after the disappearance of the Celts and the fall of Rome.
The heads of the civitates were the king's judices, it is true, and assembled to assist him in judgments at his general placita in the March of each year; but they bear the character also of local lords of no mean importance, and in some cases possessed of no inconsiderable amount of power.
These two sorts of men move in the same direction, though in a different place. They both move with the order of the universe. They all know or feel this great ancient truth: "Quod illi principi et præpotenti Deo qui omnem hunc mundum regit nihil eorum quæ quidem fiant in terris acceptius quam concilia et coetus hominum jure sociati quæ civitates appellantur."
But, unfortunately, the great author of the "Commentaries" had not sufficiently studied the social state of the Celts in Gaul and Britain; he never mentions the clan institution, even when he speaks of the feuds factiones which invariably split their septs civitates into hostile parties.
Was the grandmother really dead? What was she to do with the Latin feriæ? Mr. Strachan Davidson's explanation is perhaps the best, that Cicero means that the old lady was thinking of the Social War in B.C. 89, when the loyalty of the Latin towns must have been a subject of anxiety. She is in her dotage and only remembers old scares. This is understanding civitates with Latinæ.
Word Of The Day