hem. 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