Of Banishment, or Flying One's Country. (9)

I presume you have seen the island of Naxos, or at least the town of Hyria here hard by; in the former of which Ephialtes and Otus made their abode, and in the

latter Orion dwelt. Alcmaeon’s seat was on the newly hardened mud which the river Achelous had cast up,—when he fled from the Furies, as the poets tell us,—but I guess it was when he fled from the rulers of the state and from seditions, and to avoid those furies, the sycophants and informers, that he chose that little spot of ground to dwell on, where he was free from business and lived in ease and quiet. Tiberius Caesar passed the last seven years of his life in the island of Capreae; and that sacred governing spirit that swayed the whole world, and was enclosed as it were in his breast, yet for so long time never removed nor changed place. And yet the thoughts and cares of the empire, that were poured in upon him and invaded him on every side, made that island’s repose and retirement to be less pure and undisturbed to him. But he that by retreating to a small island can free himself from great evils is a miserable man, if he does not often say and sing those verses of Pindar to himself,—

Where slender cypress grows I’d have a seat,

But care not for the shady woods of Crete!

I’ve little land and so not many trees,

But free from sorrow I enjoy much ease,—

not being disquieted with seditions or the edicts of princes, nor with administering affairs when the public is in straits, nor undergoing officers that are hard to be put by and denied.