Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 5
Benjamin Oliver Foster, Ph.D., Ed.

6. "If it were of no moment to this war, it was yet, I assure you, of the utmost importance for military discipline that our soldiers become accustomed not only to pluck a victory within their grasp, but [2??] if a campaign should be even more protracted, to put up with the tedium and await the outcome of their hopes, however long-deferred; and if a war be not finished in a summer, to stay for winter, nor, like birds of passage, cast about at once, on the approach of autumn, for shelter and covert. [3] Do the eagerness, pray, and delight that men have in hunting carry them through snow and frost into the mountains and the forests; and shall not we use in the stress of war the same resolution which even sport and pleasure are wont to call out? [4] Do we think the bodies of our soldiers so effeminate, their hearts so faint, that they cannot endure to be one [p. 21]winter in camp, away from home; that like sailors¹ they must wage war with an eye on the weather, observing the seasons, incapable of withstanding heat or cold? [5] They would certainly blush if anyone should charge them with this, and would maintain that manly endurance was in their souls and bodies, and that they could campaign as well in winter as in summer; that they had given the tribunes no commission to protect softness and idleness; and that they were mindful that their grandsires had not founded the tribunician power in the shade or under roofs.

[6] "It is due to the valour of your soldiers, it is due to the Roman name, that you should look not merely to Veii and this present war that is upon us, but should seek for the years to come a reputation that will serve you in other wars and amongst all other nations. [7] Do you suppose there will be no great difference in men's opinion of us, whether our neighbours conclude the Roman People to be such, that if a city withstand the brunt of their first assault for a very brief time, it need thenceforward have no fears; [8] or whether our name inspire such dread, that men believe that once a Roman army has sat down before a town, it will never budge, either from the weariness of a protracted siege or from the rigours of winter, that it knows no other end of war but victory, and relies in its campaigns not more on swiftness than on perseverance? [9] For perseverance, needful in every kind of warfare, is especially so in besieging cities, since fortifications and natural advantages make most of them impregnable, and time itself subdues them, with hunger and thirst, and captures them, as it [10??] shall capture Veii, unless [p. 23]the plebeian tribunes help our enemies, and the² Veientes find in Rome those succours which they are seeking to no purpose in Etruria.

[11] “Could anything happen which would so please the Veientes as that factions should spring up, first in the City of Rome, and then, as though by contagion, in the camp? [12] But our enemies, by Heaven, are so well disciplined that no weariness of the blockade nor even of kingly rule has occasioned the smallest revolt among them; neither has the Etruscans' denial of help provoked their spirit; for whosoever prompts sedition shall forthwith die the death; [13] nor shall any man there have licence to say what is said with impunity to you. [14] Death by cudgelling is the wage of him who forsakes the standards or quits his post; but those who advise the men to abandon their standards and desert the camp gain a hearing, not with one or two soldiers, but with whole armies, openly, in public meetings; [15] so accustomed are you to hear with complacency whatever a tribune says, even if it tends to betray the City and to undo the state; and captivated by the charm of that authority, you suffer any wickedness whatsoever to lurk beneath it. [16] It only remains for them to utter in camp and in the presence of the soldiers the view which they noisily publish here, and to corrupt the armies and not to suffer them to obey their leaders. [17] For in the upshot liberty has come to mean at Rome, that a man respect neither senate nor magistrates, nor laws, nor ancestral customs, nor institutions of the fathers, nor military discipline.”