what
is far better, a contempt for it. But as for you, Aemilianus, and
ignorant boors of your kidney, in your case the fortune makes the man.
You are like barren and blasted trees that produce no fruit, but are
valued only for the timber that their trunks contain. But I beg you,
Aemilianus, in future to abstain from reviling any one for their
poverty, since you yourself used, after waiting for some seasonable
shower to soften the ground, to expend three days in ploughing
single-handed, with the aid of one wretched ass, that miserable farm
at Zarath, which was all your father left you. It is only recently
that fortune has smiled on you in the shape of wholly undeserved
inheritances which have fallen to you by the frequent deaths of
relatives, deaths to which, far more than to your hideous face, you
owe your nickname of Charon.

24. As to my birthplace, you assert that my writings prove it to lie
right on the marches of Numidia and Gaetulia, for I publicly
described myself as half Numidian, half Gaetulian in a discourse
delivered in the presence of that most distinguished citizen Lollianus
Avitus. I do not see that I have any more reason to be ashamed of that
than had the elder Cyrus for being of mixed descent, half Mede, half
Persian. A man's birthplace is of no importance, it is his character
that matters. We must consider not in what part of the world, but with
what purpose he set out to live his life. Vendors of wine and cabbages
are permitted to enhance the value of their wares by advertising the
excellence of the soil whence they spring, as for instance with the
wine of Thasos and the cabbages of Phlius. For those products of the
soil are wonderfully improved in flavour by the fertility of the
district which produces them, the moistness of the climate, the
mildness of the winds, the warmth of the sun, and the richness of the
soil. But in the case of man, the soul enters the tenement of the body
from without. What, then, can such circumstances as these add to or
take away from his virtues or his vices? Has there ever been a time or
place in which a race has not produced a variety of intellects,
although some races seem stupider and some wiser than others? The
Scythians are the stupidest of men, and yet the wise Anacharsis was a
Scyth. The Athenians are shrewd, and yet the Athenian Meletides was a
fool. I say this not because I am ashamed of my country, since even in
the time of Syphax we were a township. When he was