Plutarch's Morals · Plutarch
ON EXILE.
Sec. I. They say those discourses, like friends, are best and surest that come to our refuge and aid in adversity, and are useful. For many who come forward do more harm than good in the remarks they make to the unfortunate, as people unable to swim trying to rescue the drowning get entangled with them and sink to the bottom together. Now the discourse that ought to come from friends and people disposed to be helpful should be consolation, and not mere assent with a man's sad feelings. For we do not in adverse circumstances need people to weep and wail with us like choruses in a tragedy, but people to speak plainly to us and instruct us, that grief and dejection of mind are in all cases useless and idle and senseless; and that where the circumstances themselves, when examined by the light of reason, enable a man to say to himself that his trouble is greater in fancy than in reality, it is quite ridiculous not to inquire of the body what it has suffered, nor of the mind if it is any the worse for what has happened, but to employ external sympathizers to teach us what our grief is.
Sec. II. Therefore let us examine alone by ourselves the weight of our misfortunes, as if they were burdens. For the body is weighed down by the burden of what presses on it, but the soul often adds to the real load a burden of its own. A stone is naturally hard, and ice naturally cold, but they do not receive these properties and impressions from without; whereas with regard to exile and loss of reputation or honours, as also with regard to their opposites, as crowns and office and position, it is not their own intrinsic nature but our opinion of them that is the gauge of their real joy or sorrow, so that each person makes them for himself light or heavy, easy to bear or hard to bear. When Polynices was asked "What is't to be an exile? Is it grievous?" he replied to the question, "Most grievous, and in deed worse than in word."[913] Compare with this the language of Alcman, as the poet has represented him in the following lines. "Sardis, my father's ancient home, had I had the fortune to be reared in thee, I should have been dressed in gold as a priest of Cybele,[914] and beaten the fine drums; but as it is my name is Alcman, and I am a citizen of Sparta, and I have learned to write Greek poetry, which makes me greater than the tyrants Dascyles or Gyges." Thus the very same thing one man's opinion makes good, like current coin, and another's bad and injurious.
Sec. III. But let it be granted that exile is, as many say and sing, a grievous thing. So some food is bitter, and sharp, and biting to the taste, yet by an admixture with it of sweet and agreeable food we take away its unpleasantness. There are also some colours unpleasant to look at, that quite confuse and dazzle us by their intensity and excessive force. If then we can relieve this by a mixture of shadow, or by diverting the eye to green or some agreeable colour, so too can we deal with misfortunes, mixing up with them the advantages and pleasant things we still enjoy, as wealth, or friends, or leisure, and no deficiency in what is necessary for our subsistence. For I do not think that there are many natives of Sardis who would not choose your fortune even with exile, and be content to live as you do in a strange land, rather than, like snails who have no other home than their shells, enjoy no other blessing but staying at home in ease.
Sec. IV. As then he in the comedy that was exhorting an unfortunate friend to take courage and bear up against fortune, when he asked him "how," answered "as a philosopher," so may we also play the philosopher's part and bear up against fortune manfully. How do we do when it rains, or when the North Wind doth blow? We go to the fire, or the baths, or the house, or put on another coat: we don't sit down in the rain and cry. So too can you more than most revive and cheer yourself for the chill of adversity, not standing in need of outward aid, but sensibly using your actual advantages. The surgeon's cupping-glasses extract the worst humours from the body to relieve and preserve the rest of it, whereas the melancholy and querulous by ever dwelling on their worst circumstances, and thinking only of them, and being engrossed by their troubles, make even useful things useless to them, at the very time when the need is most urgent. For as to those two jars, my friend, that Homer[915] says are stored in Heaven, one full of good fortunes, one of bad, it is not Zeus that presides as the dispenser of them, giving to some a gentle and even portion, and to others unmixed streams of evils, but ourselves. For the sensible make their life pleasanter and more endurable by mitigating their sorrows with the consideration of their blessings, while most people, like sieves, let the worst things stick to them while the best pass through.
Sec. V. And so, if we fall into any real trouble or evil, we ought to get cheerfulness and ease of mind from the consideration of the actual blessings that are still left to us, mitigating outward trouble by private happiness. And as to those things which are not really evil in their nature, but only so from imagination and empty fancy, we must act as we do with children who are afraid of masks: by bringing them near, and putting them in their hands, and turning them about, we accustom them never to heed them at all: and so we by bringing reason to bear on it may discover the rottenness and emptiness and exaggeration of our fancy. As a case in point let us take your present exile from what you deem your country. For in nature no country, or house, or field, or smithy, as Aristo said, or surgery, is peculiarly ours, but all such things exist or rather take their name in connection with the person who dwells in them or possesses them. For man, as Plato says, is not an earthly and immovable but heavenly plant, the head making the body erect as from a root, and turned up to heaven.[916] And so Hercules said well, "Argive or Theban am I, I vaunt not To be of one town only, every tower That does to Greece belong, that is my country."
But better still said Socrates, that he was not an Athenian or Greek, but a citizen of the world (as a man might say he was a Rhodian or Corinthian), for he did not confine himself to Sunium, or Taenarum, or the Ceraunian mountains. "See you the boundless reach of sky above, And how it holds the earth in its soft arms?" These are the boundaries of our country, nor is there either exile or stranger or foreigner in these, where there is the same fire, water and air, the same rulers controllers and presidents, the sun the moon and the morning star, the same laws to all, under one appointment and ordinance the summer and winter solstices, the equinoxes, Pleias and Arcturus, the seasons of sowing and planting; where there is one king and ruler, God, who has under his jurisdiction the beginning and middle and end of everything, and travels round and does everything in a regular way in accordance with nature; and in his wake to punish all transgressions of the divine law follows Justice, whom all men naturally invoke in dealing with one another as fellow citizens.
Sec. VI. As to your not dwelling at Sardis, that is nothing. Neither do all the Athenians dwell at Colyttus, nor all the Corinthians at Craneum, nor all the Lacedaemonians at Pitane. Do you consider all those Athenians strangers and exiles who removed from Melita to Diomea, where they call the month Metageitnion,[917] and keep the festival Metageitnia to commemorate their migration, and gladly and gaily accept and are content with their neighbourhood with other people? Surely you would not. What part of the inhabited world or of the whole earth is very far distant from another part, seeing that mathematicians teach us that the whole earth is a mere point compared to heaven? But we, like ants or bees, if we get banished from one ant-hill or hive are in sore distress and feel lost, not knowing or having learnt to make and consider all things our own, as indeed they are. And yet we laugh at the stupidity of one who asserts that the moon shines brighter at Athens than at Corinth, though in a sort we are in the same case ourselves, when in a strange land we look on the earth, the sea, the air, the sky, as if we doubted whether or not they were different from those we had been accustomed to. For nature makes us free and unrestrained, but we bind and confine immure and force ourselves into small and scanty space. Then too we laugh at the Persian kings, who, if the story be true, drink only of the water of the Choaspes, thus making the rest of the world waterless as far as they are concerned, but when we migrate to other places, we desire the water of the Cephisus, or we yearn for the Eurotas, or Taygetus, or Parnassus, and so make the whole world for ourselves houseless and homeless.
Sec. VII. Some Egyptians, who migrated to Ethiopia because of the anger and wrath of their king, to those who begged them to return to their wives and children very immodestly exposed their persons, saying that they would never be in want of wives or children while so provided. It is far more becoming and less low to say that whoever has the good fortune to be provided with the few necessaries of life is nowhere a stranger, nowhere without home and hearth, only he must have besides these prudence and sense, as an anchor and helm, that he may be able to moor himself in any harbour. For a person indeed who has lost his wealth it is not easy quickly to get another fortune, but every city is at once his country to the man who knows how to make it such, and has the roots by which he can live and thrive and get acclimatized in every place, as was the case with Themistocles and Demetrius of Phalerum. The latter after his banishment became a great friend of Ptolemy at Alexandria, and not only passed his days in abundance, but also sent gifts to the Athenians. And Themistocles, who was publicly entertained at the king's expense, is stated to have said to his wife and children, "We should have been ruined, if we had not been ruined." And so Diogenes the Cynic to the person who said to him, "The people of Sinope have condemned you to banishment from Pontus," replied, "And I have condemned them to stay in Pontus, 'by the high cliffs of the inhospitable sea.'"[918] And Stratonicus asked his host at Seriphus, for what offence exile was the appointed punishment, and being told that they punished rogues by exile, said, "Why then are not you a rogue, to escape from this hole of a place?" For the comic poet says they get their crop of figs down there with slings, and that the island is very barely supplied with the necessaries of life.
"I am shut in by the dark roaring sea That foams all round," but he will rather be of the mind of Philip, who when he was thrown in wrestling, and turned round, and noticed the mark his body made in the dust, said, "O Hercules, what a little part of the earth I have by nature, though I desire all the world!" Sec. IX. I think also you have seen Naxos, or at any rate Hyria, which is close here. But the former was the home of Ephialtes and Otus, and the latter was the dwelling-place of Orion. And Alcmaeon, when fleeing from the Furies, so the poets tell us, dwelt in a place recently formed by the silting of the Achelous;[919] but I think he chose that little spot to dwell in ease and quiet, merely to avoid political disturbances and factions, and those furies informers. And the Emperor Tiberius lived the last seven years of his life in the island of Capreae, and the sacred governing power of the world enclosed in his breast during all that time never changed its abode. But the incessant and constant cares of empire, coming from all sides, made not that island repose of his pure and complete. But he who can disembark on a small island, and get rid of great troubles, is a miserable man, if he cannot often say and sing to himself those lines of Pindar, "To love the slender cypress, and to leave the Cretan pastures lying near Ida. I have but little land, where I grow strong, and have nothing to do with sorrow or faction,"[920] or the ordinances of princes, or public duties in political emergencies, or state functions hard to get off.
And yet the author of these lines went to Macedonia, and lived all the latter part of his life at the court of Archelaus. And of course you have heard the following epitaph; "Here lies Euphorion's son, Athenian AEschylus, To whom death came in corn-producing Gela." For he, like Simonides before him, went to Sicily. And many have changed the commencing words of Herodotus, "This is the setting forth of the history of Herodotus of Halicarnassus" into "Herodotus of Thurii." For he migrated to Thurii, and participated in that colony. As to the divine and sacred spirit of the Muses, the poet of the Trojan war, Homer, did not many cities claim him as theirs, because he did not cry up one city only? And Hospitable Zeus has many great honours.
Sec. XIV. And if anyone shall say that these pursued glory and honour, go to the philosophers, and their schools and lectures, consider those at the Lyceum, the Academy, the Porch, the Palladium, the Odeum. If you admire and prefer the Peripatetic school, Aristotle was a native of Stagira, Theophrastus of Eresus, Strato of Lampsacus, Glyco of Troas, Aristo of Ceos, Critolaus of Phaselis. If you prefer the Stoic school, Zeno was a native of Cittium, Cleanthes of Assus, Chrysippus of Soli, Diogenes of Babylon, Antipater of Tarsus; and the Athenian Archidemus migrated to the country of the Parthians, and left at Babylon a succession of the Stoic school. Who exiled these men? Nobody; it was their own pursuit of quiet, of which no one who is famous or powerful can get much at home, that made them teach us this by their practice, while they taught us other things by their precepts. And even nowadays most excellent and renowned persons live in strange lands, not in consequence of being expelled or banished, but at their own option, to avoid business and distracting cares, and the want of leisure which their own country would bring them. For it seems to me that the Muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exile as a fellow-worker. Thus Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians in Thrace near the forest of Scapte, Xenophon wrote at Scillus in Elis, Philistus in Epirus, Timaeus of Tauromenium at Athens, Androtion of Athens at Megara, and Bacchylides the poet[933] in Peloponnesus. All these and many more, though exiled from their country, did not despair or give themselves up to dejection, but so happy was their disposition that they considered exile a resource given them by fortune, whereby they obtained universal fame after their deaths, whereas no memorial is left of those who were factious against them and banished them.
Sec. XV. He therefore is ridiculous who thinks that any ignominy attaches itself to exile. What say you? Was Diogenes without glory, whom Alexander saw basking in the sun, and stopped to ask if he wanted anything, and when he answered, "Nothing, but that you would get a little out of my light," Alexander, astonished at his spirit, said to his friends, "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes." Was Camillus without glory when banished from Rome, of which he is now accounted the second founder? And indeed Themistocles did not lose by his exile the glory he had obtained among the Greeks, but he added to it among the barbarians, and there is no one so without honour, so ignoble, who would prefer to be Leobates who indicted him rather than Themistocles the exile, or Clodius who banished Cicero rather than the banished one, or Aristophon the accuser rather than Timotheus who got driven by him from his country. Sec. XVI. But since a good many are moved by the lines of Euripides, who seems to bring a strong indictment against exile, let us see what it is he says in each question and answer about it. _Jocasta._ What is't to be an exile? Is it grievous? _Polynices._ Most grievous, and in deed worse than in word.
_Jocasta._ What is its aspect? What is hard for exiles? _Polynices._ This is the greatest, that they have no freedom. _Jocasta._ This is a slave's life not to speak one's thoughts! _Polynices._ Then one must put up with one's masters' follies.[934] But this is not a right or true estimate.[935] For first of all, not to say out all one thinks is not the action of a slave but of a sensible man, in times and matters that require reticence and silence, as Euripides himself has said elsewhere better, "Be silent where 'tis meet, speak where 'tis safe." Then as for the follies of one's masters, one has to put up with them just as much in one's own country as in exile. Indeed, more frequently have the former reason to fear that the powerful in cities will act unjustly to them either through calumny or violence. But his greatest and absurdest error is that he takes away from exiles freedom of speech. It is wonderful, if Theodorus had no freedom of speech, that when Lysimachus the king said to him, "Did not your country cast you out because of your character?" replied, "Yes, as Semele cast out Dionysus, when unable to bear him any longer." And when he showed him Telesphorus in a cage,[936] with his eyes scooped out, and his nose and ears and tongue cut off, and said to him, "This is how I treat those that act ill to me." * *[937] And had not Diogenes freedom of speech, who, when he visited Philip's camp just as he was on the eve of offering battle to the Greeks, and was taken before the king as a spy, told him he had come to see his insatiable folly, who was going shortly to stake his dominions and life on a mere die. And did not Hannibal the Carthaginian use freedom of speech to Antiochus, though he was an exile, and Antiochus a king? For as a favourable occasion presented itself he urged the king to attack the enemy, and when after sacrifice he reported that the entrails forbade it, Hannibal chided him and said, "You listen rather to what flesh tells you than to the instruction of a man of experience." Nor does exile deprive geometricians or grammarians of their freedom of speech, or prevent their discussing what they know and have learnt. Why should it then good and worthy men? It is meanness everywhere that stops a man's speech, ties and gags his tongue, and forces him to be silent. But what are the next lines of Euripides?
_Jocasta._ Hopes feed the hearts of exiles, so they say. _Polynices._ Hopes have a flattering smile, but still delay.[938] But this is an accusation against folly rather than exile. For it is not those who have learnt and know how to enjoy the present, but those who ever hang on the future, and hope after what they have not, that float as it were on hope as on a raft, though they never get beyond the walls.[939] _Jocasta._ But did your father's friends do nothing for you? _Polynices._ Be fortunate! Friends are no use in trouble. _Jocasta._ Did not your good birth better your condition? _Polynices._ 'Tis bad to want. Birth brought no bread to me.[940] But it was ungrateful in Polynices thus to rail against exile as discrediting his good birth and robbing him of friends, for it was on account of his good birth that he was deemed worthy of a royal bride though an exile, and he came to fight supported by a band of friends and allies, a great force, as he himself admits a little later, "Many of the princes of the Danai And from Mycenae are with me, bestowing A sad but necessary kindness on me."[941] Nor was there any more justice in the lament of his mother:-- "I never lit for you the nuptial torch In marriage customary, nor did Ismenus Furnish you with the usual solemn bath."[942]
"Apollo the chaste god, exile from heaven," let me keep a religious silence, as Herodotus[945] says. And Empedocles commences his system of philosophy as follows, "It is an ordinance of necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, when anyone stains his hands with crime and murder, the long-lived demons get hold of him, so that he wanders away from the gods for thirty thousand years. Such is my condition now, that of an exile and wanderer from the gods." In these words he not only speaks of himself, but points out that all of us men similarly are strangers and foreigners and exiles in this world. For he says, "O men, it is not blood or a compounded spirit that made the being or beginning of the soul, but it is your earth-born and mortal body that is made up of these." He calls speciously by the mildest of names the birth of the soul that has come from elsewhere a living in a strange country.
But the truth is the soul is an exile and wanderer, being driven about by the divine decrees and laws, and then, as in some sea-girt island, gets joined to the body like an oyster to its shell, as Plato says, because it cannot call to mind or remember from what honour and greatness of happiness it migrated, not from Sardis to Athens, nor from Corinth to Lemnos or Scyros, but exchanging heaven and the moon for earth and life upon earth, if it shifts from place to place for ever so short a time it is put out and feels strange, and fades away like a dying plant. But although one soil is more suitable to a plant than another, and it thrives and grows better on such a soil, yet no situation can rob a man of his happiness or virtue or sense. It was in prison that Anaxagoras wrote his squaring of the circle, and that Socrates, even after drinking the hemlock, talked philosophically, and begged his friends to be philosophers, and was esteemed happy by them. On the other hand, Phaethon and Tantalus, though they got up to heaven, fell into the greatest misfortunes through their folly, as the poets tell us. [913] Euripides, "Phoenissae," 388, 389. [914] Reading [Greek: bakelas]. _Gallus_ in Latin. [915] "Iliad," xxiv. 527-533.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.