Lexitechnia

Cicero, De Lege Agraria 2.97:

Singularis homo privatus, nisi magna sapientia praeditus, vix cancellis et regionibus offici magnis in fortunis et copiis continetur.

A private individual, unless he is endowed with great wisdom, is hardly restrained by the bars and boundaries of his position when among great wealth and power.

I’ve been posting these less often chiefly because I haven’t really had much to say about them.    The reason I do post them is less to talk about the content itself than about translating it; it makes a much more interesting post when the passage itself is interesting, but it discourages me from posting everything else.   I’ll try and work on that.

The bits I stumbled over most here were:

• singularis homo privatus, which doesn’t seem to have any graceful word-for-word rendering, and
• officium, which could have been translated by ‘office’ in 1913ese, but not in modern English, and for which I don’t know a good all-purpose replacement.
• economically joining magnis in fortunis et copiis to the rest of the sentence.

As usual, any suggestions for improvement would be welcome.

[For cancelli.]