In the meantime you, after the fashion of cattle, offer yourselves, a great throng, to be controlled and exploited by mere individuals, after having been stripped of all that your forefathers left you, except for the fact that by your ballots you now play a direct role in designating masters for yourselves, just as formerly you did protectors.
interim more pecorum vos, multitudo, singulis habendos fruendosque praebetis, exuti omnibus quae maiores reliquere, nisi quia vobismet ipsi per suffragia, ut praesides olim, nunc dominos destinatis.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Like Cattle
Sallust, Histories, fragment 48.6 Maurenbrecher (speech of C. Licinius Macer, 73 BC; tr. John T. Ramsey):