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Question 82. Why before the chief officers are rods
carried bound together, with the axes fastened to them?
[p. 248]
Solution. What if it be a significant ceremony, to show
that a magistrate's anger ought not to be rash and ungrounded? Or is it that, while the rods are leisurely unloosing, they make deliberation and delay in their anger,
so that oftentimes they change their sentence as to the
punishment? Now, whereas some sort of crimes are
curable, some incurable, rods correct the corrigible, but
the axes are to cut off the incorrigible.
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.
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