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37“I do not say this with reference to you who are here, my comrades and friends; for you are not ignorant of these things, that you need to be instructed in them, nor are you indifferent toward them, that you require exhortation. I say it because I have ascertained that some of the soldiers are themselves noisily talking to the effect that this war we have undertaken is none of our business, and are stirring up the rest to sedition. 2My purpose is that you yourselves may as a result of my words make more unswerving the zeal you have for your country and may also teach the others their whole duty. For they will be benefited more by hearing it from you individually and repeatedly than they would from learning it but once from my lips. 3Tell them, then, that it was not by staying at home or shirking their campaigns or avoiding their wars or pursuing their ease that our ancestors made the city so great, but it was by bringing their minds to venture readily all that they ought to do and their bodies to work out eagerly all the plans they had determined upon; 4by risking their own possessions as if they belonged to others, but acquiring readily the possessions of their neighbours as their own, while they thought that happiness was nothing else than doing their duty, and held that misfortune was nothing else than resting inactive.
5“It was in consequence of these principles, therefore, that those men, who were in the beginning very few and dwelt in a city as small as any at first, conquered the Latins, subdued the Sabines, mastered the Etruscans, Volscians, Oscans, Lucanians and Samnites, in a word, subjugated the whole land south of the Alps, and repulsed all the foreign tribes that came against them.
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