Читать книгу Yale Classics (Vol. 2) - Луций Анней Сенека - Страница 486

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“I have learned by experience, fellow-soldiers, that words cannot inspire courage, nor a general’s speech render a spiritless army brave and intrepid. Every man displays in battle just so much courage as nature or habit has given him, and no more. It is to no purpose to exhort him whom neither glory nor danger can animate; his fear deprives him of his hearing. I have assembled you, fellow-soldiers, to instruct you in a few particulars, and to lay before you the grounds of my final resolution.

“You all know what a dreadful calamity Lentulus, by his slow and spiritless conduct, has brought on himself and us; and how I have been prevented from marching into Gaul, by waiting for reinforcements from Rome. In what posture our affairs now are you all see.