Page:Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto volume 2 Haines 1920.djvu/165

 19. The army you took over was demoralized with luxury and immorality and prolonged idleness. The soldiers at Antioch were wont to spend their time clapping actors, and were more often found in the nearest cafe-garden than in the ranks. Horses shaggy from neglect, but every hair plucked from their riders: a rare sight was a soldier with arm or leg hairy. Withal the men better clothed than armed, so much so that Pontius Laelianus, a man of character and a disciplinarian of the old school, in some cases ripped up their cuirasses with his fingertips; he found horses saddled with cushions, and by his orders the little pommels on them were slit open and the down plucked from their pillions as from geese. Few of the soldiers could vault upon their steeds, the rest scrambled clumsily up by dint of heel or knee or ham; not many could make their spears hurtle, most tossed them like toy lances without verve and vigour. Gambling was rife in camp: sleep night-long, or, if a watch was kept, it was over the wine-cups.

20. By what disciplinary measures you were to break-in soldiers of this stamp and make them serviceable and strenuous did you not learn from the dourness of Hannibal, the stern discipline of Africanus, the exemplary methods of Metellus, of which histories are full? This very precaution of yours, a lesson drawn from long study, not to engage the enemy in a pitched battle until you had seasoned your men with skirmishes and minor successes—did you 149