ed with the
necessaries of life.

Sec. VIII. For if you look at the real facts and shun idle fancy, he that
has one city is a stranger and foreigner in all others. For it does not
seem to such a one fair and just to leave his own city and dwell in
another. "It has been your lot to be a citizen of Sparta, see that you
adorn your native city," whether it be inglorious, or unhealthy, or
disturbed with factions, or has its affairs in disorder. But the person
whom fortune has deprived of his own city, she allows to make his home
in any he fancies. That was an excellent precept of Pythagoras, "Choose
the best kind of life, custom will make it easy." So too it is wise and
profitable to say here, "Choose the best and pleasantest city, time will
make it your country, and a country that will not always distract you
and trouble you and give you various orders such as, 'Contribute so much
money, Go on an embassy to Rome, Entertain the prefect, Perform public
duties.'" If a person in his senses and not altogether silly were to
think of these things, he would prefer to live in exile in some island,
like Gryarus or Cinarus,

"Savage, and fruitless, ill repaying tillage,"

and that not in dejection and wailing, or using the language of those
women in Simonides,

"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