home more increased in substance or in fortune.  Has any one ever brought back to his wife and children aught save hatred, quarrels, grudges public and private, from which you may ever be protected, not by your own valour and integrity, but by the aid of others?  But, by Hercules!  When you served under the command of us consuls, not under tribunes, in the camp and not in the forum, and the enemy trembled at your shout in the field of battle, not the Roman patricians in the assembly, having gained booty and taken land from the enemy, loaded with wealth and glory, both public and private, you used to return home in triumph to your household gods:  now you allow the enemy to go off laden with your property.  Continue fast bound to your assemblies, live in the forum; the necessity of taking the field, which you strive to escape, still follows you.  It was hard on you to march against the AEquans and the Volscians:  the war is at your gates:  if it is not driven from thence, it will soon be within your walls, and will scale the citadel and Capitol, and follow you into your very houses.  Two years ago the senate ordered a levy to be held, and an army to be marched out to Algidum; yet we sit down listless at home, quarrelling with each other like women, delighting in present peace, and not seeing that after that short-lived inactivity war will return with interest.  That there are other topics more pleasing than these, I well know; but even though my own mind did not prompt me to it, necessity obliges me to speak the truth rather than what is pleasing.  I would indeed like to meet with your approval, Quirites; but I am much more anxious that you should be preserved, whatever sentiments you shall entertain toward me.  It has been so ordained by nature, that he who addresses a crowd for his own private interest, is more welcome than the man whose mind has nothing in view but the public interest unless perhaps you suppose that those public sycophants those flatterers of the commons, who neither suffer you to take up arms nor to live in peace, excite and work you up for your own interests.  When excited, you are to them sources either of position or of profit:  and, because, when the orders are in accord, they see that they themselves are of no importance in anything, they prefer to be leaders of a bad cause, of tumults and sedition, rather than of no cause at all.  If you can at last become wearied of all this, and if you are willing to resume the habits practised by your forefathers of old, and formerly by yourselves, in place of these new ones, I am ready to submit to any punishment, if I do not in a few days rout and put to flight, and strip of their camp those devastators of our lands, and transfer from our gates and walls to their cities this terror of war, by which you are now thrown into consternation.”