"This being so, no one of you at this juncture should have an eye to what is privately pleasant and safe rather than to what is suitable and beneficial for the whole body of Romans. For besides many other considerations that might naturally arise, reflect that we who are so many and of such rank (members of the senate and knights) have come here accompanied by a great mass of soldiers and with money in abundance not to be idle or careless, but for the purpose of managing rightly the affairs of our subjects, preserving in safety the property of those bound by treaty, repelling any who undertake to do them wrong, and increasing our own possessions. If we have not come with this in mind, why in the world did we take the field at all instead of staying at home with some occupation or other and on our private domains? Surely it were better not to have undertaken the campaign than when assigned to it to throw it over. If, however, some of us are here because compelled by the laws 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