A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

354 The Early Republic
Proposal of
Canuleius,
445 B.C.
Livy iv. i.
Aristocratic
feeling.
lb. 2.
These selections
up to
and including
the
Ogulnian law
have been
translated
by Dr. E. G.
Sihler.
Ancient
World, 346.
b. The Canuleian Law
At the beginning of the year the tribune of the people
C. Canuleius made public a bill concerning the right of
intermarriage [conubium] of the senatorial class (patres)
and the plebeians, by which the senatorial class felt that
their blood was stained and the rights of the old families
were perverted.
[Appeal of the aristocracy]: They should remember
what eminence the senate itself had received from the
Fathers, what eminence they intended to hand down to
their children, so that they too, like the plebeians, could
boast that it was more enlarged and imposing. . . .
What and how great things had C. Canuleius undertaken?
He was proposing a rude mixture of families, a perversion
of public and private auspices, to
the end that there be
nothing pure and unstained, so that with the removal of
all distinction no one could know either himself or his
own.
For what other force could mixed marriages have,
but that almost in the fashion of irrational beasts the mating
of plebeians and patricians be indiscriminately brought
about? So that the offspring (of such allianjces) shall not
know of what blood or of what religion he is. One half
would be of senatorial rank, one half of plebeian, not even
Plebeian
feeling.
Livy iv. 4. 6.
itself in harmony with itself. . . .
Or can there be any greater or more marked disgrace,
than that a part of
the citizen body as though polluted
should be held unworthy of the right of intermarriage? . . .
The plebeians on this issue were particularly enraged,
because it was claimed that they could not secure auspices,
as though they were hateful to the immortal gods, nor was
there an end of the struggles—since the plebeians had got
as its leader a most insistent tribune and since the pie-