1You rightly hesitated, my dearest Secundus, over what reply you ought to give the censors when they consulted you whether men who were citizens of other cities, though of the same province, ought to remain in the senate. 1For both the authority of the law and the long custom practised against the law could well have drawn you in opposite directions. 1I have decided on this compromise: that we make no change regarding the past, but that citizens of any cities whatever who were admitted, even though against the law, should remain, while for the future the Pompeian law should be observed; 1for if we wished to maintain its force retrospectively as well, many things would necessarily be thrown into confusion.
Lectitō › Pliny the Younger › Letters, Book 10
Pliny · Epistulae X
Pliny, Letter 10.115
Trajan's compromise on the law
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Pliny, Epistulae X. Latin text: the Perseus digital text of Pliny's Letters, public domain; digital text from the Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA. Word analysis: drafted by our own tagger (trained on the hand-checked texts on this site), with every doubtful word checked by hand. English translation and section titles: written for this app, each checked against the Latin by a second reader.