€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.