The reason, I take it, for which men amass
education and learning is that they may thereby
make themselves more useful to their native land,
and they likewise acquire riches out of ambition to
contribute to its common funds. With reason, I
think: for men should not be ungrateful when
they have received the greatest favours. On the
contrary, if a man returns thanks to individuals,
as is right, when he has been well treated by
them, much more should he requite his country
with its due. To wrong one’s parents is against the
law of the different states; but counting our native
land the common mother of us all, we should give
her thank-offerings for our nurture and for our
knowledge of the law itself.

 

No one was ever known to be so forgetful of
his country as to care nothing for it when he was
in another state. No, those who get on badly in
foreign parts continually cry out that one’s own
country is the greatest of all blessings, while those
who get on well, however successful they may be in all
else, think that they lack one thing at least, a thing
of the greatest importance, in that they do not live
in their own country but sojourn in a strange land; for
thus to sojourn is a reproach! And men who during
their years abroad have, become illustrious through
acquirement of wealth, through renown from office-


 

holding, through testimony to their culture, or
through praise of their bravery, can be seen hurrying
one and all to their native land, as if they thought
they could not anywhere else find better people
before whom to display the evidences of their
success. The more a man is esteemed elsewhere,
the more eager is he to regain his own country.

 
Even the young love their native land; but
aged men, being wiser, love it more. In fact, every
aged man yearns and prays to end his life in it,
that there in the place where he began to live he
may €posit his body in the earth which nurtured
him: and may share the graves of his fathers. He
thinks it a calamity to be guilty of being an
alien even after death, through lying buried in a
strange land.

 

How much affection real, true citizens have
for their native land can be learned only among a
people sprung from the soil. Newcomers, being but
bastard children, as it were, transfer their allegiance
easily, since they neither know nor love the name of
native land, but expect to be well provided with the
necessities of life wherever they may be,1
 measuring
happiness by their appetites! On the other hand,
those who have a real mother-country love the soil
on which they were born and bred, even if they own
but little of it, and that be rough and thin. Though
they be hard put to it to praise the soil, they will not
lack words to extol their country. Indeed, when
they see others priding themselves on their open
plains and prairies diversified with all manner of
growing things, they themselves do not forget the


 Cf. Thucydides 1, 1. 
 

merits of their own country, and pass over its fitness
for breeding horses to praise its fitness for breeding
men.