to do what our country ordains, and the greater number voluntarily on account of the honors and rewards that come from wars, how could we either decently or without sin be false at once to the hopes of the men that sent us forth and to our own?  Not one person could grow so prosperous as a private citizen as not to be ruined with the commonwealth, if it fell.  But if the republic succeeds, it lifts all fortunes and each one individually.

[-37-] “I am not saying this with reference to you, my comrades and friends who are here:  you are not in general ignorant of the facts, that you should need to learn them, nor do you assume an attitude of contempt toward them, that you should require exhortation.  I am saying it because I have ascertained that there are some of the soldiers who themselves are talking to the effect that the war we have taken up is none of our business, and are stirring up the rest to sedition.  My purpose is that you yourselves may as a result of my words show a more ardent zeal for your country and teach them all they should know.  They would be apt to receive greater benefit in hearing it from you privately and often than in learning it but once from my lips.  Tell them, then, that it was not by staying at home or shirking campaigns or avoiding wars or pursuing idleness that our ancestors made the State so great, but it was by bringing their minds to venture readily everything that they ought and by working eagerly to the bitter end with bodily labor for everything that pleased them, by regarding their own things as belonging to others but acquiring readily the possessions of their neighbors as their own, while they saw happiness in nothing else than in doing what was required of them and held nothing else to be ill fortune than resting inactive.  Accordingly, as a result of this policy those men, who had been at the start very few and possessed at first a city than which none was more diminutive, conquered the Latins, conquered the Sabines, mastered the Etruscans, Volsci, Opici, Leucanians and Samnites, in one word subjugated the whole land bounded by the Alps and repulsed all the alien tribes that came against them.

[-38-] “The later Romans, likewise, and our own fathers imitated them, not being satisfied with their temporary fortune nor content with what they had inherited, and they regarded sloth as their sure destruction but exertion as their certain safety.  They feared that if their treasures remained unaugmented they would be consumed and worn away by age, and were ashamed after receiving so rich a heritage to make no further additions:  thus they performed greater and more numerous exploits.

“Why should one name individually Sardinia, Sicily, Macedonia, Illyricum, Greece, Ionic Asia, the Bithynians, Spaniards, Africans?  I tell you the Carthaginians would have given them plenty of money to stop sailing against that city, and so would Philip and Perseus to stop making campaigns against them; Antiochus would have given much, his children and descendants would have given much to let them remain on European soil.  But those men in view of the glory and the greatness of the empire did not choose to be ignobly idle or to enjoy their wealth in confidence, nor did the elders of our own generation who even now are still alive.