Book 31
29
Capua does indeed survive as the sepulchre and memorial of the Campanian nation, the people themselves are either dead and buried, or else cast forth as exiles. It is a headless and limbless city without a senate, without a plebs, without magistrates, an unnatural portent in the land. To leave it as a habitation for men was an act of greater cruelty than its utter destruction would have been. If men of an alien race, separated from you more widely by language, customs and laws than by intervening sea and land, obtain a hold here, it is folly and madness to hope that anything will remain as it is now. You think that Philip's sovereignty is a danger to your liberty. It was your own doing that he took up arms against you, and his sole aim was to have a settled peace with you. All that he asks today is that you will keep that peace unbroken. Once make foreign legions familiar with these shores and bow your necks to the yoke, then you will seek in vain and too late for Philip's support as your ally; you will have the Romans for your masters. Aetolians, Acarnanians, Macedonians are united and disunited by slight and purely temporary causes; with foreigners and barbarians, all Greeks ever have been and ever will be at war. For they are our enemies by nature, and nature is unchanging; their hostility is not due to causes which vary from day to day. But I will end where I began. Three years ago you decided on this very spot to make peace with Philip. You are the same men that you were then, he is the same that he was, the Romans who were opposed to it then are just those who want to upset it now. Fortune has altered nothing, I do not see why you should alter your minds."
