Of Banishment, or Flying One's Country. (13)

For this reason, you will find that very few of the most prudent and wise men were buried in their own country, but the most of them, when none forced them to it, weighed anchor and steered their course to live in another port, removing some to Athens, and others from it.

Who ever gave a greater encomium of his own country than Euripides in the following verses?

We are all of this country’s native race,

Not brought-in strangers from another place,

As some, like dice hither and thither thrown,

Remove in haste from this to t’other town.

And, if a woman may have leave to boast,

A temperate air breathes here in every coast;

We neither curse summer’s immoderate heat,

Nor yet complain the winter’s cold’s too great.

If aught there be that noble Greece doth yield,

Or Asia rich, by river or by field,

We seek it out and bring it to our doors.

And yet he that wrote all this went himself into Macedonia, and passed the rest of his days in the court of Archelaus. I suppose you have also heard of this short epigram:

Here lieth buried Aeschylus, the son

Of the Athenian Euphorion;

In Sicily his latest breath did yield,

And buried lies by Gela’s fruitful field.

For both he and Simonides before him went into Sicily. And whereas we meet with this title, This publication of the History of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, many have changed it into Herodotus of Thurii, for he dwelt at Thurii, and was a member of that colony. And that sacred and divine poet Homer, that adorned the Trojan war,—why was he a controversy to so many cities (every one pleading he was theirs) but because he did not cry up any one of them to the disparagement of the rest? Many also and great are the honors that are paid to Jupiter Hospitalis.