Here [it is] to be answered in almost the same manner as to the previous question. First: Commonly, in war, when victory is already won, death is not to be brought upon infants, boys, and the decrepit. For first, infants and boys are utterly innocent. Secondly, in the administration of the Commonwealth they hold no part. Thirdly, the weakness of [their] age is worthier of pity than of slaughter. But it belongs to the old, generally, to govern the Commonwealth — by them, and from them, [comes] the Senate [the council of elders]; by [their] counsel they sometimes harm the enemy very much, nay, even by [their] exhortation and example. Yet because their bodily strength is worn out, [their] hands feeble, [their] limbs unwarlike, so that of themselves they can do no great harm to the adversaries; because they are already near to death; because that age is [worthy] of veneration, and, if it be full of hardship, has not a little [claim] to pity — it is commonly wont, by moderate commanders, that that little which remains to them of life be spared to them. And from the slaughter of infants all are restrained by God’s command, Deut. 20:14. But the illustrious oration of Camillus about them [the children] — which filled the enemy first with admiration, then with love of the [Roman] command and name — is read in Livy, book 5 of the first decade; when, to him [Camillus] besieging the Faliscans, a traitor schoolmaster had led the boys, whose parents were the chief men there. “Between us and the Faliscans,” he says, “there is no fellowship established by human compact; but that [fellowship] which nature has engendered in both, is, and will be. There are laws both of war and of peace; and we have learned to wage them justly no less than bravely. We have arms not against that age which is spared even when cities are captured, but against the armed.” See also Valerius [Maximus], book 6, chapter [7]…
(col. 795)
…[See also Valerius Maximus, book 6, chapter] 2, [and] Florus, book 1. Alphenus says (in [Digest] book 3), and reason dictates, that “those [things] which are granted to children not by the father, but by their birth, by the state, [and] by the nature of things, remain inviolate.” It was held a reproach to do otherwise. Tacitus, book 3 of the Histories: “[the soldiers] dragged the aged old men and the women worn out with age — worthless as booty — into [their] mockery,” namely in the destruction of Cremona. Secondly, [there] can, however, be causes which make the slaying of all these [infants, boys, old men] just; and they are exactly the same [causes] which were in the previous question: but, as to the old, the first and second; as to the same old age, and infancy and boyhood, the third, fourth, and fifth. And so Ps. 136[137]: “Blessed [is he] who shall hold, and dash your little ones against the rock.” So Deut. 2:34; ch. 3:6.