n some employment or undertaking of
serious trouble and importance; but pain is a sharp motion in the body,
disagreeable to our senses.--Both these feelings, the Greeks, whose
language is more copious than ours, express by the common name of {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~};
therefore they call industrious men, pains-taking, or rather fond of
labour; we, more conveniently, call them laborious; for labouring is one
thing and enduring pain another. You see, O Greece, your barrenness of
words, sometimes, though you think you are always so rich in them. I say,
then, that there is a difference betwixt labouring and being in pain. When
Caius Marius had an operation performed for a swelling in his thigh, he
felt pain; when he headed his troops in a very hot season, he laboured.
Yet these two feelings bear some resemblance to one another; for the
accustoming ourselves to labour makes the endurance of pain more easy to
us.--And it was because they were influenced by this reason, that the
founders of the Grecian form of government provided that the bodies of
their youth should be strengthened by labour, which custom the Spartans
transferred even to their women, who in other cities lived more
delicately, keeping within the walls of their houses, but it was otherwise
with the Spartans.

The Spartan women, with a manly air,
Fatigues and dangers with their husbands share:
They in fantastic sports have no delight,
Partners with them in exercise and fight.

And in these laborious exercises pain interferes sometimes; they are
thrown down, receive blows, have bad falls, and are bruised, and the
labour itself produces a sort of callousness to pain.

XVI. As to military service, (I speak of our own, not of that of the
Spartans, for they used to march slowly to the sound of the flute, and
scarce a word of command was given without an anapaest;) you may see in the
first place whence the very name of an army (Exercitus)(82) is derived;
and secondly, how great the labour is of an army on its march; then
consider that they carry more than a fortnight's provision, and whatever
else they may want: that they carry the burthen of the stakes,(83) for as
to shield, sword, or helmet, they look on them as no more encumbrance than
their own limbs, for they say that arms are the limbs of a soldier, and
those ind