Toxaris, or Friendship (4-6)

MNESIPPUS Please go on and say what else they did that is imposing and godlike; since as far as concerns their voyage and their foreign travel I could point you many who are more godlike than they—the merchant traders, and particularly the Phoenicians among them, who not only sail into the Pontus or as far as Lake Maeotis and the Cimmerian Bosporus,[*] but cruise everywhere in Greek and foreign waters; for these fellows comb every single shore and every strand, you may say, each year before returning late in the autumn to their own country. On the same principle, you should account them gods, even though most of them are pedlars and, it may be, fishmongers!

TOXARIS Listen then, you amazing fellow, and learn how much more generously than you Greeks we barbarians judge good men. In Argos and Mycenae there is not even a respectable tomb of Orestes or

All that the went through in each other’s company or for eac other’s sake our ancestors inscribed on a tablet of bronze which they set up in the Oresteum;[*] and they made it the law that the first study and lesson for