existence that leads you to live without wives.  There is not one of you who either eats alone or sleeps alone, but you want to have opportunity for wantonness and licentiousness.  Yet I have allowed you to court girls still tender and not yet of age for marriage, in order that having the name of intendant bridegrooms you may lead a domestic life.  And those not in the senatorial class I have permitted to wed freedwomen, so that if any one through passion or some inclination should be disposed to such a proceeding he might go about it lawfully.  I have not limited you rigidly to this, even, but at first gave you three whole years in which to make preparations, and later two.  Yet not even so, by threatening or urging or postponing or entreating, have I accomplished anything.  You see for yourselves how much larger a mass you constitute than the married men, when you ought by this time to have furnished us with as many more children, or rather with several times your number.  How otherwise shall families continue?  How can the commonwealth be preserved if we neither marry nor produce children?  Surely you are not expecting some to spring up from the earth to succeed to your goods and to public affairs, as myths describe.  It is neither pleasing to Heaven nor creditable that our race should cease and the name of Romans meet extinguishment in us, and the city be given up to foreigners,—­Greek or even barbarians.  We liberate slaves chiefly for the purpose of making out of them as many citizens as possible; we give our allies a share in the government that our numbers may increase:  yet you, Romans of the original stock, including Quintii, Valerii, Iulli, are eager that your families and names at once shall perish with you.

[-8-] “I am thoroughly ashamed that I have been led to speak in such a fashion.  Have done with your madness, then, and reflect now if not before that with many dying all the time by disease and many in the wars it is impossible for the city to maintain itself unless the multitude in it is constantly reinforced by those who are ever and anon being born.  Let no one of you think that I am ignorant of the many disagreeable and painful features that belong to marriage and child-rearing.  But bear in mind that we possess nothing at all good with which some bane is not mingled, and that in our most abundant and greatest blessings there reside the most abundant and greatest woes.  If you decline to accept the latter, do not strive to obtain the former.  Practically all who possess any real excellence and pleasure are obliged to work before its enjoyment, to work at the time, and to work afterward.  Why should I lengthen my speech by going into each one of them in detail?  Therefore even if there are some unpleasant features connected with marriage and the begetting of children, set over against them the better elements:  you will find them more numerous and more vital.  For, in addition to all the other blessings that naturally inhere in this state of life, the prizes offered by law—­an infinitesimal portion of which determines many to undergo death—­might induce anybody to obey me.  And is it not a disgrace that for rewards which influence others to give up their own lives you should be unwilling either to marry wives or to rear children?