History of Rome

​Come now, when you have surrounded the senate-house here and made the forum hostile and filled the prison with the leading men, ​with those same fierce spirits of yours, march out beyond the Esquiline gate, or, if you do not even dare this, view from the walls your fields devastated by iron and fire, the booty being driven off, and the burned roofs smoking everywhere.

​But you will say, “The public interest is in a worse position because of these things: the land is burned, the city is besieged, the glory of war is in the power of the enemy.” What of it? In what condition are your private affairs? Soon his own losses will be announced to each one from the fields. What, pray, is there at home from which you may make them good?

​Will the tribunes return and restore to you what has been lost? They will heap upon you as much of voice and words as you wish, of accusations against the leading men, of laws piled upon laws, and of public assemblies; but from those assemblies not one of you ever returned home increased in substance or fortune.

​Has anyone carried back anything to his wife and children except hatreds, offenses, and enmities, both public and private? From which you are always protected not by your own valor and innocence, but by alien aid.

​But, by Hercules, when you performed military service under us consuls, not under the leadership of tribunes, and in the camp, not in the forum, and when the enemy in the battle line, not the Roman fathers in the assembly, dreaded your shout, then, with booty acquired and land taken from the enemy, full of both public and private fortune and glory at the same time, you returned home in triumph to your household gods. Now you allow the enemy to depart laden with your fortunes.

​Cling, fixed to your assemblies, and live in the forum; the necessity of military service, which you flee, will follow you. It was a heavy thing to march against the Aequi and Volsci; the war is before the gates; if it is not driven from there, it will soon be within the walls and will climb the citadel and the Capitol, and will pursue you into your homes.

​Two years ago the senate ordered a levy to be held and the army to be led out to Mount Algidus; we sit idle at home, quarreling among ourselves in the manner of women, rejoicing in the present peace and not discerning that from that brief leisure a manifold war will return.

​I know that other things are more pleasing to be said than these; but necessity compels me to speak the truth instead of pleasing things, even if my own character did not advise it. Indeed, I should wish to please you, Quirites; but I prefer much more that you should be safe, with whatever mind you are going to be toward me.

​It is so constituted by nature that he who speaks for his own sake before the crowd is more pleasing than he whose mind sees nothing except the public advantage; unless perhaps you think that those public flatterers, those crowd-pleasers, who allow you to be neither in arms nor at leisure, are inciting and stimulating you for your own sake.

​Stirred up, you are a source of honor or profit to them, and because they see that in the harmony of the orders they are nothing anywhere, they wish to be leaders of an evil thing, of disturbances and seditions, rather than of nothing. If weariness of these things can at last seize you, ​and you wish to adopt the ancient manners of the fathers and of yourselves in place of these new ones, ​I refuse no punishment, unless within a few days I strip of their camp these devastators of our fields, routed and put to flight, and transfer this terror of war, by which you are now astonished, from our gates and walls to their cities.”