1But when, after the camp had been pitched by the river Volturnus, the loveliest countryside in Italy was being burned and farmhouses everywhere were smoking with fires, while Fabius led the army along the ridges of Mount Massicus, then the mutiny was kindled almost afresh; 2for they had been quiet for a few days, because, since the column had been led faster than usual, they had believed that haste was being made to protect Campania from devastation. 2But when they came to the farthest ridges of Mount Massicus, and the enemy were before their eyes burning the houses of the Falernian district and of the settlers of Sinuessa, and there was no mention of battle, 'Have we come here,' said Minucius, 'to watch, as if to feast our eyes on a spectacle, the slaughter and burning of our allies?
4If we feel shame before no one else, do we not feel it even before these citizens, whom our fathers sent to Sinuessa as settlers so that this coast might be safe from the Samnite enemy, a coast which now no neighbouring Samnite is burning, but a Carthaginian stranger, who through our delay and sloth has already advanced all the way here from the farthest bounds of the world? 6So far, alas, are we falling short of our fathers that the coast along which they thought it a disgrace to their empire for Punic fleets to roam, we now see already filled with enemies, with Numidians and Moors. 7We who only lately, in our indignation that Saguntum was being besieged, were calling upon not only men but treaties and gods, now quietly watch Hannibal scaling the walls of a Roman colony.
8The smoke from the burning farmhouses and fields comes into our eyes and faces; 8our ears ring with the cries of weeping allies, who call on our help more often than on that of the gods: and we here are leading the army like cattle through summer pastures and out-of-the-way tracks, hidden in clouds and forests. 9If Marcus Furius had chosen to recover the city from the Gauls by wandering over peaks and woodland pastures in the way in which this new Camillus, sought out by us as our one and only dictator in our distress, is preparing to win back Italy from Hannibal, Rome would belong to the Gauls; and I fear that, while we delay like this, our ancestors have preserved it so many times only for Hannibal and the Carthaginians.
11But that man, a true Roman, on the day the news was brought to Veii that he had been named dictator on the authority of the senators and by order of the people, though the Janiculum was high enough for him to sit there and watch the enemy from afar, came down onto level ground, and on that very day in the middle of the city, where the Gallic Pyres now are, and on the next day this side of Gabii, he cut down the legions of the Gauls. 12What then? 12Many years later, when we had been sent under the yoke at the Caudine Forks by the Samnite enemy, did Lucius Papirius Cursor, I ask you, take the yoke from Roman necks and set it on the proud Samnite by surveying the ridges of Samnium, or by pressing Luceria hard, besieging it and challenging the victorious enemy?
13Only recently, what else but speed gave Gaius Lutatius his victory, in that on the day after he sighted the enemy he overwhelmed their fleet, heavy with supplies and hampered by its own gear and equipment? 14It is folly to believe that a war can be finished by sitting still or by prayers: you must take up arms and come down onto level ground and meet the enemy man to man; 14it is by daring and doing that the Roman state has grown, not by these sluggish policies which the timid call cautious.' 15Round Minucius as he harangued them in this way, as if at an assembly, a crowd of tribunes and Roman knights poured, and his fierce words rolled on to the ears of the soldiers as well: and if the matter were one for a soldiers' vote, they declared that they would beyond doubt set Minucius above Fabius as commander.