79

conabatur? … volebat?: two rhetorical questions, to which the obvious answer is ‘no’.

ab imperio ac nomine nostro: in the phrase nomen nostrum (sc. Romanum) Cicero evokes both Roman rule and power grounded in military superiority (imperium) and an ethnic concept of Roman identity. The passage is listed by the OLD s.v. nomen 19, but this particular sense, though favoured by Cicero, is not all that common; in Roman political discourse, ethnic use of the nomen (gentile) was first and foremost a marker of what family-network (gens) an individual member of Rome’s ruling elite belonged to. See further Gildenhard (2011) 52.

ex iis quae legi et audivi intellego: Cicero specifies two sources of information about past practice: written records and oral sources. But he remains vague as to the genre – is he thinking of official records or literary texts, mere hearsay or public proceedings? The entire posture is at any rate mildly ironic: there is hardly any need for ‘fact finding’ to realize that the actions detailed would, under normal circumstances, have resulted in a declaration of war.

in qua civitate … ei civitati: civitati is the antecedent of qua; here it is attracted into the relative clause and repeated afterwards, both for emphasis and clarity.

legatus populi Romani: the paragraph advances Cicero’s strategy of quest