bolished
them. Who can doubt but that in a city doomed for eternal duration,
increasing to an immense magnitude, new civil offices, priesthoods,
rights of families and of individuals, may be established? This very
matter, that there should not be the right of intermarriage between
patricians and commons, did not the decemvirs introduce within the last
few years to the utmost injury of the commons, on a principle most
detrimental to the public? Can there be a greater or more marked insult,
than that one portion of the state, as if contaminated, should be deemed
unworthy of intermarriage? What else is it than to suffer exile within
the same walls, actual rustication? They wish to prevent our being mixed
with them by affinity or consanguinity; that our blood be not mingled
with theirs. What? if this cast a stain on that nobility of yours, which
most of you, the progeny of Albans or Sabines, possess, not in right of
birth or blood, but by co-optation into the patricians, having been
elected either by the kings, or after the expulsion of kings, by order
of the people, could ye not keep it pure by private regulations, by
neither marrying into the commons, and by not suffering your daughters
or sisters to marry out of the patricians. No one of the commons would
offer violence to a patrician maiden; such lust as that belongs to the
patricians. None of them would oblige any man against his will to enter
into a marriage contract. But really that such a thing should be
prevented by law, that the intermarriage of the patricians and plebeians
should be interdicted, that it is which is insulting to the commons. Why
do you not combine in enacting a law that there shall be no
intermarriage between rich and poor? That which has in all places and
always been the business of private regulations, that a woman might
marry into whatever family she has been engaged to, and that each man
might take a wife out of whatever family he had contracted with, that ye
shackle with the restraints of a most tyrannical law, by which ye sever
the bonds of civil society and split one state into two. Why do ye not
enact a law that a plebeian shall not dwell in the neighbourhood of a
patrician? that he shall not go the same road with him? that he shall
not enter the same banquet with him? that he shall not stand in the same
forum? For what else is there in the matter, if a patrician man wed a
plebeian woman, or a plebeian a patrician? What right, pray, is there