1But in rendering all these duties we shall have to see what each person most needs, and what each either could or could not obtain even without us. 1Thus the degrees of relationship will not be the same as those of circumstance; 1and there are duties which are owed to some more than to others; 1so you would help a neighbour in gathering his harvest sooner than either a brother or a friend, but if there were a lawsuit in court, you would defend a kinsman and friend rather than a neighbour. 1These and such things, then, must be considered in every duty, so that we may be good calculators of duties and be able, by adding and subtracting, to see what the sum of the remainder is, from which you may understand how much is owed to each.
60But just as neither doctors nor generals nor orators, however well they have learned the precepts of their art, can achieve anything worthy of great praise without practice and training, so the precepts for keeping duty are indeed handed down, as we are doing ourselves, but the greatness of the matter demands practice and training as well. 60And how the honourable, on which duty depends, is derived from those things which belong to the law of human society, we have now said almost enough. 61We must understand, moreover, that, of the four categories set out from which the honourable and duty flow, that seems most splendid which is done with a great and lofty spirit that looks down on human affairs.
61And so in reproaches nothing is more readily to hand than anything of this sort, if it can be said: 'For you, young men, bear a woman's spirit, but that maiden a man's,' and anything of this kind: 'Salmacis' son, spoils without sweat and blood!' 61On the other hand, in praises, what has been done with a great spirit, bravely and outstandingly, we somehow praise as if with a fuller mouth. 61Hence the rhetoricians' field of Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, Thermopylae and Leuctra; hence our own Cocles, hence the Decii, hence Gnaeus and Publius Scipio, hence Marcus Marcellus and countless others; and above all the Roman people itself excels in greatness of spirit.
61Their zeal for military glory is shown, moreover, by the fact that we see even their statues generally in military dress.