[63]
Lacedaemonians are here; men of that city, whose tried and glorious virtue is considered not
only to be implanted in them by nature, but also to be fortified by discipline. The only men
in the whole world who have been living for now seven hundred years and more under one system,
and under laws which have never been altered.
Many deputies are here from all Achaia, Boeotia, and Thessaly, places in which Lucius
Flaccus has lately been in command as lieutenant under Metellus as commander-in-chief. Nor do
I pass you over, O Marseilles, you who have known Lucius Flaccus as soldier and as
quaestor,—a city, the strict discipline and wisdom of which I do not know whether I
might not say was superior, not only to that of Greece, but to that of any nation whatever; a
city which, though so far separated from the districts of all the Greeks, and from their
fashions and language, and though placed in the extremity of the world and surrounded by
tribes of Gauls, and washed with the waves of barbarism, is so regulated and governed by the
counsels of its chief men, that there is no nation which does not find it easier to praise its
institutions than to imitate them.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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