Plutarch's Morals
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,