This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
Question 63. Why is he that is called Rex Sacrorum
(who is king of priests) forbid either to take upon him a
civil office or to make an oration to the people?
Solution. Was it that of old the kings did perform the
most and greatest sacred rites and offered sacrifices together with the priests; but when they kept not within
the bounds of moderation and became proud and insolent,
most of the Grecians, depriving them of their authority,
left to them only this part of their office, to sacrifice to the
Gods; but the Romans, casting out kings altogether, gave
the charge of the sacrifice to another, enjoining him
neither to meddle with public affairs nor to hold office,
so that they might seem to be subject to royalty only in
their sacrifices, and to endure the name of king only with
respect to the Gods? Hence there is a certain sacrifice
kept by tradition in the market-place near the Comitia,
which as soon as the king (i.e. the chief priest) hath
offered, he immediately withdraws himself by flight out of
the market-place.
[p. 239]
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 2.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.