"If the last of the flying ships, with masts and prows half burned, pursued and harried by our swift boats, should really succeed in reaching the southern shore and the harbor fortress from which they sailed forth so victoriously, who knows--I will not say more--who knows whether they may not find there an unexpected doom? "No! Silence still! Hear me to the end. "Before I dissolve the assembly and send you all to prepare your weapons in the best way, to polish the points and blades, and to eat and drink enough,--not over much, then afterwards--do you hear--to seek sleep soon, very soon, for you will have no slumber to-morrow night--hear one thing more: you must make one resolve before this battle! "Remember, men, how from generation to generation these Romans have sinned against our people; how again and again they have broken faith and treaty; how they will not even grant us the poor land we have wrested from the marsh and the primeval forest; how, in violation of treaties, they have pushed their fortresses farther and farther into our boundaries; how they forced thousands of our ancestors to fight naked and unarmed with wild beasts on the blood-stained sand of their arenas in the city by the Tiber, gloating, safe in their high seats, over the death-agonies of our kinsmen under the paws and rent by the teeth of roaring monsters; how they forced thousands of our young men into their cohorts and made them shed their blood, often far beyond the salt sea! "Ha, Alemanni of the Black Forest, do you still know how they invited your King Widigab to a banquet and murdered him over the wine-cup? Have you forgotten, Alemanni of the Ebergau, who submitted to them on condition that you should live according to your own laws, how on the smallest pretext, they had your free men scourged by their lictors? Do you still recollect, Alemanni from the Breisgau, how they asked a peaceful passage through your country, and then encamped near the sacred grove of the goddess Ostara, asked permission to visit the aged priest of eighty and his great-granddaughter, the girl of sixteen, in the grove (it was a General and one of their shaven priests, with a hundred warriors), and inquired what was your most sacred thing? And when the maiden unsuspiciously showed the sacred bronze vessels which the gracious goddess had once sent down to you on the rainbow, how they suddenly seized both, and the Christian priest, before the eyes of the unarmed people, shamefully profaned the sacred vessel; how the General slew the venerable priest and dragged the young priestess away to captivity and disgrace, and how their warriors set fire to the sacred grove? "Do you still remember, men of the Alpgau, how, in the midst of peace, a centurion dishonored your Count's young wife by her own hearthstone, so that she hanged herself by her girdle?