Sec. I. They say those discourses, like friends, are best and surest that
come to our refuge and aid in adversity, and are useful. For many who
come forward do more harm than good in the remarks they make to the
unfortunate, as people unable to swim trying to rescue the drowning get
entangled with them and sink to the bottom together. Now the discourse
that ought to come from friends and people disposed to be helpful should
be consolation, and not mere assent with a man's sad feelings. For we do
not in adverse circumstances need people to weep and wail with us like
choruses in a tragedy, but people to speak plainly to us and instruct
us, that grief and dejection of mind are in all cases useless and idle
and senseless; and that where the circumstances themselves, when
examined by the light of reason, enable a man to say to himself that his
trouble is greater in fancy than in reality, it is quite ridiculous not
to inquire of the body what it has suffered, nor of the mind if it is
any the worse for what has happened, but to employ external sympathizers
to teach us what our grief is.
Sec. II. Therefore let us examine alone by ourselves the weight of our
misfortunes, as if they were burdens. For the body is weighed down by
the burden of what presses on it, but the soul often adds to the real
load a burden of its own. A stone is naturally hard, and ice naturally
cold, but they do not receive these properties and impressions from
without; whereas with regard to exile and loss of reputation or honours,
as also with regard to their opposites, as crowns and office and
position, it is not their own intrinsic nature but our opinion of them
that is the gauge of their real joy or sorrow, so that each person makes
them for himself light or heavy, easy to bear or hard to bear. When
Polynices was asked
"What is't to be an exile? Is it grievous?"
he replied to the question,
"Most grievous, and in deed worse than in word."[913]
Compare with this the language of Alcman, as the poet has represented
him in the following lines. "Sardis, my father's ancient home, had I had
the fortune to be reared in thee, I should have been dressed in gold as
a priest of Cybele,[914] and beaten the fine drums; but as it is my name
is Alcman, and I am a citizen of Sparta, and I have learned to write
Greek poetry, which makes me greater than the tyrants Dascyles or
Gyges." Thus the very same thing one man's opinion makes good, like
current coin, and another's bad and injurious.
Sec. III. But let it be granted that exile is, as many say and sing, a
grievous thing. So some food is bitter, and sharp, and biting to the
taste, yet by an admixture with it of sweet and agreeable food we take
away its unpleasantness. There are also some colours unpleasant to look
at, that quite confuse and dazzle us by their intensity and excessive
force. If then we can relieve this by a mixture of shadow, or by
diverting the eye to green or some agreeable colour, so too can we deal
with misfortunes, mixing up with them the advantages and pleasant things
we still enjoy, as wealth, or friends, or leisure, and no deficiency in
what is necessary for our subsistence. For I do not think that there are
many natives of Sardis who would not choose your fortune even with
exile, and be content to live as you do in a strange land, rather than,
like snails who have no other home than their shells, enjoy no other
blessing but staying at home in ease.
Sec. IV. As then he in the comedy that was exhorting an unfortunate friend
to take courage and bear up against fortune, when he asked him "how,"
answered "as a philosopher," so may we also play the philosopher's part
and bear up against fortune manfully. How do we do when it rains, or
when the North Wind doth blow? We go to the fire, or the baths, or the
house, or put on another coat: we don't sit down in the rain and cry. So
too can you more than most revive and cheer yourself for the chill of
adversity, not standing in need of outward aid, but sensibly using your
actual advantages. The surgeon's cupping-glasses extract the worst
humours from the body to relieve and preserve the rest of it, whereas
the melancholy and querulous by ever dwelling on their worst
circumstances, and thinking only of them, and being engrossed by their
troubles, make even useful things useless to them, at the very time when
the need is most urgent. For as to those two jars, my friend, that
Homer[915] says are stored in Heaven, one full of good fortunes, one of
bad, it is not Zeus that presides as the dispenser of them, giving to
some a gentle and even portion, and to others unmixed streams of evils,
but ourselves. For the sensible make their life pleasanter and more
endurable by mitigating their sorrows with the consideration of their
blessings, while most people, like sieves, let the worst things stick to
them while the best pass through.
Sec. V. And so, if we fall into any real trouble or evil, we ought to get
cheerfulness and ease of mind from the consideration of the actual
blessings that are still left to us, mitigating outward trouble by
private happiness. And as to those things which are not really evil in
their nature, but only so from imagination and empty fancy, we must act
as we do with children who are afraid of masks: by bringing them near,
and putting them in their hands, and turning them about, we accustom
them never to heed them at all: and so we by bringing reason to bear on
it may discover the rottenness and emptiness and exaggeration of our
fancy. As a case in point let us take your present exile from what you
deem your country. For in nature no country, or house, or field, or
smithy, as Aristo said, or surgery, is peculiarly ours, but all such
things exist or rather take their name in connection with the person who
dwells in them or possesses them. For man, as Plato says, is not an
earthly and immovable but heavenly plant, the head making the body erect
as from a root, and turned up to heaven.[916] And so Hercules said well,
"Argive or Theban am I, I vaunt not
To be of one town only, every tower
That does to Greece belong, that is my country."
But better still said Socrates, that he was not an Athenian or Greek,
but a citizen of the world (as a man might say he was a Rhodian or
Corinthian), for he did not confine himself to Sunium, or Taenarum, or
the Ceraunian mountains.
"See you the boundless reach of sky above,
And how it holds the earth in its soft arms?"
These are the boundaries of our country, nor is there either exile or
stranger or foreigner in these, where there is the same fire, water and
air, the same rulers controllers and presidents, the sun the moon and
the morning star, the same laws to all, under one appointment and
ordinance the summer and winter solstices, the equinoxes, Pleias and
Arcturus, the seasons of sowing and planting; where there is one king
and ruler, God, who has under his jurisdiction the beginning and middle
and end of everything, and travels round and does everything in a
regular way in accordance with nature; and in his wake to punish all
transgressions of the divine law follows Justice, whom all men naturally
invoke in dealing with one another as fellow citizens.
Sec. VI. As to your not dwelling at Sardis, that is nothing. Neither do all
the Athenians dwell at Colyttus, nor all the Corinthians at Craneum, nor
all the Lacedaemonians at Pitane. Do you consider all those Athenians
strangers and exiles who removed from Melita to Diomea, where they call
the month Metageitnion,[917] and keep the festival Metageitnia to
commemorate their migration, and gladly and gaily accept and are content
with their neighbourhood with other people? Surely you would not. What
part of the inhabited world or of the whole earth is very far distant
from another part, seeing that mathematicians teach us that the whole
earth is a mere point compared to heaven? But we, like ants or bees, if
we get banished from one ant-hill or hive are in sore distress and feel
lost, not knowing or having learnt to make and consider all things our
own, as indeed they are. And yet we laugh at the stupidity of one who
asserts that the moon shines brighter at Athens than at Corinth, though
in a sort we are in the same case ourselves, when in a strange land we
look on the earth, the sea, the air, the sky, as if we doubted whether
or not they were different from those we had been accustomed to. For
nature makes us free and unrestrained, but we bind and confine immure
and force ourselves into small and scanty space. Then too we laugh at
the Persian kings, who, if the story be true, drink only of the water of
the Choaspes, thus making the rest of the world waterless as far as they
are concerned, but when we migrate to other places, we desire the water
of the Cephisus, or we yearn for the Eurotas, or Taygetus, or Parnassus,
and so make the whole world for ourselves houseless and homeless.
Sec. VII. Some Egyptians, who migrated to Ethiopia because of the anger and
wrath of their king, to those who begged them to return to their wives
and children very immodestly exposed their persons, saying that they
would never be in want of wives or children while so provided. It is far
more becoming and less low to say that whoever has the good fortune to
be provided with the few necessaries of life is nowhere a stranger,
nowhere without home and hearth, only he must have besides these
prudence and sense, as an anchor and helm, that he may be able to moor
himself in any harbour. For a person indeed who has lost his wealth it
is not easy quickly to get another fortune, but every city is at once
his country to the man who knows how to make it such, and has the roots
by which he can live and thrive and get acclimatized in every place, as
was the case with Themistocles and Demetrius of Phalerum. The latter
after his banishment became a great friend of Ptolemy at Alexandria, and
not only passed his days in abundance, but also sent gifts to the
Athenians. And Themistocles, who was publicly entertained at the king's
expense, is stated to have said to his wife and children, "We should
have been ruined, if we had not been ruined." And so Diogenes the Cynic
to the person who said to him, "The people of Sinope have condemned you
to banishment from Pontus," replied, "And I have condemned them to stay
in Pontus, 'by the high cliffs of the inhospitable sea.'"[918] And
Stratonicus asked his host at Seriphus, for what offence exile was the
appointed punishment, and being told that they punished rogues by exile,
said, "Why then are not you a rogue, to escape from this hole of a
place?" For the comic poet says they get their crop of figs down there
with slings, and that the island is very barely supplied with the
necessaries of life.
Sec. VIII. For if you look at the real facts and shun idle fancy, he that
has one city is a stranger and foreigner in all others. For it does not
seem to such a one fair and just to leave his own city and dwell in
another. "It has been your lot to be a citizen of Sparta, see that you
adorn your native city," whether it be inglorious, or unhealthy, or
disturbed with factions, or has its affairs in disorder. But the person
whom fortune has deprived of his own city, she allows to make his home
in any he fancies. That was an excellent precept of Pythagoras, "Choose
the best kind of life, custom will make it easy." So too it is wise and
profitable to say here, "Choose the best and pleasantest city, time will
make it your country, and a country that will not always distract you
and trouble you and give you various orders such as, 'Contribute so much
money, Go on an embassy to Rome, Entertain the prefect, Perform public
duties.'" If a person in his senses and not altogether silly were to
think of these things, he would prefer to live in exile in some island,
like Gryarus or Cinarus,
"Savage, and fruitless, ill repaying tillage,"
and that not in dejection and wailing, or using the language of those
women in Simonides,
"I am shut in by the dark roaring sea
That foams all round,"
but he will rather be of the mind of Philip, who when he was thrown in
wrestling, and turned round, and noticed the mark his body made in the
dust, said, "O Hercules, what a little part of the earth I have by
nature, though I desire all the world!"
Sec. IX. I think also you have seen Naxos, or at any rate Hyria, which is
close here. But the former was the home of Ephialtes and Otus, and the
latter was the dwelling-place of Orion. And Alcmaeon, when fleeing from
the Furies, so the poets tell us, dwelt in a place recently formed by
the silting of the Achelous;[919] but I think he chose that little spot
to dwell in ease and quiet, merely to avoid political disturbances and
factions, and those furies informers. And the Emperor Tiberius lived the
last seven years of his life in the island of Capreae, and the sacred
governing power of the world enclosed in his breast during all that time
never changed its abode. But the incessant and constant cares of empire,
coming from all sides, made not that island repose of his pure and
complete. But he who can disembark on a small island, and get rid of
great troubles, is a miserable man, if he cannot often say and sing to
himself those lines of Pindar, "To love the slender cypress, and to
leave the Cretan pastures lying near Ida. I have but little land, where
I grow strong, and have nothing to do with sorrow or faction,"[920] or
the ordinances of princes, or public duties in political emergencies, or
state functions hard to get off.
Sec. X. For if that seems a good saying of Callimachus, "Do not measure
wisdom by a Persian rope," much less should we measure happiness by
ropes and parasangs, and if we inhabit an island containing 200 furlongs
only, and not (like Sicily) four days' sail round, ought we to wail and
lament as if we were very unfortunate? For how does plenty of room bring
about an easy life? Have you not heard Tantalus saying in the play,[921]
"I sow a field that takes twelve days to travel round,
The Berecyntian region,"
but shortly after he says,
"My fortunes, that were once as high as heaven,
Now to the ground are fallen, and do say to me,
'Learn not to make too much of earthly things.'"
And Nausithous leaving the spacious Hyperia because of the proximity of
the Cyclopes, and migrating to an island "far from all enterprising
men,"[922] and living an unsocial life,
"Apart from men beside the stormy sea,"[923]
yet contrived to make the life of his citizens very pleasant. And the
Cyclades were first inhabited by the sons of Minos, and afterwards by
the sons of Codrus and Neleus, though foolish people now think they are
punished if they are exiled to them. And yet what island used as a place
of exile is not of larger extent than Scillus, where Xenophon after his
military service saw a comfortable old age?[924] And the Academy, a
small place bought for only 3,000 drachmae,[925] was the domicile of
Plato and Xenocrates and Polemo, who taught and lived there all their
lives, except one day every year, when Xenocrates went to Athens to
grace the festival of Dionysus, so they said, and to see the new plays
exhibited. And Theocritus of Chios twitted Aristotle with loving to live
at the courts of Philip and Alexander, and preferring to dwell at the
mouth of the Borborus to dwelling in the Academy. For there is a river
near Pella that the Macedonians call Borborus. As to islands Homer seems
to sing their praise, and recommend them to us as if on purpose, as
"She came to Lemnos, town of sacred Thoas;"[926]
and,
"What Lesbos has, the seat of the immortals;"[927]
and,
"He captured lofty Scyros, citadel
Of Enyeus;"[928]
and,
"And those who from Dulichium came, and from
The sacred islands called th' Echinades,
That lie across the sea opposite Elis;"[929]
and of the illustrious men that dwelt in islands he mentions AEolus the
favourite of the gods, and Odysseus most wise, and Ajax most brave, and
Alcinous most kind to strangers.
Sec. XI. When Zeno learned that the only ship he had left was with all its
freight lost at sea, he said, "Fortune, you deal kindly with me,
confining me to my threadbare cloak and the life of a philosopher." And
a man not altogether silly, or madly in love with crowds, might, I
think, not blame fortune for confining him in an island, but might even
praise her for relieving him from weariness and anxiety, and wanderings
in foreign countries, and perils by sea, and the uproar of the forum,
and for giving him truly a secure, quiet, undistracted and private life,
putting him as it were inside a circle in which everything necessary for
him was contained. For what island has not a house, a promenade, a bath,
and fish and hares for those who love fishing and field-sports? And the
greatest blessing, quiet, which others frequently pant for, you can
freely enjoy.[930] And whereas in the world,[930] when men are playing
at dice or otherwise enjoying the privacy of their homes, informers and
busybodies hunt them up and pursue them from their houses and gardens in
the suburbs, and drag them by force to the forum and court, in an island
no one comes to bother one or dun one or to borrow money, or to beg one
to be surety for him or canvass for him: only one's best friends and
intimates come to visit one out of good will and affection, and the rest
of one's life is a sort of holy retirement to whoever wishes or has
learnt to live the life of leisure. But he who thinks those happy who
are always scouring the country, and pass most of their lives in inns
and ferryboats, is like a person who thinks the planets happier than
fixed stars. And yet every planet keeps its order, rolling in one
sphere, as in an island. For, as Heraclitus says, the sun will never
deviate from its bounds, for if it did, the Furies, who are the
ministers of Justice, would find it out.
Sec. XII. Let us use such and similar language, my friend, and harp upon
it, to those who are banished to an island, and are debarred all access
with others
"By the sea waves, which many keep apart."[931]
But you who are not tied down to one spot, but only forbidden to live in
one, have by that prohibition liberty to go to all others. Moreover to
the considerations, I am not in office, or a member of the senate, or an
umpire in the games, you may oppose these, I do not belong to any
faction, I have no large sums to spend, I have not to dance attendance
at the doors of the prefect, it is no odds to me who has got by lot the
province, whether he is hot-tempered or an objectionable person. But
just as Archilochus overlooked the fruitful fields and vineyards of
Thasos, and abused that island as rocky and uneven, and said of it,
"It stands like donkey's chine crowned with wild forest,"
so we, fixing our eyes only on one aspect of exile, its inglorious
state, overlook its freedom from cares, its leisure, its liberty. And
yet people thought the kings of Persia happy, because they passed their
winter in Babylon, their summer in Media, and the pleasant season of
spring at Susa. So can the exile be present at the Eleusinian mysteries,
at the festival of Dionysus at Athens, at the Nemean games at Argos, at
the Pythian games at Delphi, and can pass on and be a spectator of the
Isthmian and Corinthian games, if he is fond of sight-seeing; and if
not, he has leisure, can walk about, read, sleep without being
disturbed, and can say like Diogenes, "Aristotle has to dine when Philip
thinks fit, Diogenes can dine at any time he himself chooses," having no
business, or magistrate, or prefect, to put him out of his general
habits of living.
Sec. XIII. And so it is that you will find few of the wisest and most
intelligent men buried in their own countries, but most (even without
any compulsion) have themselves weighed anchor, and transferred their
course, and removed, some to Athens, some from it. For who ever bestowed
such encomium upon his country as Euripides did in the following lines?
"First we are not a race brought in from other parts,
But are indigenous, when all other cities
Are, draughts-men like, transferred from place to place,
And are imported from elsewhere. And, lady,
If it is not beside the mark to boast,
We have above us a well-tempered sky,
A climate not too hot, nor yet too cold.
And all the finest things in Greece or Asia
We do procure as an attraction here."[932]
And yet the author of these lines went to Macedonia, and lived all the
latter part of his life at the court of Archelaus. And of course you
have heard the following epitaph;
"Here lies Euphorion's son, Athenian AEschylus,
To whom death came in corn-producing Gela."
For he, like Simonides before him, went to Sicily. And many have changed
the commencing words of Herodotus, "This is the setting forth of the
history of Herodotus of Halicarnassus" into "Herodotus of Thurii." For
he migrated to Thurii, and participated in that colony. As to the divine
and sacred spirit of the Muses, the poet of the Trojan war, Homer, did
not many cities claim him as theirs, because he did not cry up one city
only? And Hospitable Zeus has many great honours.
Sec. XIV. And if anyone shall say that these pursued glory and honour, go
to the philosophers, and their schools and lectures, consider those at
the Lyceum, the Academy, the Porch, the Palladium, the Odeum. If you
admire and prefer the Peripatetic school, Aristotle was a native of
Stagira, Theophrastus of Eresus, Strato of Lampsacus, Glyco of Troas,
Aristo of Ceos, Critolaus of Phaselis. If you prefer the Stoic school,
Zeno was a native of Cittium, Cleanthes of Assus, Chrysippus of Soli,
Diogenes of Babylon, Antipater of Tarsus; and the Athenian Archidemus
migrated to the country of the Parthians, and left at Babylon a
succession of the Stoic school. Who exiled these men? Nobody; it was
their own pursuit of quiet, of which no one who is famous or powerful
can get much at home, that made them teach us this by their practice,
while they taught us other things by their precepts. And even nowadays
most excellent and renowned persons live in strange lands, not in
consequence of being expelled or banished, but at their own option, to
avoid business and distracting cares, and the want of leisure which
their own country would bring them. For it seems to me that the Muses
aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works
by calling in exile as a fellow-worker. Thus Thucydides the Athenian
wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the
Athenians in Thrace near the forest of Scapte, Xenophon wrote at Scillus
in Elis, Philistus in Epirus, Timaeus of Tauromenium at Athens, Androtion
of Athens at Megara, and Bacchylides the poet[933] in Peloponnesus. All
these and many more, though exiled from their country, did not despair
or give themselves up to dejection, but so happy was their disposition
that they considered exile a resource given them by fortune, whereby
they obtained universal fame after their deaths, whereas no memorial is
left of those who were factious against them and banished them.
Sec. XV. He therefore is ridiculous who thinks that any ignominy attaches
itself to exile. What say you? Was Diogenes without glory, whom
Alexander saw basking in the sun, and stopped to ask if he wanted
anything, and when he answered, "Nothing, but that you would get a
little out of my light," Alexander, astonished at his spirit, said to
his friends, "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes." Was
Camillus without glory when banished from Rome, of which he is now
accounted the second founder? And indeed Themistocles did not lose by
his exile the glory he had obtained among the Greeks, but he added to it
among the barbarians, and there is no one so without honour, so ignoble,
who would prefer to be Leobates who indicted him rather than
Themistocles the exile, or Clodius who banished Cicero rather than the
banished one, or Aristophon the accuser rather than Timotheus who got
driven by him from his country.
Sec. XVI. But since a good many are moved by the lines of Euripides, who
seems to bring a strong indictment against exile, let us see what it is
he says in each question and answer about it.
_Jocasta._ What is't to be an exile? Is it grievous?
_Polynices._ Most grievous, and in deed worse than in word.
_Jocasta._ What is its aspect? What is hard for exiles?
_Polynices._ This is the greatest, that they have no freedom.
_Jocasta._ This is a slave's life not to speak one's thoughts!
_Polynices._ Then one must put up with one's masters' follies.[934]
But this is not a right or true estimate.[935] For first of all, not to
say out all one thinks is not the action of a slave but of a sensible
man, in times and matters that require reticence and silence, as
Euripides himself has said elsewhere better,
"Be silent where 'tis meet, speak where 'tis safe."
Then as for the follies of one's masters, one has to put up with them
just as much in one's own country as in exile. Indeed, more frequently
have the former reason to fear that the powerful in cities will act
unjustly to them either through calumny or violence. But his greatest
and absurdest error is that he takes away from exiles freedom of speech.
It is wonderful, if Theodorus had no freedom of speech, that when
Lysimachus the king said to him, "Did not your country cast you out
because of your character?" replied, "Yes, as Semele cast out Dionysus,
when unable to bear him any longer." And when he showed him Telesphorus
in a cage,[936] with his eyes scooped out, and his nose and ears and
tongue cut off, and said to him, "This is how I treat those that act ill
to me." * *[937] And had not Diogenes freedom of speech, who, when he
visited Philip's camp just as he was on the eve of offering battle to
the Greeks, and was taken before the king as a spy, told him he had come
to see his insatiable folly, who was going shortly to stake his
dominions and life on a mere die. And did not Hannibal the Carthaginian
use freedom of speech to Antiochus, though he was an exile, and
Antiochus a king? For as a favourable occasion presented itself he urged
the king to attack the enemy, and when after sacrifice he reported that
the entrails forbade it, Hannibal chided him and said, "You listen
rather to what flesh tells you than to the instruction of a man of
experience." Nor does exile deprive geometricians or grammarians of
their freedom of speech, or prevent their discussing what they know and
have learnt. Why should it then good and worthy men? It is meanness
everywhere that stops a man's speech, ties and gags his tongue, and
forces him to be silent. But what are the next lines of Euripides?
_Jocasta._ Hopes feed the hearts of exiles, so they say.
_Polynices._ Hopes have a flattering smile, but still delay.[938]
But this is an accusation against folly rather than exile. For it is not
those who have learnt and know how to enjoy the present, but those who
ever hang on the future, and hope after what they have not, that float
as it were on hope as on a raft, though they never get beyond the
walls.[939]
_Jocasta._ But did your father's friends do nothing for you?
_Polynices._ Be fortunate! Friends are no use in trouble.
_Jocasta._ Did not your good birth better your condition?
_Polynices._ 'Tis bad to want. Birth brought no bread to me.[940]
But it was ungrateful in Polynices thus to rail against exile as
discrediting his good birth and robbing him of friends, for it was on
account of his good birth that he was deemed worthy of a royal bride
though an exile, and he came to fight supported by a band of friends and
allies, a great force, as he himself admits a little later,
"Many of the princes of the Danai
And from Mycenae are with me, bestowing
A sad but necessary kindness on me."[941]
Nor was there any more justice in the lament of his
mother:--
"I never lit for you the nuptial torch
In marriage customary, nor did Ismenus
Furnish you with the usual solemn bath."[942]
She ought to have been pleased and content to hear that her son dwelt in
such a palace _as that at Argos_, and in lamenting that the nuptial
torch was not lit, and that he had not had the usual bath in the river
Ismenus, as though there was no water or fire at Argos for wedded
people, she lays on exile the evils really caused by pride and
stupidity.
Sec. XVII. But exile, you will say, is a matter of reproach. It may be
among fools, who also jeer at the beggar, the bald man, the dwarf, aye,
and even the stranger and resident alien. But those who are not carried
away in that manner admire good men, whether they are poor, or strangers
or exiles. Do we not see that all men adore the temple of Theseus as
well as the Parthenon and Eleusinium? And yet Theseus was an exile from
Athens, though it was owing to him that Athens is now inhabited, and he
was banished from a city which he did not merely dwell in, but had
himself built. And what glory is left to Eleusis, if we are ashamed of
Eumolpus, who migrated from Thrace, and taught the Greeks (as he still
teaches them) the mysteries? And who was the father of Codrus that
reigned at Athens? Was it not Melanthus, an exile from Messene? And do
you not praise the answer of Antisthenes to the person who told him that
his mother was a Phrygian, "So also is the mother of the gods." If you
are twitted then with exile, why do you not answer, "The father of the
glorious victor Hercules was an exile." And Cadmus, the grandfather of
Dionysus, when he was sent from home to find Europa, and never came
back, "though a Phoenician born he changed his country,"[943] and
migrated to Thebes, and became[944] the grandfather of "Dionysus, who
rejoices in the cry of Evoe, the exciter of women, who delights in
frantic honours." As for what AEschylus obscurely hints at in the line,
"Apollo the chaste god, exile from heaven,"
let me keep a religious silence, as Herodotus[945] says. And Empedocles
commences his system of philosophy as follows, "It is an ordinance of
necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, when anyone stains his hands
with crime and murder, the long-lived demons get hold of him, so that he
wanders away from the gods for thirty thousand years. Such is my
condition now, that of an exile and wanderer from the gods." In these
words he not only speaks of himself, but points out that all of us men
similarly are strangers and foreigners and exiles in this world. For he
says, "O men, it is not blood or a compounded spirit that made the being
or beginning of the soul, but it is your earth-born and mortal body that
is made up of these." He calls speciously by the mildest of names the
birth of the soul that has come from elsewhere a living in a strange
country. But the truth is the soul is an exile and wanderer, being
driven about by the divine decrees and laws, and then, as in some
sea-girt island, gets joined to the body like an oyster to its shell, as
Plato says, because it cannot call to mind or remember from what honour
and greatness of happiness it migrated, not from Sardis to Athens, nor
from Corinth to Lemnos or Scyros, but exchanging heaven and the moon for
earth and life upon earth, if it shifts from place to place for ever so
short a time it is put out and feels strange, and fades away like a
dying plant. But although one soil is more suitable to a plant than
another, and it thrives and grows better on such a soil, yet no
situation can rob a man of his happiness or virtue or sense. It was in
prison that Anaxagoras wrote his squaring of the circle, and that
Socrates, even after drinking the hemlock, talked philosophically, and
begged his friends to be philosophers, and was esteemed happy by them.
On the other hand, Phaethon and Tantalus, though they got up to heaven,
fell into the greatest misfortunes through their folly, as the poets
tell us.
[913] Euripides, "Phoenissae," 388, 389.
[914] Reading [Greek: bakelas]. _Gallus_ in Latin.
[915] "Iliad," xxiv. 527-533.
[916] Plato, "Timaeus," p. 90 A. Compare Ovid,
"Metamorphoses," i. 84-86.
[917] Derived from [Greek: meta, geiton], because then
people flitted and changed their neighbours.
[918] Euripides, "Iphigenia in Tauris," 253.
[919] See also Pausanias, viii. 24.
[920] Pindar, Fragm. 126.
[921] AEschylus, "Niobe," Fragm. 146.
[922] "Odyssey," vi. 8. I read [Greek: andron] as
Wyttenbach.
[923] "Odyssey," vi. 204.
[924] See Pausanias, v. 6.
[925] In our money about L121 17_s._ 6_d._
[926] "Iliad," xiv. 230.
[927] "Iliad," xxiv. 544.
[928] "Iliad," ix. 668.
[929] "Iliad," ii. 625, 626.
[930] So Reiske.
[931] "Iliad," xxi. 59.
[932] Euripides, Fragm. 950.
[933] Reiske suggests [Greek: Bakchylides ho Keios]. A
very probable suggestion.
[934] Euripides, "Phoenissae," 388-393.
[935] Omitting [Greek: prhotos], which probably got in
from [Greek: proton] following, and for which Reiske
conjectured [Greek: horas hos].
[936] Such as Cardinal Balue was shut up by Louis XI in
for fourteen years.
[937] The answer of Theodorus is wanting.
[938] Euripides, "Phoenissae," 396, 397.
[939] That is, they never get any further.
[940] Euripides, "Phoenissae," 402-405.
[941] Euripides, "Phoenissae," 430-432.
[942] Ibid. 344-346.
[943] Reading [Greek: chthonos]. "Sic mutandum censet
Valckenarius."--_Wyttenbach._
[944] Through his daughter Semele.
[945] Herodotus, ii. 171.