Orationes 22
Orationes 22 Imperial Aelius Aristides Greek- I could have wished, admirable sir, above all that the city might appear such as you left it; or, failing that, that I might be present myself to make the speech, so that I should gain on both counts, both being
- with you and enjoying what is now happening in our city as it rises again. But since it has so fallen out, I supposed it was not well to be debarred from the whole, but that at least some trace of my voice should come to be known to you and to those of the Greeks who are present, both citizens and strangers. For, on the whole, it has become almost a habit with me to keep festival when absent, since the god leads this one. And the present speech is also very much in season for me. For since, when the unhoped-for report arrived, I was the first to make mention of the city to the emperors, who are best in all things, having tarried no more than a single night, it is fitting, surely, that I should be disposed toward the things that make for good cheer as toward things that concern myself. The ancient matters, then, you remember, having heard them at the first beginning of your rule, which you shared with your father: a certain birth of Zeus and the dances of the Curetes, and Tantalus and Pelops, the foundation of the first city, which came to be on Sipylus, and the crossings of Pelops from here into the land formerly called Apia, but named the Peloponnese after him; from whom the third descendant, becoming the common king of Greece, overthrew the rule of the barbarians. And of the second praises Theseus was the founder, and the name Smyrna was given to this city, and there was an Attic stock, and afterward the entrance of the Ionians as into a home of their own; and the third settlement and colonization . . . Alexander, of whom there are these two fairest and greatest memorials, this city and the one neighbouring the Nile. Such things you heard; and there was a certain trireme, displayed at the festival of Dionysus and hymned in the songs of the Returns, a token of an ancient victory which the Smyrnaeans won, in their Bacchic frenzy, over the Chians though fenced with arms and ships. But the things which the eye set forth, and which are no longer legend nor the tales of story-tellers and poets, but which even Homer himself, were he present, would think it safer to keep silent about than to tell—you saw the marketplace, the hearth of the gods, and the harbours, on the one side encircling the city,
- on the other held in the middle by the city; and the beauties of temples and their enclosures, adorned equally by nature and by art, and the whole ornament of the moorings, how they hung together one from another; and the greatest token of the city, the agreement through all things and the music that shows the whole body to be one single thing, just as if, according to the legend told of the wall of the Thebans, it had been fitted together from the beginning to lyre and cithara. Well then. The ancient things, and the not-ancient but, so to say, still appearing as of yesterday and the day before—such you heard, and such you beheld. But nothing of what is among men is unmoving, they say; rather, even land receives the sea and sea becomes mainland; and of cities some have sunk beneath the earth, and others have been made to vanish by floods both from heaven and of every kind. For changes are proper to the mortal race, and many are the marvels of time. And so it befell our city too, victorious as it was in so great a degree, in a manner to slip; whereupon there was plainly shown how great was the adornment that came from Asia itself—and I mean not the Asia reaching to the springs of the Maeander, nor as much as the allotment of your governors bounds, but that which from the beginning the Greeks called Asia, and which they named, in distinction from the three, the continent above all. But what I wished to say is this: that together with the fall, when it occurred, everything seemed to have been stripped bare, and everyone sought it as it were the eye of a body. I say, then, that the stumbling befell the city according to the common fortune and nature of all men, but that what followed belongs already to the good fortune which the city obtained from the beginning. For when the season was ripe, . . . stretched out a hand, having such men as the protectors of the whole, who of all men were least likely to overlook her lying low, and of all most likely to be eager not only to raise her up but even to exalt her to excess; and now all things are being accomplished, as the son of Meles says. And indeed the nobility of the people—for let us not have everything be about the buildings—who would not have admired and
- marvelled at it? For it was neither dismayed at the calamity, nor sought consolation, nor awaited any fairer than that which came from the emperors at once in deed and in word. So that the season of its mourning had become for it a kind of festival. And indeed the things that followed upon these we know by hearsay, but you, seeing them, could yourself set them forth even to others. For the city seems to have fared not far from the fable told of her founder. You know that the poets say that Pelops, cut up limb by limb and boiled in a cauldron, was put together again from the beginning out of the cauldron, and, the shoulder being lacking, had one of ivory in place of the old; and they say the work was Demeter's. So too for the city, after that cauldron which set all of her ablaze, the second composition has come to a wondrous abundance of beauty, as though Poseidon had shaken her on purpose with his trident, that he might see her fairer than before; just as he is said to have shown his kindness also with regard to Thessaly, having made the cleft of Tempe for the sake of the Peneius. For indeed before this it was not even possible to come to a conception of anything beyond, but the city seemed to be a pattern of beauty; whereas now we have been convicted of not judging rightly. For then she surpassed the other cities, but now she has, one may say, almost surpassed herself; and it seems to me that she has fared like her mother-city. And I will make mention of an image not fabulous, but necessary to be believed. For that city too, burned by the Persian and destroyed in every way, made advance on every side, and the disaster became a gain to the city: by such a hand she is raised up everywhere more august and loftier and more sheltering—and we call upon Adrasteia—and, all these visible ornaments being fair, she has taken on another greater one besides. For her founders are those who have all the cities under themselves, whom no one yet has surpassed either in humanity or in displays of deeds; than whom alone, I think, it was possible to find something
- mightier than the Smyrna of that time. Such, for us, has been the palinode of fortune concerning the city. And so for Ionia the crown is well preserved, and Asia has recovered her ornament. And the affairs of the city have become a pattern of unhoped-for things—that for those running before a fair wind nothing is past swearing off, and that, when the ship is wrecked, it is not past hope that something better will come to pass. But to adorn the Meles I leave now to others; and yet he is himself, seen, the greatest ornament to himself, since for him summer and winter have the same account, and he has neither ever run riot from rains nor yielded to droughts, but, like some other of the unmoving things, he keeps one form and one colour for all time. And indeed Meles is no wanderer, nor one to go off, but he is like a lover of the city not daring to be away too long, having, I think, an unquenchable love of her and an unquenchable watch over her. So that, setting out from her very self, he also ends there, having stretched himself along one limb of the city. These things, then, like those possessed by the Nymphs, by some power of the Nymphs themselves, I seem to have sung in addition concerning the Meles, though I had not so proposed. But perhaps it was needful that for the children too, as it were another portion of the speech, should be preserved. And one might set this too down for a good token, both that you have come to us over the cities, and that the circuit so falls out that you exactly renew your ancestral rule by your sojourns about Smyrna. For the season of the city is great; and may the things of good fortune prevail on every side.