to effect your preservation?  What would you do if you had to die for your country?  Fifty thousand of your countrymen and allies on that very day lay around you slain.  If so many examples of courage did not move you, nothing ever will.  If so great a carnage did not make life less dear, none ever will.  While in freedom and safety, show your affection for your country; nay, rather do so while it is your country, and you its citizens.  Too late you now endeavour to evince your regard for her when degraded, disfranchised from the rights of citizens, and become the slaves of the Carthaginians.  Shall you return by purchase to that degree which you have forfeited by cowardice and neglect?  You did not listen to Sempronius, your countryman, when he bid you take arms and follow him; but a little after you listened to Hannibal, when he ordered your arms to be surrendered, and your camp betrayed.  But why do I charge those men with cowardice, when I might tax them with villany?  They not only refused to follow him who gave them good advice, but endeavoured to oppose and hold him back, had not some men of the greatest bravery, drawing their swords, removed the cowards.  Publius Sempronius, I say, was obliged to force his way through a band of his countrymen, before he burst through the enemy’s troops.  Can our country regret such citizens as these, whom if all the rest resembled, she would not have one citizen of all those who fought at Cannae?  Out of seven thousand armed men, there were six hundred who had courage to force their way, who returned to their country free, and in arms; nor did forty thousand of the enemy successfully oppose them.  How safe, think you, would a passage have been for nearly two legions?  Then you would have had this day at Canusium, conscript fathers, twenty thousand bold and faithful.  But now how can these men be called faithful and good citizens, (for they do not even call themselves brave,) except any man suppose that they showed themselves such when they opposed those who were desirous of forcing their way through the enemy? or, unless any man can suppose, that they do not envy those men their safety and glory acquired by valour, when the must know that their timidity and cowardice were the cause of their ignominious servitude?  Skulking in their tents they preferred to wait for the light and the enemy together, when they had an opportunity of sallying forth during the silence of the night.  But though they had not courage to sally forth from the camp, had they courage to defend it strenuously?  Having endured a siege for several days and nights, did they protect their rampart by their arms, and themselves by their rampart?  At length, having dared and suffered every extremity, every support of life being gone, their strength exhausted with famine, and unable to hold their arms, were they subdued by the necessities of nature rather than by arms?  At sunrise, the enemy approached the rampart:  before the second hour, without hazarding any contest,