# CHAPTER 46 — How It Happens That a Family Maintains the Same Customs in a City Over a Long Period of Time

It seems that not only does one city have different methods and forms of education than another, and bears men who are either tougher or more effeminate, but within the same city, it is clear that such differences can exist between one family and another. This is found to be true in every city, and we can read of many such examples in the city of Rome. We can see that the Manlius family was tough and stubborn, the Publicola family was kind and friendly to the people, the Appius family ambitious and hostile to the plebeians, and likewise many other families, in turn, have each had qualities distinct from the others. Such a thing cannot arise solely from blood-lines, since these must change through the diversity of marriages, but it necessarily derives from the differences in education between one family and another. Consequently, it is much more important for a young man of tender years to begin by hearing good or bad of something, because it necessarily makes an impression on him according to which he will then regulate his mode of conduct at all periods of his life. If this were not the case, it would be impossible for the entire Appius family to have possessed the same ambition and to have been stirred by the same passions, as Livy notes in many of them. In one last example, when one member of the family was made censor and his colleague had, at the end of eighteen months, as the law provided, left the magistracy, he did not wish to do so, declaring that he was able to hold the office for five years, according to the first law established by the censors. Although there were many speeches about this matter and it caused many disturbances, there was, nevertheless, no way to make him leave office, even though he acted against the will of the people and the majority of the senate. Anyone who reads the speech he made against Publius Sempronius, tribune of the plebeians, will note there all the usual Appian insolence and all the goodness and humanity exercised by countless citizens to obey the laws and auspices of their native city.