Of Banishment, or Flying One's Country. (1-5)

ONE may say of discourses what they use to say of friends, that they are the best and firmest that afford their useful presence and help in calamities. Many indeed present themselves and discourse with those that are fallen into misfortunes, who yet do them more harm than good. Like men that attempt to succor drowning persons and have themselves no skill in diving under water, they entangle one another, and sink together to the bottom. The discourses of friends, such as would help an afflicted person, ought to be directed to the consolation, and not to the patronage of his sorrows. For we have no need in our distresses of such as may bear us company in weeping and howling, like a chorus in a tragedy, but of such as will deal freely with us, and will convince us that,—as it is in all cases vain and foolish and to no purpose to grieve and cast down one’s self,—so, when the things themselves that afflict us, after a rational examination and discovery of what they are, give a man leave to say to himself thus,

Thou feel’st but little pain and smart,

Unless thou’lt feign and act a part,

it would be extremely ridiculous for him not to put the question to his body, and ask it what it has suffered, nor to his soul, and ask how much worse it is become by this accident, but only to make use of those teachers of grief from abroad, who come to bear a part with him in his sorrow, or to express indignation at what has happened.

Let us therefore, when we are alone, question with ourselves concerning the things that have befallen us, considering them as heavy loads. The body, we know, is under pressure by a burden lying upon it; but the soul oft-times adds a further weight of her own to things. A stone is hard and ice is cold by nature, not by any thing from without happening to make such qualities and impressions upon them. But as for banishment and disgraces and loss of honors (and so for their contraries, crowns, chief rule, and precedency of place), our opinion prescribing the measure of our joys or sorrows and not the nature of the things themselves, every man makes them to himself light or heavy, easy to be borne or grievous. You may hear Polynices’s answer to this question,

JOCAST. But say, is’t so deplorable a case

To live in exile from one’s native place?

POLYN. It’s sad indeed; and whatsoe’er you guess,

’Tis worse to endure than any can express.

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But you may hear Alcman in quite another strain, as the epigrammatist has brought him in saying:

Sardis, my ancient fatherland,

Hadst thou, by Fate’s supreme command,

My helpless childhood nourished,

I must have begg’d my daily bread,

Or else, a beardless priest become,

Have toss’d Cybele frantic down.

Now Alcman I am call’d—a name

Inscribed in Sparta’s lists of fame,

Whose many tripods record bear

Of solemn wreaths and tripods rare,

Achieved in worship at the shrine

Of Heliconian maids divine,

By whose great aid I’m mounted higher

Than Gyges or his wealthy sire.

[*]

Thus one man’s opinion makes the same thing commodious, like current money, and another man’s unserviceable and hurtful.

Wherefore, if we fall into any real evil or calamity, we must bring in what is pleasant and delightful of the remaining good things in our possession, and thus, by what we enjoy at home, mitigate the sense of those evils that befall us from abroad. But where there is no evil in the nature of the things, but the whole of that which afflicts us is framed by imagination and false opinion, in this case we must do just as we deal with children that are apt to be frighted with false faces and vizards; by bringing them nearer, and making them handle and turn then on every side, they are brought at last to despise them; so we, by a nearer touching and fixing our consideration upon our feigned evils, may be able to detect and discover the weakness and vanity of what we fear and so tragically deplore.

Such is your present condition of being banished out of that which you account your country; for nature has given us no country, as it has given us no house or field, no smith’s or apothecary’s shop, as Ariston said; but every one of them is always made or rather called such a man’s by his dwelling in it or making use of it. For man (as Plato says)

is not an earthly and unmovable, but a heavenly plant, the head raising the body erect as from a root, and directed upwards toward heaven.[*] Hence is that saying of Hercules:

Am I of Thebes or Argos? Whether

You please, for I’m content with either;

But to determine one, ’tis pity,

In Greece my country’s every city.

But Socrates expressed it better, when he said, he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world (just as a man calls himself a citizen of Rhodes or Corinth), because he did not enclose himself within the limits of Sunium, Taenarum, or the Ceraunian mountains.

Behold how yonder azure sky,

Extending vastly wide and high

To infinitely distant spaces,

In her soft arms our earth embraces.

[*]

These are the boundaries of our country, and no man is an exile or a stranger or foreigner in these, where there is the same fire, water, air, the same rulers, administrators, and presidents, the same sun, moon, and daystar; where there are the same laws to all, and where, under one orderly disposition and government, are the summer and winter solstices, the equinoxes, Pleiades, Arcturus, times of sowing and planting; where there is one king and supreme ruler, which is God, who comprehends the beginning, the middle, and end of the universe; who passes through all things in a straight course, compassing all things according to nature: justice follows him to take vengeance on those that transgress the divine law, which justice we naturally all make use of towards all men, as being citizens of the same community.