Panegyricus (186-189)

And how great must we think will be the name and the fame and the glory which they will enjoy during their lives, or, if they die in battle, will leave behind them—they who will have won the meed of honor in such an enterprise? For if those who made war against an Alexander[*] and took a single city were accounted worthy of such praise, what encomiums should we expect these men to win who have conquered the whole of Asia? For who that is skilled to sing or trained to speak will not labor and study in his desire to leave behind a memorial both of his own genius and of their valor, for all time to come?

I am not at the present moment of the same mind as I was at the beginning of my speech. For then I thought that I should be able to speak in a manner worthy of my theme; now, however, I have not risen to its grandeur, and many of the thoughts which I had in mind to utter have escaped me. Therefore you must come to my aid and try to picture to yourselves what vast prosperity we should attain if we should turn the war which now involves ourselves against the peoples of the continent, and bring the prosperity of Asia across to Europe.

And you must not depart to your homes as men who have merely listened to an oration; nay, those among you who are men of action must exhort one another to try to reconcile our city with Lacedaemon; and those among you who make claims to eloquence must stop composing orations on “deposits,”[*] or on the other trivial themes[*] which now engage your efforts, and center your rivalry on this subject and study how you may surpass me in speaking on the same question,

bearing ever in mind that it does not become men who promise great things to waste their time on little things,[*] nor yet to make the kind of speeches which will improve no whit the lives of those whom they convince, but rather the kind which, if carried out in action, will both deliver the authors themselves from their present distress[*] and win for them the credit of bringing to pass great blessings for the rest of the world.[*]