Library › Latin: Oratory & Rhetoric › Orationes (Fragments)
The emperor Lucius Septimius Severus (ruled 193-211) is represented in Heinrich Meyer’s Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta (1832) by two passages from speeches to the senate that were preserved as law. The first, delivered in 195 and quoted in the Digest, forbids guardians to sell the rural or suburban estates of their wards unless the father’s will allowed it, and sets out the procedure before the urban praetor when debts made a sale necessary. The second, from the Vatican legal fragments, limits the right of a guardian to name another person as better qualified to serve.
These texts show how an emperor’s speech in the senate became binding law, and their careful, formal Latin is typical of imperial legislation in the Severan age. They complete Meyer’s survey of Roman oratory with examples of the legal speeches that, as he observed, came to dominate public eloquence under the later emperors. The jurists cite the speech of 195 as the oratio of Severus, and it long remained the basis of the law protecting wards’ land, so that these sentences were read and interpreted by lawyers for centuries after the senate itself had ceased to matter politically.
About this edition. The Latin text was transcribed for this library from a public-domain printed edition (edition: H. Meyer, Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta ab Appio inde Caeco et M. Porcio Catone usque ad Q. Aurelium Symmachum, Zurich 1832 (p. 262)), using the scan and text recognition at the Internet Archive; the editor’s notes and critical apparatus are not reproduced. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.