United States or Serbia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A number of men of mature age, known as the Patres, composed the Senate, which Romulus formed to assist him in the government. This body consisted of one hundred members until the union with the Sabines, when it was doubled, the Etruscans not being represented until a later time.
This obscurity increases when the author of the Annals is in the palace of Tiberius, or in the Senate amid the deliberations of the Patres Conscripti.
The end of all this shall be," he went on, looking up at us "the end of this shall be, that some day he will run amuck amongst his faithful subjects and send 'ad patres' ever so many of them before they make up their minds to the disloyalty of knocking him on the head." I nodded. I thought it more than probable that such would be the end of Karain.
Sagum. Then of a sudden, like the interval between the recession of one wave and the advance of a second billow, came a moment of silence; and into that silence Antonius broke, with a voice so strong, so piercing, so resonant, that the most envenomed oligarch checked his clamour to give ear. "Hearken, ye senators of the Republic, ye false patres, ye fathers of the people who are no fathers!
They have seen a middle class coquetting with a lower class in order to force an upper class to share with it its privileges, and an upper class resorting in its turn to the same alliance; and they may have noted something more than a superficial resemblance between the tactics of the patres and nobiles of Rome and our own magnates of birth and commerce.
Whether, as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the three tribes were called patres or patricians or whether the term was restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of the house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the curies was by houses, not by individuals en masse.
And in truth, vaguely, I bore the originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about them as possible; for it seemed to me that as <i>patres patrae</i>, in their degree, they might have decreed that the great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle less ugly.
The period we now have before us embraces the motliest jumble of crying contradictions: constitutionalists, who openly conspire against the Constitution; revolutionists, who admittedly are constitutional; a National Assembly that wishes to be omnipotent yet remains parliamentary; a Mountain, that finds its occupation in submission, that parries its present defeats with prophecies of future victories; royalists, who constitute the "patres conscripti" of the republic, and are compelled by the situation to uphold abroad the hostile monarchic houses, whose adherents they are, while in France they support the republic that they hate; an Executive power that finds its strength in its very weakness, and its dignity in the contempt that it inspires; a republic, that is nothing else than the combined infamy of two monarchies the Restoration and the July Monarchy with an imperial label; unions, whose first clause is disunion; struggles, whose first law is in-decision; in the name of peace, barren and hollow agitation; in the name of the revolution, solemn sermonizings on peace; passions without truth; truths without passion; heroes without heroism; history without events; development, whose only moving force seems to be the calendar, and tiresome by the constant reiteration of the same tensions and relaxes; contrasts, that seem to intensify themselves periodically, only in order to wear themselves off and collapse without a solution; pretentious efforts made for show, and bourgeois frights at the danger of the destruction of the world, simultaneous with the carrying on of the pettiest intrigues and the performance of court comedies by the world's saviours, who, in their "laisser aller," recall the Day of Judgment not so much as the days of the Fronde; the official collective genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it in the arbitrary will of a filibuster.
However the chant went on, and Father Massias, hearing nothing and seeing nothing, absorbed as he was in his glowing gratitude to God, shouted the final verse in a thundering voice: "Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham, et semini ejus in saecula." "As He spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever!"
Next, that a full house might give additional strength to the senate, he filled up the number of senators, which had been diminished by the assassinations of Tarquinius, to the full number of three hundred, by electing the principal men of equestrian rank to fill their places: from this is said to have been derived the custom of summoning into the senate both the patres and those who were conscripti.
Word Of The Day