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 suppli