Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/131

N° 27. people in Rome, introduce discourses about yourself, inquire your own character: do the same in your camp; walk about it in the evening, hearken at every tent; and if you do not hear every mouth censuring, lamenting, cursing this vice in you, and even you for this vice, conclude yourself innocent. If you be not yet persuaded, send for Atticus, Servius Sulpicius, Cato, or Brutus; they are all your friends; conjure them to tell you ingenuously, which is your great fault, and which they would chiefly wish you to correct; if they do not agree in their verdict, in the name of all the gods you are acquitted.

"When your adversaries reflect how far you are gone in this vice, they are tempted to talk as if we owed our successes not to your courage or conduct, but to those veteran troops you command; who are able to conquer under any general, with so many brave and experienced officers to lead them. Besides, we know the consequences your avarice has often occasioned. The soldier has been starving for bread, surrounded with plenty, and in an enemy's country; but all under safeguards and contributions; which, if you had sometimes pleased to have exchanged for provislons, might, at the expense of a few talents in a campaign, have so endeared you to the army, that they would have desired you to lead them to the utmost limits of Asia. But you rather chose to confine your conquests within the fruitful country of Mesopotamia, where plenty of money might be raised. How far that fatal greediness of gold may have influenced you, in breaking off the treaty with the old Parthian king Orodes, you " best