consent to its obedience and observation. A legitimate proceeding is
cold, heavy, and constrained, and not fit to make head against a
headstrong and unbridled proceeding. 'Tis known to be to this day cast
in the dish of those two great men, Octavius and Cato, in the two civil
wars of Sylla and Caesar, that they would rather suffer their country to
undergo the last extremities, than relieve their fellow-citizens at the
expense of its laws, or be guilty of any innovation; for in truth, in
these last necessities, where there is no other remedy, it would,
peradventure, be more discreetly done, to stoop and yield a little to
receive the blow, than, by opposing without possibility of doing good,
to give occasion to violence to trample all under foot; and better to
make the laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would.
After this manner did he--[Agesilaus.]--who suspended them for four-and-
twenty hours, and he who, for once shifted a day in the calendar, and
that other--[Alexander the Great.]--who of the month of June made a
second of May. The Lacedaemonians themselves, who were so religious
observers of the laws of their country, being straitened by one of their
own edicts, by which it was expressly forbidden to choose the same man
twice to be admiral; and on the other side, their affairs necessarily
requiring, that Lysander should again take upon him that command, they
made one Aratus admiral; 'tis true, but withal, Lysander went general of
the navy; and, by the same subtlety, one of their ambassadors being sent
to the Athenians to obtain the revocation of some decree, and Pericles
remonstrating to him, that it was forbidden to take away the tablet
wherein a law had once been engrossed, he advised him to turn it only,
that being not forbidden; and Plutarch commends Philopoemen, that being
born to command, he knew how to do it, not only according to the laws,
but also to overrule even the laws themselves, when the public necessity
so required.