Latin Texts & Translations

Indeed the rules upon this point were remarkably severe. L. Fulvius, a banker, ^[Note] having been accused, at the time of the Second Punic War, of looking down from the balcony ^[Note] of his house upon the Forum, with a chaplet of roses upon his head, was imprisoned by order of the Senate, and was not liberated before the war was brought to a close. P. Munatius, having placed upon his head a chaplet of flowers taken from the statue of Marsyas, ^[Note] was condemned by the Triumviri to be put in chains. Upon his making appeal to the tribunes of the people, they refused to intercede in his behalf —a very different state of things to that at Athens, where the young men, ^[Note] in their drunken revelry, were in the habit,

before midday, of making their way into the very schools of the philosophers even. Among ourselves, no such instance of a similar licentiousness is to be found, unless, indeed, in the case of the daughter ^[Note] of the late Emperor Augustus, who, in her nocturnal debaucheries, placed a chaplet on the statue ^[Note] of Marsyas, conduct deeply deplored in the letters of that god. ^[Note]