So too,
had he ever watched our games! For he would have seen one presiding,
another fighting, yet both of them sharing the same common humanity.
He would have noted that the Roman toga is worn alike by him who
performs a vow to heaven and by him that lies dead upon the bier, that
the Grecian pallium serves to shroud the dead no less than to clothe
the philosopher.

_Fragment from the opening of a discourse delivered in a theatre._

5. You have, I feel assured, come to this theatre with the best will
in the world. For you know that the importance of an oration does not
depend on the place in which it is delivered, but that the first thing
that has to be considered is, 'What form of entertainment is the
theatre going to provide?' If it is a mime, you will laugh; if a
rope-walker, you will tremble lest he fall; if a comedian, you will
applaud him, while, if it be a philosopher, you will learn from him.

_India and the Gymnosophists._

6. India is a populous country of enormous extent. It lies far to the
east of us, close to the point where ocean turns back upon himself and
the sun rises, on that verge where meet the last of lands and the
first stars of heaven. Far away it lies, beyond the learned Egyptians,
beyond the superstitious Jews and the merchants of Nabataea, beyond
the children of Arsaces in their long flowing robes, the Ityreans, to
whom earth gives but scanty harvest, and the Arabs, whose perfumes are
their wealth. Wherefore I marvel not so much at the great stores of
ivory possessed by these Indians, their harvests of pepper, their
exports of cinnamon, their finely-tempered steel, their mines of
silver and their rivers of gold. I marvel not so much that in the
Ganges they have the greatest of all rivers which

_Lord of all the waters of the East
Is cloven and parted in a hundred streams.
A hundred vales are his, a hundred mouths,
And hundred-fold the flood that meets the main_;

nor wonder I that the Indians that dwell at the very portals of day
are yet of the hue of night, nor that in their land vast serpents
engage in combat with huge elephants, to the equal danger and the
common destruction of either; for they envelop and bind their prey in
slippery coils so that they cannot disengage their feet nor in any
wise break the scaly fetters of these clinging snakes, but must needs
find vengeance by hurling their vast bulk to the ground and crushing
the foe that grips them by the we