[44.1] When it was now break of day, the women, leading the children, went with torches to the house of Veturia, and taking her with them, proceeded to the gates. In the meantime the consuls, having got ready spans of mules, carts, and a great many other conveyances, seated the women in them and accompanied them for a long distance. The women were attended by the senators and many other citizens, who by their vows, commendations and entreaties lent distinction to their mission. [2] As soon as the women, while still approaching at a distance, could be clearly seen by those in the camp, Marcius sent some horsemen with orders to learn what multitude it was that advanced from the city and what was the occasion of their coming. And being informed that the wives of the Romans together with their children had come to him and twenty they were led by his mother, his wife and his sons, he was at first astonished at the assurance of the women in resolving to come with their children into an enemy’s camp without a guard of men, neither showing regard any longer for the modesty becoming to free-born and virtuous women, which forbids them to be seen by men who are strangers, nor becoming alarmed at the dangers which they would run if his soldiers, preferring their own interests to justice, should think fit to make a profit and advantage of them. [3] But when they were near, he resolved to go out of the camp with a few of his men and to meet his mother, after first ordering his lictors to lay aside the axes which were customarily carried before generals, and when he should come near his mother, to lower the rods. [4] This is a custom observed by the Romans when inferior magistrates meet those who are their superiors, which continues even to our time; and it was in observance of this custom that Marcius, as if he were going to meet a superior power, now laid aside all the insignia of his own office. So great was his reverence and his concern to show his veneration for the tie of kinship.
[45.1] When they came near to one another, his mother was the first to advance toward him to greet him, clad in rent garments of mourning and with her eyes melting with tears, an object of great compassion. Upon seeing her, Marcius, who till then had been hard-hearted and stern enough to cope with any distressing situation, could no longer keep any of his resolutions, but was carried away by his emotions into human kindness, and embracing her and kissing her, he called her by the most endearing terms, and supported her for a long time, weeping and caressing her as her strength failed and she sank to the ground. After he had had enough of caressing his mother, he greeted his wife when with their children she approached him, and said: [2] “You have acted the part of a good wife, Volumnia, in living with my mother and not abandoning her in her solitude, and to me you have done the dearest of all favours.” After this, drawing each of his children to him, he gave them a father’s caresses, and then, turning again to his mother, begged her to state what she had come to ask of him. She answered that she would speak out in the presence of all, since she had no impious request to make of him, and bade him be seated where he was wont to sit when administering justice to his troops. [3] Marcius willingly agreed to her proposal, thinking, naturally, that he should have a great abundance of just arguments to use in combating his mother’s intercession and that he should be giving his answer where it was convenient for the troops to hear. When he came to the general’s tribunal, he first ordered the lictors to remove the seat that stood there and to place it on the ground, since he thought he ought not to occupy a higher position than his mother or use against her any official authority. Then, causing the most prominent of the commanders and captains to sit by him and permitting any others to be present who wished, he bade his mother speak.
[46.1] Thereupon Veturia, having placed the wife of Marcius with his children and the most prominent of the Roman matrons near her, first wept, fixing her eyes on the ground for a long time, and roused great compassion in all who were present. Then, recovering herself, she said: [2] “These women, Marcius, my son, mindful of the outrages and other calamities which will come upon them if our city falls into the power of the enemy, and despairing of all other assistance, since you gave haughty and harsh answers to their husbands when they asked you to end the war, took their children, and clad in these rent garments of mourning, turned for refuge to me, your mother, and to Volumnia, your wife, begging us not to permit them to suffer the greatest of all human evils at your hands, as they have never done us any injury, great or slight, but showed much affection for us while we were still prosperous, and compassion when we met with adversity. [3] For we can bear them witness that since you withdrew from your country and we were left desolate and no longer of any account, they constantly visited us, alleviated our misfortunes, and condoled with us. So, remembering all this, neither I nor your wife, who lives with me, rejected their entreaties, but brought ourselves to come to you, as they asked, and to make our supplications in behalf of our country.”
[47.1] While she was yet speaking Marcius interrupted her and said: “You have come demanding the impossible, mother, when you ask me to betray those who have cast me out those who have received me, and to those who have deprived me of all my possessions those who have conferred on me the greatest of human blessings — men to whom, when I accepted this command, I gave the gods and other divinities as sureties that I would neither betray their state nor end the war unless all the Volscians agreed to do so. [2] Both out of reverence, then, for the gods by whom I swore and out of respect for the men to whom I gave my pledges I shall continue to make war upon the Romans to the last. But if they will restore to the Volscians the lands of theirs which they hold by force, and will make them their friends, giving them an equal share in all privileges as they have to the Latins, I will put an end to the war against them, otherwise not. [3] As for you women, then, depart and carry this word to your husbands; and persuade them to cease their unjust fondness for possessions of others and to be content if they are permitted to keep what is their own, and not, just because they now hold the possessions of the Volscians which they took in war, to wait till they are in turn deprived of them in war by the Volscians. For the conquerors will not be satisfied with merely recovering their own possessions, but will think themselves entitled also to those that belong to the conquered. And if, by clinging to what is not theirs at all, the Romans persist in their arrogance and are willing to suffer anything whatever, you will impute to them, rather than to Marcius, the Volscians or anyone else, the blame for the miseries that shall befall them. [4] And of you, mother, I, who am your son, beg in my turn that you will not urge me to wicked and unjust actions, nor, ranging yourself on the side of those who are the bitterest foes both to me and to yourself, regard as enemies your nearest of kin, but that, taking your place at my side, as is right, you will make the land where I dwell your fatherland, and your home the house I have acquired, and that you will enjoy my honours and share in my glory, looking upon my friends and enemies as your own; also that you will lay aside the mourning which, unhappy woman, you have endured because of my banishment, and cease to avenge yourself upon me by this garb. [5] For though all other blessings, mother, have been conferred on me both by the gods and men above my hopes and beyond my prayers, yet the concern I have felt for you, whose old age I have not cherished in return for all your pains, has so sunk into my inmost being as to render my life bitter and incapable of enjoying all my blessings. But if you will take your place by my side and consent to share all I possess, no longer will any of the blessings which fall to the lot of man be lacking to me.”
[48.1] When he had ended, Veturia, after waiting a short time till the great and long-continued applause of the bystanders ceased, spoke to him as follows:
“But I, Marcius, my son, neither ask you to become a traitor to the Volscians who received you when an exile and, among other honours, entrusted you with the command of their army, nor do I desire that, contrary to the agreements and to the sworn pledges you gave them when you took command of their forces, you should arbitrarily, without the general consent, put an end to enmity. Do not imagine that your mother has been filled with such fatuousness as t
o urge her dear and only son to shameful and wicked actions. [2] On the contrary, I ask you to withdraw from the war only with the general consent of the Volscians, after you have persuaded them to use moderation with regard to an accommodation and to make such a peace as shall be honourable and seemly for both nations. This may be done if you will now withdraw your forces, first making a truce for a year, and will in the meantime, by sending and receiving ambassadors, work to bring about a genuine friendship and a firm reconciliation. [3] And be well assured of this: the Romans, in so far as no impossible condition or any dishonour attaching to the terms prevents, will consent to perform them all if won over by persuasion and exhortation, but if compulsion is attempted, as you now think proper, they will never make any concession, great or small, to please you, as you may learn from many other instances and particularly from the concessions they recently made to the Latins after these had laid down their arms. As to the Volscians, on the other hand, their arrogance is now great, as happens to all who have met with signal success; [4] but if you point out to them that ‘any peace is preferable to any war,’ that ‘a voluntary agreement between friends is more secure than concession extorted by necessity,’ and that ‘it is the part of wise men, when they seem to be prosperous, to husband their good fortune, but when their fortunes become low and paltry, to submit to nothing that is ignoble,’ and if you make use of such other instructive maxims conducive to moderation and reasonableness as have been devised, maxims with which you politicians in particular are familiar, be assured that they will voluntarily recede from their present boastfulness and give you authority to do anything you believe will be to their advantage. [5] But if they oppose you and refuse to accept your proposals, being elated by the successes they have gained through you and your leadership, as if these would always continue, resign publicly the command of their army and make yourself neither a traitor to those who have trusted you nor an enemy to those who are nearest to you; for to do either is impious. These are the favours I have come begging you to grant me, Marcius, my son, and they are not only not impossible to grant, as you assert, but are free from any consciousness on my part of an unjust or impious intent.
[49.1] “But come, you are afraid perhaps that if you do what I urge you will incur a shameful reputation, believing that you will stand convicted of ingratitude to your benefactors, who received you, an enemy, and shared with you all the advantages to which their native-born citizens are entitled; for these are the things you constantly stress in your remarks. [2] Have you not, then, made them many fine returns, and have you not by the favours you have bestow wed, while nigh limitless in magnitude and number, surpassed the kindnesses received from them? Though they regarded it as enough and as the greatest of all blessings if they could continue to live as freemen in their native cities, you have not only made them securely their own masters, but have also brought it about that they are already considering whether it is better for them to destroy the dominion of the Romans or to have an equal share in it by forming a joint commonwealth. [3] I say nothing of all the spoils of war with which you have adorned their cities nor of the great riches you have bestowed upon those who accompanied you on your expeditions. Do you believe that those who through your aid have become so great and have entered upon such prosperity will not be content with the blessings they have, but will be angry with you and indignant if you do not also spill by their hands your country’s blood? For my part, I do not believe so. [4] I have still one point left to speak of — a strong one if you judge of it by reason, but weak if you judge by passion. I refer to the unjust hatred you bear toward your country. For the commonwealth was neither in a state of health nor governed according to the established constitution when she pronounced that unjust sentence against you, but was diseased and tossed in a violent tempest; nor did the state as a whole entertain this opinion at that time, but only the baser element in it, which had followed evil leaders. [5] Yet supposing not only the worst of the citizens, but all the rest of as well had been of this mind, and you had been banished by them as not acting for the best interests of the state, not even in that case did it become you to bear any resentment against your country. For it has fallen to the lot of many others, you know, of those whose policies were prompted by the best motives, to have the same experience, and few indeed are those who have not, because of their reputation for virtue, felt the breath of unjust envoy on the part of their political rivals. [6] But all who are high-minded, Marcius, bear their misfortunes like men and with moderation, and remove to other cities in which they can dwell without causing harm to their fatherland. This was the case with Tarquinius, surnamed Collatinus. (A single instance and one from our own history will suffice.) He had assisted in freeing his fellow citizens from the tyrants, but was later accused before them of attempting in turn to restore these tyrants and for that reason was himself banished from his country; yet he retained no resentment against those who had exiled him, nor would he march against his country bringing with him the tyrants nor commit acts that would substantiate the charges made against him, but retiring to Lavinium, our mother-city, he spent the remainder of his life there, continuing loyal to his country and its friend.
[50.1] “Conceding the point nevertheless, and granting the right to all who have suffered grievously not to distinguish whether those who have injured them are friends or aliens but to direct their anger against all impartially, even so have you not taken a sufficient revenge on such as abused you, now that you have turned their best land into a sheep-walk, have utterly destroyed the cities of their allies, which they had acquired and held at the cost of many hardships, and have reduced them now for the third year to a great scarcity of provisions? But you carry your wild and mad resentment even to the point of enslaving them and razing their city; [2] and you showed no regard even for the envoys sent to you by the senate, men of worth and your friends, who came to offer you a dismissal of the charges and leave to return home, nor yet for the priests whom the commonwealth sent at the last to you, old men holding before them the holy garlands of the gods; but these also you drove away, giving a haughty and imperious answer to them as to men who had been conquered, [3] For my part, I cannot commend these harsh and overbearing claims, which overstep the bounds of human nature, when I observe that a refuge for all men and the means of securing forgiveness for their offences one against another have been devised in the form of suppliant boughs and prayers, by which all anger is softened and instead of hating one’s enemy one pities him; and when I observe also that those who act arrogantly and treat with insolence the prayers of suppliants all incur the indignation of the gods and in the end come to a miserable state. [4] For the gods themselves, who in the first place instituted and delivered to us these customs, are disposed to forgive the offences of men and are easily reconciled; and many have there been ere now who, though greatly sinning against them, have appeased their anger by prayers and sacrifices. Unless you think it fitting, Marcius, that the anger of the gods should be mortal, but that of men immortal! You will be doing, then, what is just and becoming both to yourself to your country if you forgive her her offences, seeing that she is repentant and ready to be reconciled and to restore to you now everything that she took away from you before.
[51.1] “But if you are indeed irreconcilable to her, grant, my son, this honour and favour to me, at least, from whom you have received, not the boons that are of least value nor those to which another also might lay claim, but rather those that are the greatest and most precious and have enabled you to acquire everything else you possess — namely, your body and your soul. These are loans you have from me, and neither place nor time will ever deprive me of them, nor will the benefactions of the Volscians or of all the rest of mankind together, even if they should reach the heavens in magnitude, avail to efface and surpass the rights of Nature; but you will be mine forever, and to me before all others you will owe gratitude for your life, and you will oblige me in everything I ask without alleging any excuse. [2] For this
is a right which the law of Nature has prescribed for all who partake of sense and reason; and putting my trust in this law, Marcius, my son, I too beg of you not to make war upon your country, and I stand in your way if you resort to violence. Either, therefore, first sacrifice with your own hand to the Furies your mother who opposes you and then begin the war against your country, or, if you shrink from the guilt of matricide, yield to your mother, my son, and grant this favour willingly. [3] Having this law, then, which no lapse of time will ever repeal, to avenge my wrongs and be my ally, I cannot consent, Marcius, to be alone deprived by you of honours to which it entitles me. But leaving this law aside, consider in turn the reminders I have to give you of the good offices you have received from me, human many and how great they are. When you were left an orphan by your father, I took you as an infant, and for your sake I remained a widow and underwent the labours of rearing you, showing myself not only a mother to you, but also a father, a nurse, a sister, and everything that is dearest. [4] When you reached manhood and it was in my power to be freed from these cares by marrying again, to rear other children, and lay up many hopes to support me in my old age, I would not do so, but remained at the same hearth and put up with the same kind of life, placing all my pleasures and all my advantages in you alone. Of these you have disappointed me, partly against your will and partly of your own accord, and have made me the most wretched of all mothers. For what time, since I brought you up to manhood, have I passed free from grief or fear? Or when have I possessed a spirit cheerful on your account, seeing you always undertaking wars upon wars, engaged in battles upon battles, and receiving wounds upon wounds?
Delphi Complete Works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 79) Page 76