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.

[916] Plato, "Timaeus," p. 90 A. Compare Ovid,
"Metamorphoses," i. 84-86.

[917] Derived from [Greek: meta, geiton], because then
people flitted and changed their neighbours.

[918] Euripides, "Iphigenia in Tauris," 253.

[919] See also Pausanias, viii. 24.

[920] Pindar, Fragm. 126.

[921] AEschylus, "Niobe," Fragm. 146.

[922] "Odyssey," vi. 8. I read [Greek: andron] as
Wyttenbach.

[923] "Odyssey," vi. 204.

[924] See Pausanias, v. 6.

[925] In our money about L121 17_s._ 6_d._

[926] "Iliad," xiv. 230.

[927] "Iliad," xxiv. 544.

[928] "Iliad," ix. 668.

[929] "Iliad," ii. 625, 626.

[930] So Reiske.