1Come now: when you have besieged the senate house here, made the Forum dangerous and filled the prison with leading men, go out beyond the Esquiline gate with those same fierce spirits, or, if you do not dare even that, look from the walls at your fields laid waste with fire and sword, plunder being driven off, houses set on fire smoking everywhere. 3But, you say, it is the common interest that is in a worse position through this: the land is burnt, the city besieged, the glory of the war lies with the enemy. 3What then? 3In what state are your private affairs? 3Soon each of you will be told of his own losses from the fields.
3What, pray, is there at home from which you can make them good? 4Will the tribunes give back and restore to you what you have lost? 4Of voice and words they will heap on you as much as you like, and of accusations against the leading men, and of laws one on top of another, and of assemblies; 4but from those assemblies not one of you has ever gone home richer in substance or fortune. 5Has anyone brought back anything to his wife and children except hatreds, grudges and quarrels, public and private? 5From which you are always kept safe not by your own courage and blamelessness, but by the help of others.
6But by Hercules, when you served your campaigns under us consuls, not under tribunes as leaders, and in the camp, not in the Forum, and when the enemy shuddered at your shout in the battle line, not the Roman senators in the assembly, you used to win plunder, capture land from the enemy, and return home in triumph to your household gods, full of wealth and glory, both public and private; 6now you allow the enemy to depart laden with your possessions. 7Stick fast to your assemblies and live in the Forum; 7the necessity of military service, which you shun, will follow you. 7It was burdensome to march against the Aequi and Volsci; 7the war is at your gates; 7if it is not driven from there, it will soon be within the walls and will climb the citadel and the Capitol and pursue you into your homes.
8Two years ago the senate ordered a levy to be held and an army to be led out to Algidus; 8we sit idle at home, squabbling among ourselves like women, glad of the present peace and not seeing that out of that brief respite war will return many times over. 9I know that other things are more pleasant to say than these; 9but even if my nature did not prompt me, necessity compels me to speak what is true rather than what is pleasing. 9I should like indeed to please you, Quirites; 9but I much prefer that you be safe, whatever feelings you are going to have towards me. 10Nature has so arranged it that he who speaks before the multitude for his own sake is more welcome than he whose mind sees nothing but the public good; 10unless perhaps you think that those public flatterers, those courtiers of the plebs, who allow you to be neither under arms nor at peace, incite and goad you for your own sake.
11Stirred up, you serve them either for honour or for profit, and, because they see that in harmony between the orders they are nobodies anywhere, they would rather be leaders of a bad cause than of none, of riots and seditions. 11If weariness of these things can at last take hold of you, and you are willing to take up your fathers' and your own old ways instead of these new ones, I refuse no punishment if within a few days I have not routed and put to flight these ravagers of our fields, stripped them of their camp, and carried this terror of war, at which you are now dumbfounded, from our gates and walls to their cities.'