two great men, Octavius[1] and Cato, in the civil wars, — the first with Sylla, the other with Cæsar, — that they allowed their country to incur the utmost extremities rather than succour it at the expense of its laws and by changing any thing. For, in truth, in those extreme emergencies, where to hold one’s ground is the most to be looked for, it would be perchance more wisely done to how the head and give way a little to the blow, rather than, persisting beyond possibility in yielding nothing, to give violence opportunity to trample every thing underfoot; and it would be better to make the laws desire to do what they can, since they can not do what they desire. Thus did he who ordered that they [the laws] should sleep four-and-twenty hours;[2] and he who for that occasion took a day out of the calendar; and that other who of the month of June made a second May.[3] Even the Lacedæmonians, who observed so religiously the laws of their country, being hampered by that one which prohibited the election of the same person twice as admiral, and, on the other hand, their affairs rendering it absolutely necessary that Lysander should again assume that office — they made, indeed, one Aracus admiral, but Lysander superintendent of the navy.[4] And with the same sort of subtlety, one of their ambassadors being sent to the Athenians to secure a change in some decree,[5] and Pericles declaring to him that it was forbidden to take away the tablet on which a law had once been set down, he [the ambassador] advised him merely to turn it over, inasmuch as that was not forbidden. It is for this that Plutarch praises Philopœmen — that, being born to command, he knew, not only how to command according to the laws, but how to command the laws themselves when public necessity required it.[6]
- ↑ This was not Octavius, afterward Augustus, but Octavius who was consul with Cinna, and of whom Plutarch speaks at some length in the Life of Marius.
- ↑ Agesilaus. See Idem, Life of Agesilaus.
- ↑ Alexander the Great. See Idem, Life of Alexander.
- ↑ See Idem, Life of Lysander.
- ↑ Really, to stay the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War. The ambassador was Polyarces. See Idem, Life of Pericles.
- ↑ See Idem, Parallel between Flaminius and Philopœmen.
