ch. 683.68Well, then, now that you have beleaguered the
Senate-house, and treated the Forum as enemies'
ground, and filled the prison with our foremost men,
display the same daring courage in making a sortie
from the Esquiline gate, or if you have not the
courage even for this, mount the walls and watch your
fields disgracefully laid waste with fire and sword,
plunder carried off and smoke rising everywhere from
your burning dwellings. But I may be told it is the
common interests of all that are being injured by
this; the land is burned, the City besieged, all the
honours of war rest with the enemy. Good heavens! In
what condition are your own private interests? Every
one of you will have losses reported to him from the
fields. What, pray, is there at home from which to
make them good?
Will the tribunes restore and repay you for what you
have lost? They will contribute any amount you like of
talk and words and accusations against the leading
men, and law after law, and meetings of the Assembly.
But from those meetings not a single one of you will
ever go home the richer. Who has ever brought back to
his wife and children anything but resentment and
hatred, party strife and personal quarrels, from which
you are to be protected not by your own courage and
honesty of purpose, but by the help of others? But,
let me tell you, when you were campaigning under us
your consuls, not under tribunes, in the camp not in
the Forum, and your battle-cry appalled the enemy in
the field, not the patricians of Rome in the Assembly
then you obtained booty, took territory from the
enemy, and returned to your homes and household gods
in triumph, laden with wealth and covered with glory
both for the State and for yourselves. Now you allow
the enemy to depart laden with your property. Go on,
stick to your Assembly meetings, pass your lives in
the Forum, still the necessity, which you shirk, of
taking the field follows you. It was too much for you
to go out against the Aequi and Volscians; now the war
is at your gates. If it is not beaten back, it will be
within the walls, it will scale the Citadel and the
Capitol and follow you into your homes. It is two
years since the senate ordered a levy to be raised and
an army led out to Algidus; we are still sitting idly
at home, wrangling with one another like a troop of
women, delighted with the momentary peace, and
shutting our eyes to the fact that we shall very soon
have to pay for our inaction many times over in war.
I know that there are other things pleasanter to
speak about than these, but necessity compels me, even
if a sense of duty did not, to say what is true
instead of what is agreeable. I should only be too
glad, Quirites, to give you pleasure, but I would very
much rather have you safe, however you may feel
towards me for the future. Nature has so ordered
matters that the man who addresses the multitude for
his own private ends is much more popular than the man
who thinks of nothing but the public good. Possibly,
you imagine that it is in your interest that those
demagogues who flatter the plebs and do not suffer you
either to take up arms or live in peace, excite you
and make you restless. They only do so to win
notoriety or to make something out of it, and because
they see that when the two orders are in harmony they
are nowhere, they are willing
to be leaders in a bad cause rather than in none, and
get up disturbances and seditions.
If there is any possibility of your becoming at last
weary of this sort of thing, if you are willing to
resume the character which marked your fathers and
yourselves in old days, instead of these new-fangled
ideas, then there is no punishment I will not submit
to, if I do not in a few days drive these destroyers
of our fields in confusion and flight out of their
camp, and remove from our gates and walls to their
cities this dread aspect of war which now so appalls
you.
