Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
They say that the best and most reliable words, like the best and most reliable friends, are those that are present in misfortunes and give useful help. For indeed many are present and converse with people who have stumbled, but uselessly, or rather harmfully, like non-swimmers who try to help drowning men and end up entangled with them and dragged under together. What is needed from friends and from those who help with words is consolation, not advocacy for the thing that is causing the pain.
For we have no need of people who weep and wail along with us like tragic choruses amid unwelcome events, but rather of people who speak frankly and teach that grieving and abasing oneself over everything is useless, and happens vainly and foolishly; whereas, when the facts themselves, examined and uncovered by reason, allow a man to say to himself, "You have suffered nothing terrible," that is so, unless he merely pretends it is.
It is altogether ridiculous not to inquire of the flesh what it has suffered, nor of the soul whether it has become worse because of this misfortune, but instead to use as teachers of one's grief people from outside who join in one's distress and share one's indignation. That is why, becoming judges by ourselves, on our own, we should examine the weight of each of our misfortunes as though they were loads: the body is weighed down by the burden of what oppresses it, but the soul often adds the weight to circumstances out of itself.
A stone is by nature hard, ice is by nature cold — we are not the ones who, from outside, arbitrarily impose these qualities of resistance and solidity upon them. But exile and disrepute and the loss of honors — and, on the other hand, their opposites, crowns and offices and seats of honor — have as the measure of their power to grieve or gladden us not their own nature but our judgment; each person makes these things light or heavy and easy to bear for himself, and the opposite as well.
One can hear how Polyneices answered this very question, and how Alcman did, as the man who wrote the little epigram has represented him: "Sardis, ancient custom of my fathers — had I been raised among you, I would have been some gaudy priest of Cybele, beating fine drums; but as it is my name is Alcman, and I belong to Sparta of the many tripods, and I have learned the Muses of Helicon, who have made me greater than the tyrants Dascylus and Gyges." For the very same thing — reputation — makes itself, like a coin of good standing, easy to spend for one man, but hard to spend and harmful for another.
Let exile, then, be a terrible thing, as the many say and sing. And indeed among foods too there are many that are bitter and sharp and biting to the taste; but by mixing in with them some of what is sweet and pleasant we remove their unpleasantness. There are also colors that are painful to the sight, against which the eye becomes confused and dazzled because of their harshness and an unbearable intensity. If, then, as a remedy for that discomfort we mixed in shade with them, or turned our gaze aside to something green and gentle, this we may do also with respect to our misfortunes,
blending with them the useful and kindly elements among the things now present to you — abundance, friends, freedom from public business, the lack of any want of what is necessary for life. For I do not think there are many people of Sardis who would not gladly choose to have your circumstances, even along with the exile, and who would not be content to live abroad in this fashion, rather than, like snails,
be fused to their shells and possess no other good, merely sharing without grief in what is at home. So, just as in a comedy someone urges an unfortunate friend to take courage and defend himself against fortune, and when asked "in what way?" answers "philosophically" — so let us too defend ourselves against fortune by philosophizing worthily. But when Zeus rains, how do we defend ourselves? And when the north wind blows, how? We seek fire, a bath, a cloak, shelter; for indeed we do not,
when it rains, sit still and weep. So too for you, as for anyone whatever, it is possible to rekindle and warm again this chilled part of your life, needing no other remedies but making sensible use of what is present. For the doctor's cupping-glasses draw out the worst matter from the body and thereby relieve it and preserve the rest; but those who love grief and love to find fault, by constantly gathering together
the worst of their own circumstances, and by dwelling on them and being consumed by their troubles, render useless even what is useful to them, at the very moment when it is most naturally able to help. For the two jars, my friend, which Homer said stood in heaven full of fates, the one of good things and the other of bad, are not dispensed by Zeus sitting there as steward, mixing gentle streams for some and pouring unmixed streams of evils for others;
rather, among us ourselves, those who have sense, by drawing from the good things to dilute the bad, make life sweeter and more palatable, while for most people, as though through sieves, the worst things remain and cling, while the better things flow away underneath. Therefore even if we truly fall into some real evil and grief, we must draw in cheerfulness and good spirits from the good things that remain and are still available to us,
smoothing over what is foreign with what is our own. But as for things whose nature contains no evil at all, and whose whole capacity to pain us has been fashioned entirely out of empty opinion, these we must treat as we do with children who are afraid of masks: by bringing the masks close and putting them into their hands and turning them about, we accustom the children to despise them; likewise, by handling our reasoning close up and pressing hard upon it, we must uncover what is rotten and empty and merely staged for tragic effect in these things. Such, for instance, is
this change now present for you, away from your so-called native land. For by nature there is no such thing as a native land, just as there is no house, no field, no smithy — as Ariston used to say — nor any doctor's office; rather, each of these things comes to be, or rather is named and called such, always in relation to the one who inhabits and uses it. For man, as Plato says, is "a plant not rooted in the earth," nor immovable, but
"heavenly," as it were, since the root — his head — holds the body upright and turned toward the sky. That is why Heracles spoke well when he said, "I am not Argive, nor Theban; I do not claim citizenship of one city alone; every tower of the Greeks is my native land." But Socrates spoke even better, saying he was not an Athenian nor a Greek but a citizen of the world (as one might say a Rhodian or a Corinthian); for he did not confine himself
within Sunium, nor Taenarum, nor the Ceraunian mountains. Do you see this boundless upper air, and the earth encircled all about in its moist embrace? These are the boundaries of our native land, and no one here is exile or stranger or foreigner, where fire, water, and air are the same for all, where the same rulers and administrators and presiding officers govern — sun, moon, morning star — where the same
laws hold for all, under a single ordinance and a single sovereignty: solstices in the north, solstices in the south, equinoxes, the Pleiades, Arcturus, the seasons for sowing, the seasons for planting; and there is one king and ruler, "God, holding the beginning and middle and end of the whole, proceeding in a straight course according to nature; and Justice follows him, punisher of those who fall away from the divine law" — by nature we all, as human beings, treat all
other human beings as our fellow citizens. That you do not dwell in Sardis is nothing at all; for not all Athenians dwell in Collytus, nor all Corinthians in Craneum, nor all Spartans in Pitane. Are, then, those Athenians who have moved from Melite to Diomeia strangers and without a city, though they even keep a month named Metageitnion and hold a sacrifice named after their change of residence, the Metageitnia, receiving the neighborly nearness of others readily and gladly,
and cherishing it? You could not say so. What then, of the inhabited world or of the whole earth, is far from any other part, when mathematicians demonstrate that it holds the ratio of a mere point without extension in relation to the heavens? But we, like ants or bees fallen from a single anthill or a single hive, grow distressed and feel like strangers, not knowing or having learned to treat everything as our own and to regard it as such,
which indeed it is. And yet we laugh at the foolishness of the man who claims the moon in Athens is finer than the one in Corinth — though we in a way suffer the same thing ourselves, whenever, finding ourselves in a foreign land, we grow uncertain about the earth, the sea, the air, the sky, as though they were different and other than what we are used to. For nature releases us free and unbound, but we ourselves bind ourselves, cramp ourselves, wall ourselves in, driving ourselves into
small and cramped quarters. And then we laugh at the kings of Persia, if it is indeed true that, drinking only the water of the Choaspes, they make the rest of the inhabited world waterless for themselves — yet whenever we move to other places, longing for the Cephisus and yearning for the Eurotas or Taygetus or Parnassus, we make the whole inhabited world cityless and uninhabitable for ourselves. Now among the Egyptians,
those who were resettled to Ethiopia out of some anger and harshness on the part of the king, when those who wanted them to return to their children and wives displayed their genitals in a rather cynical fashion, said they would lack neither marriages nor children so long as they had these with them. But it is more decorous and dignified to say that wherever and to whomever it falls to have a modest sufficiency for life, there he is
neither cityless nor homeless nor a stranger; he need only have, in addition to this, intelligence and reason, like an anchor or a pilot, so that wherever he puts in he can make use of any harbor. For it is not easy or quick to gather again wealth once thrown away; but every city at once becomes a native land to the man who has learned to make use of it and has roots capable of taking hold and thriving everywhere —
such roots as Themistocles had, such as Demetrius of Phalerum had. This latter, in Alexandria after his exile, being foremost among the friends of Ptolemy, not only lived himself in abundance but also sent gifts to the Athenians. Themistocles, maintained by royal bounty, is said to have remarked to his wife and children, "We would have been ruined, had we not been ruined." That is also why Diogenes
the Cynic, when someone said to him, "The people of Sinope have condemned you to exile from Pontus," replied, "And I have condemned them to stay in Pontus" — on the rocky shores of the inhospitable strait. And Stratonicus asked the stranger from Seriphus for what crimes exile was appointed as the penalty among them; and when he heard that they exiled swindlers, he said, "Why then did you not commit some swindle, so as to be removed from
this cramped little place?" — the island of which the comic poet says its figs are harvested with slings, and that it has everything one needs. For if you look at the truth apart from empty opinion, the man who possesses only one city is a stranger and foreigner to all the others. For it does not seem noble or just to abandon one's own city in order to manage another. "You have been allotted Sparta: adorn it," even if
it is without renown, even if it is sickly, even if it is disturbed by factions within itself and by unhealthy affairs. But to the man from whom fortune has taken away his own, she gives leave to have whichever one pleases him. For that fine precept of the Pythagoreans, "choose the best life, and habit will make it pleasant," is wise and useful here too: "choose the best and pleasantest city, and time will make it your native land" —
and a native land that does not distract you, does not trouble you, does not command you: "contribute, go as ambassador to Rome, receive the governor, perform public service." For if a man of sound mind, and not utterly deluded, keeps these things in view, he will choose, even having become an exile, to inhabit an island — Gyarus or Cinarus, harsh, unfruitful, and bad for planting — without losing heart or lamenting or saying those words of the women in Simonides,
"the roar of the purple sea, churned all about, holds me fast." Rather, he will reckon like Philip: for when he fell in the wrestling-school and turned over, and saw the imprint of his body, he said, "Heracles, how small a portion of the earth we naturally possess, and yet we desire the whole inhabited world!" I suppose you have been a spectator of Naxos; or if not, of Hyria nearby here,
which was the dwelling-place of Ephialtes and Otus; and the other island received Orion. And Alcmaeon settled on the newly formed silt deposited by the Achelous, fleeing the Furies, as the poets say; and I imagine that he too, fleeing political turmoil and factions and the fury of malicious accusations, chose a small piece of ground to inhabit quietly and without public trouble. And Tiberius Caesar, on
Capri, spent seven years there up to his death; and the ruling sanctuary of the inhabited world, gathered as it were into a single heart, did not shift from that spot for so long a time. But for him the cares of empire, poured in and brought to him from every side, did not allow the island's quiet to remain pure or free from disturbance; whereas the man who is able, having stepped off onto a small island, to be rid of no small evils — such a man is wretched only if he does not
talk to himself in the words of Pindar, and often sing to himself of loving "the light cypress" and leaving "the pasture-land of Crete rich in fields" to others: "to me a small portion of earth has been given, from which no oaks grow, but I have had no share of griefs, nor of factions, nor of the commands of governors, nor of the services and hard-to-refuse public burdens demanded in political affairs." For where Callimachus is thought to speak not badly in saying, "do not measure wisdom by the Persian rope" —
surely we too, if we measure our happiness by ropes and parasangs, ought not, if we inhabit an island of two hundred stades and not one requiring four days to sail around like Sicily, to torment and lament ourselves as though we were unfortunate? For what does a wide country contribute to a griefless life? Do you not hear Tantalus saying in the tragedy, "I sow a field a twelve days' journey across, the region of Berecyntus" — and then a little
later saying, "but my fate, which once touched the sky above, falls to the ground, and speaks this to me: learn not to revere human things too greatly"? And Nausithous, abandoning the spacious Hyperia because the Cyclopes lived too near it, and moving to an island far from men who toil for bread, and dwelling apart, unmixed with other men, in the surging sea, provided the sweetest life for his own citizens. And the
Cyclades were inhabited first by the sons of Minos, and later by the sons of Codrus and Neileus — the very islands in which foolish exiles nowadays imagine themselves to be punished. And yet what island of exile is not more spacious than the district of Scillus, where Xenophon, after his campaigns, saw a comfortable old age? And the Academy, a little plot of ground bought for three thousand drachmas, was the dwelling place of Plato and Xenocrates and
of Polemo, who spent their time and lived out their whole lives there, except for a single day, on which Xenocrates went down each year into the city for the Dionysia to see the new tragedies, as they say, keeping the festival. Aristotle, too, was reviled by Theocritus of Chios for having grown fond of his life at the court of Philip and Alexander and having chosen to dwell by the outflow of the Borborus rather than at the Academy. For there is a river near Pella, which the Macedonians
they call the Mudflat. As for the islands, the poet, as if he made it his special task to praise and commend them to us, says: "and he came to Lemnos, city of godlike Thoas"; and "as much of lofty Lesbos, seat of the blessed, as it encloses"; and "and having taken steep Scyros, citadel of Enyeus"; and "and those from Dulichium and the sacred Echinades, islands that lie across the sea, facing Elis." And he says that the most illustrious of men dwelt on an island—
the god-beloved Aeolus, the wisest Odysseus, the bravest Ajax, the most hospitable Alcinous. So when Zeno learned that the one ship he still had left, along with its cargo, had been swallowed by the sea, he said, "Well done, Fortune, to drive us toward the cloak and the philosophic life." And a man not altogether puffed up with pride, nor maddened by the crowd, would not, I think, find fault with Fortune
for driving him onto an island, but would rather praise her, because, stripping away his great wandering restlessness and roving, his travels abroad, his dangers at sea, and his tumults in the marketplace, she truly gives him a settled, leisured, undistracted life of his own, marking out with a fixed radius the supply of what is necessary. For what island lacks a house, a walk, a bath, fish, hares for those who wish
to hunt and to play? The greatest thing is quiet, for which others thirst, and which is often yours to have—whereas at home, while men are playing draughts and keeping out of sight, informers and busybodies track them down and chase them from their suburbs and gardens into the marketplace and the courthouse, dragging them by force; but on an island no one troubles you, no one asks you for anything, no one borrows from you, no one calls on you to stand surety or to join in canvassing for office, except out of goodwill
and longing that the best of one's necessary kin sail out to visit; and the rest of one's life is set apart as inviolate and sacred for whoever wishes and has learned how to be at leisure. The man who counts happy those who run about outside and spend the greater part of their life in inns and ferry-boats is like the man who thinks the wandering planets fare better than the fixed stars—and yet each of the planets, within
a single sphere, circling as though within an island, keeps its order: "for the sun will not overstep his measures," says Heraclitus, "or else the Furies, ministers of Justice, will find him out." But let us say these things, my friend, and others like them, to those men, and sing them as a charm to those men, for whom being settled on an island makes everything else beyond their reach—"the sea, whose brine holds many back against their will":
but for you, since not merely one place but no place has been forbidden you, the exclusion from a single city leaves you the freedom of them all. Indeed, set against "we do not rule, nor sit in council, nor preside over the games" the reply, "we do not engage in faction, nor spend money, nor hang about the doors of a governor: it makes no difference to us who has drawn the lot of the province, whether he is short-tempered or overbearing." But we, like Archilochus,
who, overlooking the fruit-bearing, vine-planted lands of Thasos, slandered the island because of its rough and uneven ground, saying, "this island stands like the spine of an ass, crowned with wild woodland"—so too we, straining our attention toward the one inglorious aspect of exile, overlook its freedom from business, its leisure, and its liberty. And yet men used to call the Persian kings blessed for spending the winter in Babylon, the summer in
Media, and the most pleasant part of spring in Susa. It is surely open also to the exile to spend time at the Mysteries in Eleusis, at the Dionysia in Athens, to attend the festival panegyris of the Olympic games at Pisa, the Nemean games at Argos, to go to Delphi when the Pythian games are held, to Corinth for the Isthmian games, if he is fond of such spectacles; and if not, there is leisure, walking, reading, untroubled sleep—the saying of Diogenes: "Aristotle dines when
it seems good to Philip, Diogenes when it seems good to Diogenes"—with no business, no ruler, and no governor disturbing his accustomed routine. This is why you would find few of the wisest and most prudent men buried in their own native lands; most of them, with no one compelling them, themselves weighed anchor and shifted their lives elsewhere, some moving to Athens, others away from Athens. For who has spoken
such an encomium of his own homeland as Euripides has? "In her, first of all, our people are not settlers brought in from elsewhere, but we are native-born; while the other cities, scattered about like the throws of dice, are peopled by immigrants drawn from one place and another. And if I must boast further of something incidental, we have a sky above our land tempered well, so that neither excessive heat nor winter cold befalls it. And whatever things Greece and Asia"
nurture that are fairest on earth, holding out this land as a lure, we hunt them all together for ourselves." Yet the man who wrote this went off to Macedonia and lived out his life at Archelaus's court. And you have surely heard this little epigram too: "This tomb conceals Aeschylus son of Euphorion, an Athenian, dead at wheat-bearing Gela"—for he too departed for Sicily, as Simonides had done before him. And as for "This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus," many rewrite it as "of Herodotus of Thurii":
for he moved to Thurii and took part in that colony. And the sacred, divine spirit among the Muses, "Homer, marshaller of the Phrygian battle"—has this not made him a subject of dispute among many cities, precisely because he is not the encomiast of one alone? And Zeus the god of hospitality receives many great honors. But if someone should say that these men were hunting after fame and honors, go to the wise men and to the
wise schools and discourses at Athens: review those in the Lyceum, those in the Academy, the Stoa, the Palladium, the Odeum. If you especially embrace and admire the Peripatetic school, Aristotle was from Stagira, Theophrastus from Eresus, Strato from Lampsacus, Lyco from the Troad, Ariston from Ceos, Critolaus from Phaselis; if the Stoic school, Zeno was from Citium, Cleanthes from Assos, Chrysippus from Soli, Diogenes
of Babylon, Antipater of Tarsus—while Archedemus the Athenian, having moved to the land of the Parthians, left behind a Stoic succession in Babylon. Who, then, drove these men out? No one: rather, it was they themselves, in pursuit of the quiet that those at home who hold any reputation or power have scarcely any share in, who teach us this lesson—not so much by their words as by their deeds. Indeed, even now the most reputable and eminent men live abroad,
not because they were forcibly removed, but because they themselves moved; not because they were banished, but because they themselves fled the business, distractions, and preoccupations that their homelands bring. And indeed for the ancients too, it seems, the Muses took exile as their collaborator and thereby brought to completion the finest and most esteemed of their compositions. Thucydides the Athenian composed his history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians in Thrace, near Scapte Hyle; Xenophon wrote his in Scillus, in the territory of
Elis; Philistus in Epirus; Timaeus of Tauromenium in Athens; Androtion the Athenian in Megara; Bacchylides the poet in the Peloponnese. All these men, and many others besides, though cast out of their homelands, did not despair or abandon themselves, but instead used their natural gifts, taking their exile as provisions supplied by Fortune, through which, even in death, they are remembered everywhere; whereas of those who expelled them and drove them out by faction, not a single one
has left behind any word at all. This is why it is ridiculous for anyone to suppose that disgrace attaches to exile. What are you saying? Is Diogenes a man without honor—Diogenes, whom Alexander, seeing him sitting in the sun, approached and asked whether he needed anything; and when Diogenes told him he needed nothing except that he move a little out of his light, Alexander, astonished at his spirit, said to his friends, "If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes." Was Camillus without honor,
driven out of Rome—Rome, of which he is now proclaimed a second founder? And surely Themistocles, in fleeing, did not lose his reputation among the Greeks, but gained further reputation among the barbarians; and there is no one so lacking in ambition or so ignoble that he would rather be Leobates, who brought the indictment, than Themistocles, who was driven into exile; or Clodius, who cast Cicero out, rather than Cicero, who was cast out; or Aristophon,
who brought the accusation, rather than Timotheus, who was forced to move from his homeland. But since the words of Euripides move many people, on the grounds that he seems to speak forcefully against exile, let us examine what he says, questioning and answering point by point; for these claims are, in the first place, neither rightly nor truly esteemed. First, "not to say what one thinks" is not the mark of a slave, but of a man of sense, in circumstances and situations
that call for discretion and silence, just as Euripides himself has better said elsewhere: "to be silent where one must, and to speak where it is safe." Next, ignorance on the part of those in power must be endured no less by those who stay at home than by those in exile; indeed, often those who remain fear the powerful men in their cities more than those who have departed, dreading unjust prosecution or violence at their hands. But the greatest and strangest thing of all is if one supposes that free speech
is taken away from exiles: for it would be astonishing if Theodorus lacked free speech—Theodorus, who, when King Lysimachus said to him, "Your homeland banished a man like you," replied, "Yes—because it could not bear me, just as Semele could not bear Dionysus." And when Lysimachus showed him Telesphorus shut in a cage, his eyes gouged out, his nose and ears cut off, and his tongue excised, and said, "This is how
I treat those who wrong me," Theodorus said, "What does it matter to Theodorus whether he rots above the earth or below it?" And what of Diogenes—did he lack free speech, when he went into Philip's camp just as Philip was setting out to fight the Greeks, and, being brought before him as a spy, said, when asked if he was indeed a spy, "Yes, a spy come to see your insatiable greed and your folly, since in a short span
of time you are staking everything on the throw—your rule and your life together"? And what of Hannibal the Carthaginian—did he not use free speech with King Antiochus, though he himself was an exile, when, at a moment favorable for attack, he urged the king to fall upon the enemy, and the king, having sacrificed, said the entrails forbade it, and Hannibal rebuked him, saying, "You are looking at the flesh of an animal, not at what a man of sense should consider"? Nor indeed does exile take away
free speech even from geometers and students of line-drawing, when they discuss matters they know and have learned—how much less, then, from good and noble men? No, it is baseness of character that everywhere "stops up the voice, twists the tongue, chokes it, and forces it into silence." And what of the lines that follow in Euripides—what sort are they? This too is a charge against foolishness rather than against exile. For it is not those who have learned and know how to make use of what is
present, but those who are forever hanging upon the future and grasping after what is absent, who are tossed about, as if on a raft of hope, even though they never once venture beyond the city wall. These, then, are the graceless and thankless words of Polynices, who charges exile with dishonoring noble birth and depriving one of friendship—though it was precisely because of his noble birth that, exile though he was, he was thought worthy of a royal marriage, and, fortified by the alliance and might of friends so great, he went to war,
as he himself soon admits: "and many chief men of the Danaans and Mycenaeans are here, granting me a grudging but necessary favor." Similar too are the laments of his mother: "I did not kindle for you the marriage torch, nor was the Ismenus honored, as is customary, with the bridal bath's luxury." She ought to have rejoiced and been glad to learn that her son was dwelling in so great a palace; instead she laments
the torch that was not lit and the Ismenus that did not supply the bridal bath, as though in Argos those who marry have neither water nor fire—thus attaching to exile the evils that belong to vanity and folly. But is the exile truly held in reproach? Only among fools, who make a term of abuse even of the poor man, the bald man, and the short man, and, by Zeus, the foreigner
and the resident alien. But surely those who are not carried away by such prejudices admire good men, whether they are poor, or foreigners, or exiles. Do we not see that, just as with the Parthenon and the Eleusinion, so too with the Theseum, all men bow down before it? And yet Theseus was an exile from Athens—Theseus, because of whom men now come to Athens—and he lost a city that he had not inherited but had himself
created. And what fine thing would be left to Eleusis, if we were to feel shame at Eumolpus, who, having moved from Thrace, initiated the Greeks into the Mysteries and initiates them still? And Codrus—whose son was he, that he became king? Was he not the son of Melanthus, an exile from Messenia? And do you not approve the reply of Antisthenes to the man who said to him, "Your mother is Phrygian"—"Yes, and so is the mother of the gods"? Why, then, do you not likewise,
when reviled as an exile, answer, "Indeed, the father of Heracles of the glorious victories was also an exile, as was the grandfather of Dionysus, who, when sent out to find Europa, never returned himself, though he was a Phoenician by birth—"and from him our race is named"—having come to Thebes, "bringing the raving Dionysus, rouser of women, who flourishes amid frenzied honors"? And as for what Aeschylus hinted and darkly signified when he said, "holy Apollo, an exile
from heaven, a god—"let a good word rest upon it," as Herodotus says. And Empedocles, at the beginning of his philosophy, proclaims in advance: "There is a decree of Necessity, an ancient ordinance of the gods, that whenever one in his transgressions defiles his own dear limbs with bloodshed—the spirits who have obtained long life as their portion—he must wander thrice ten thousand seasons away from the blessed ones. Such a one am I too, now, an exile from the god and a wanderer": it is not himself, but
the very act of coming to be, that Empedocles here shows to make all of us, from the moment we leave the god, migrants in this world, and strangers, and exiles. For it is not blood, he says, nor breath mingled together, O men, that furnished the substance and origin of the soul, but the body is molded together out of these elements, earthborn and mortal; whereas the soul, having come here from elsewhere, calls its coming-to-be by the gentlest of names, "a journey abroad"; but the truest name for it is that it flees
and wanders, driven by divine decrees and laws. Then, as though on an island tossed by great swell, just as Plato says, bound to the body "in the manner of an oyster," because it does not recall or remember from what honor and how great a happiness it has been displaced—not from Sardis to Athens, nor from Corinth to Lemnos or Scyros, but having exchanged heaven and the moon for earth and
life upon it—if it should shift even a small distance from one place to another here below, it grows distressed and feels itself a stranger, withering away like some ignoble plant. And yet for a plant, one region may indeed be more suited than another, in which it is nourished and grows better; but from a human being no place takes away happiness, any more than it takes away virtue or wisdom: rather, Anaxagoras, in prison, worked out the squaring of the circle,
while Socrates, drinking the poison, went on philosophizing and urging his companions to philosophize, and was counted happy by them for it; whereas Phaethon and Tantalus, who ascended into heaven, the poets say met with the greatest misfortunes on account of their folly.