Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"Plutarch
Philosophy
Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"
Plutarch
Classical literature; Essays; Ethics; Philosophy
Do you look upon those Athenians as strangers and banished persons
who removed from Melite to Diomea,—whence they called the month
Metageitnion, and the sacrifices they offered in memory of their
removal Metageitnia, being pleased with and cheerfully accepting this
new neighborhood to another people? Surely you will not say so. What
parts of the inhabited earth or of the whole earth can be said to be
far distant one from another, when mathematicians demonstrate that the
whole earth is to be accounted as an indivisible point, compared with
the heavens? But we, like pismires or bees, when we are cast out of
one ant-hill or hive, are in great anxiety, and take on as if we were
strangers and undone, not knowing how to make and account all things
our own, as indeed they are. We shall certainly laugh at his folly who
shall affirm there was a better moon at Athens than at Corinth; and yet
we in a sort commit the same error, when being in a strange country we
look upon the earth, the sea, the air, the heavens doubtfully, as if
they were not the same, but quite different from those we have been
accustomed to. Nature in our first production sent us out free and
loose; we bind and straiten and pin up ourselves in houses, and reduce
ourselves into a scant and little room.
Moreover, we laugh at the kings of Persia, who (if the story be true)
will drink only the water of the River Choaspes, by this means making
the rest of the habitable world to be without water, as to themselves;
but we, when we remove to other countries, and retain our longings
after Cephissus and Eurotas, and are pleased with nothing so much as
the hills Taygetus and Parnassus, we make the whole earth unhabitable
to ourselves, and are without a house or city where we can dwell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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