[45]
Those, on the other hand,
whose humble and obscure origin has kept them unknown to the world in their early years ought, as
soon as they approach young manhood, to set a high
ideal before their eyes and to strive with unswerving zeal towards its realization. This they will
do with the better heart, because that time of life is
[p. 215]
accustomed to find favour rather than to meet with
opposition.
Well, then, the first thing to recommend to a young1
man in his quest for glory is that he try to win it, if
he can, in a military career. Among our forefathers
many distinguished themselves as soldiers; for warfare was almost continuous then. The period of your
own youth, however, has coincided with that war in
which the one side was too prolific in crime, the
other in failure. And yet, when Pompey placed you
in command of a cavalry squadron in this war, you
won the applause of that great man and of the army
for your skill in riding and spear-throwing and for
endurance of all the hardships of the soldier's life.
But that credit accorded to you came to nothing
along with the fall of the republic.
The subject of this discussion, however, is not
your personal history, but the general theme. Let
us, therefore, proceed to the sequel.
1 (1) by a military career,
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.