stence that leads you
to live without wives. There is not one of you who either eats alone
or sleeps alone, but you want to have opportunity for wantonness and
licentiousness. Yet I have allowed you to court girls still tender and
not yet of age for marriage, in order that having the name of intendant
bridegrooms you may lead a domestic life. And those not in the senatorial
class I have permitted to wed freedwomen, so that if any one through
passion or some inclination should be disposed to such a proceeding he
might go about it lawfully. I have not limited you rigidly to this, even,
but at first gave you three whole years in which to make preparations,
and later two. Yet not even so, by threatening or urging or postponing or
entreating, have I accomplished anything. You see for yourselves how much
larger a mass you constitute than the married men, when you ought by this
time to have furnished us with as many more children, or rather with
several times your number. How otherwise shall families continue? How can
the commonwealth be preserved if we neither marry nor produce children?
Surely you are not expecting some to spring up from the earth to succeed
to your goods and to public affairs, as myths describe. It is neither
pleasing to Heaven nor creditable that our race should cease and the
name of Romans meet extinguishment in us, and the city be given up to
foreigners,--Greek or even barbarians. We liberate slaves chiefly for the
purpose of making out of them as many citizens as possible; we give our
allies a share in the government that our numbers may increase: yet you,
Romans of the original stock, including Quintii, Valerii, Iulli, are
eager that your families and names at once shall perish with you.

[-8-] "I am thoroughly ashamed that I have been led to speak in such a
fashion. Have done with your madness, then, and reflect now if not before
that with many dying all the time by disease and many in the wars it is
impossible for the city to maintain itself unless the multitude in it is
constantly reinforced by those who are ever and anon being born. Let no
one of you think that I am ignorant of the many disagreeable and painful
features that belong to marriage and child-rearing. But bear in mind that
we possess nothing at all good with which some bane is not mingled, and
that in our most abundant and greatest blessings there reside the most
abundant and greatest woes. If you decline to accept the latter, do
not stri