undertaking of serious trouble and importance; but pain is a sharp
motion in the body, disagreeable to our senses.--Both these feelings,
the Greeks, whose language is more copious than ours, express by the
common name of [Greek: Ponos]: therefore they call industrious men
painstaking, or, rather, fond of labor; we, more conveniently, call
them laborious; for laboring is one thing, and enduring pain another.
You see, O Greece! your barrenness of words, sometimes, though you
think you are always so rich in them. I say, then, that there is a
difference between laboring and being in pain. When Caius Marius had an
operation performed for a swelling in his thigh, he felt pain; when he
headed his troops in a very hot season, he labored. Yet these two
feelings bear some resemblance to one another; for the accustoming
ourselves to labor makes the endurance of pain more easy to us. And it
was because they were influenced by this reason that the founders of
the Grecian form of government provided that the bodies of their youth
should be strengthened by labor, which custom the Spartans transferred
even to their women, who in other cities lived more delicately, keeping
within the walls of their houses; but it was otherwise with the
Spartans.

The Spartan women, with a manly air,
Fatigues and dangers with their husbands share;
They in fantastic sports have no delight,
Partners with them in exercise and fight.

And in these laborious exercises pain interferes sometimes. They are
thrown down, receive blows, have bad falls, and are bruised, and the
labor itself produces a sort of callousness to pain.

XVI. As to military service (I speak of our own, not of that of the