For this reason, you will find that very few of the
most prudent and wise men were buried in their own
country, but the most of them, when none forced them
to it, weighed anchor and steered their course to live
in another port, removing some to Athens, and others
from it.
Who ever gave a greater encomium of his own country
than Euripides in the following verses?
We are all of this country's native race,
Not brought-in strangers from another place,
As some, like dice hither and thither thrown,
Remove in haste from this to t'other town.
And, if a woman may have leave to boast,
A temperate air breathes here in every coast;
We neither curse summer's immoderate heat,
Nor yet complain the winter's cold's too great.
[p. 28]
If aught there be that noble Greece doth yield,
Or Asia rich, by river or by field,
We seek it out and bring it to our doors.
And yet he that wrote all this went himself into Macedonia, and passed the rest of his days in the court of
Archelaus. I suppose you have also heard of this short
epigram:
Here lieth buried Aeschylus, the son
Of the Athenian Euphorion;
In Sicily his latest breath did yield,
And buried lies by Gela's fruitful field.
For both he and Simonides before him went into Sicily.
And whereas we meet with this title, ‘This publication
of the History of Herodotus of Halicarnassus,’ many have
changed it into Herodotus of Thurii, for he dwelt at
Thurii, and was a member of that colony. And that
sacred and divine poet Homer, that adorned the Trojan
war,—why was he a controversy to so many cities (every
one pleading he was theirs) but because he did not cry up
any one of them to the disparagement of the rest? Many
also and great are the honors that are paid to Jupiter
Hospitalis.
