Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 2.pdf/101

 abundance of neighboring towns which surround us they will compare in laughter and scorn with their neighbors. They will compare Labici, Fidenæ, Collatia,—even Lanuvium itself, and Aricia, and Tusculum, with Cales, and Teanum, and Naples, and Puteoli, and Cumæ, and Pompeii, and Nuceria. By all these things they will be elated and puffed up, perhaps not at once, but certainly when they have got a little more age and vigor they will not be able to restrain themselves; they will go on further and further. A single individual, unless he be a man of great wisdom, can scarcely, when placed in situations of great wealth or power, contain himself within the limits of propriety; much less will those colonists, sought out and selected by Rullus, and others like Rullus, when established at Capua, in that abode of pride, and in the very home of luxury, refrain from immediately contracting some wickedness and iniquity. Aye, and it will be much more the case with them, than with the old genuine Campanians, because they were born and trained up in a fortune which was theirs of old, but were deprived by a too great abundance of everything; but these men, being transferred from the most extreme indigence to a corresponding affluence, will be affected, not only by the extent of their riches, but also by the strangeness of them.

I do not wonder that you, men of such folly and intemperance as you are, should have desired these things,—I do marvel that you should