Orationes 41
Orationes 41 Imperial Aelius Aristides Greek- To the Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus and to the Emperor Caesar Lucius Aurelius Commodus Augustus, Aelius Aristides sends greeting. Before this, O greatest of emperors, I used to send you contests and discourses out of my studies, and such things; but now the deity has given another theme. Smyrna lies low, the ornament of Asia, the adornment of your empire, ground to ruin by fire and earthquakes. Stretch out, in the gods' name, a hand—stretch it out, such as befits you. Smyrna, which of all present-day Greece has been most greatly favoured both by the gods and by you, by the successive emperors and by the senate in common, has now suffered the greatest of recorded calamities. Yet even in these things one thing was preserved for her by the deity, as it were a token of salvation: you have seen the city, you know the loss. Recall what you said upon your journey, looking toward her; recall what you said when you had passed within, how you were disposed, how you disposed of things. The people kept festival of the gods' welcome, and you rested as among the gentlest of your possessions. What approach to the sight did not make you more glad? What
- of all things did you behold in silence and not with the words of good omen that befit you? Things which not even on your departure did you forget. All these are now in the dust. That harbour is shut up, the beauties of the marketplace are gone, the ornaments of the streets are made invisible, the gymnasia are destroyed with their men and boys; of the temples some lie low, others have sunk down; and she who was of cities the fairest to behold, named after beauty by all mankind, is shown forth as the most untimely of spectacles, a heap of ruins and of corpses. And the west winds blow over a desolate place. And all that is left looks to you, and all the rest of Asia looks together with her toward you, praying for good things for you both now and always, and for Smyrna a pity from you—if indeed Smyrna is still the ground. I know I am about to say a paradoxical word, yet not, I think, a senseless one. For even if the theme is unwished-for by you, it has come from your good fortune, which has given you an occasion on which you will use your nature most nobly and most conspicuously, beyond the many and great things you displayed before. For let no one any longer speak to me of Lysimachus, nor of Alexander himself, nor of Theseus and legends; but be you the founders of the city, declare her new from the beginning, let the city become wholly and through all things yours—whether you reckon her as a veil of empresses, or as a diadem of emperors, or however you will—only save the city. What founders, what kings will you not eclipse? What bounds of greatness of soul will you not overpass, when, what was acquired for the city over time and piece by piece, you will have made come to be by a single foundation? And I have said this not as one counselling, nor as teaching men who do not know—I have not become so beside myself through the calamity—but indeed it is in this very way that men think fit to pray: Grant victory to Ajax, and Now again, dear
- Athena, befriend me. In the same manner, then, in which we converse with the gods, in this too it is no cause of offence to write to you. And indeed to the gods we pray for these things, while of you, the most divine of rulers, we make request. And it is honourable, surely, both before gods and before men to make such requests. But how I myself escaped, perhaps you long to hear. Some days before what befell, the god moved me and set me in a certain place, and bade me remain there; and there indeed, while I was staying, I learned of what had happened. And learning it, I could not be at peace; and there was nothing else left, I think, but to call upon the gods and upon you. For this reason I neither awaited a common embassy nor thought fit to look to another to see what he might do, but, holding that, if the matter concerned anyone in the world, it concerned me too to speak of it, I appointed myself a minister, thinking it worth while, if nothing else, at least to bewail the city's calamities. Others, then, prevailing with emperors, have won gifts for their own fatherlands when they were faring well; but I, if anything of mine has weight with you, ask and entreat that this grace be granted to the city: not, like a vessel shattered, to be thrown out, condemned to uselessness, but to be brought to life again through you. And there came into my mind the act of Solon, who, they say, when the constitution had been overthrown, took up shield and spear and sat before his house, not able, I think, to give help, but showing how his mind stood. And my own case is more than this. For even if I could contribute nothing by deed, yet I knew that the calling forth of your humanity into action was being set up for me, so that my zeal would not be in vain. And indeed all that is outside the gates does not greatly trouble me, since I did not even rejoice with the leaders when they were meddling; let whoever wishes plead on their behalf—nothing of mine forbids it. But all that is within the circuit, both old and new, memorials of honour toward you and at the same time of honour from you, and holding for the city distinction both toward her peers
- and toward the strangers who arrive, and besides being for strangers a resource and a consolation in every fortune—gladly would I come to that day on which I shall behold these things standing. Whenever, indeed, I reflect within myself that one of the emperors of old—not of your house, for may that never be, nor would it come from any of you, but one of the earlier ones, playing at draughts, as is told, let fall a word in the midst, that he did not wish the Nasamones to exist, and then the Nasamones perished—I think that concerning you one might reasonably hope that, in earnest and using your own characters, and saying and showing only this much, that you wish Smyrna to be, you will quickly show us all what we long for. And I am not using foreign examples, but your own: what care you took of the cities in Italy, so as to restore them in all respects. Those, then, long since worn out, you recovered; but Smyrna, but lately flourishing and but lately fallen, set again in the number of cities, having before adorned her sanctuaries, and now saving her whole form. And the city deserves to be saved not only for the sake of her appearance, but also for the goodwill which through all time she has shown toward you, having joined in the war against Antiochus and joined in the war against Aristonicus, having endured sieges and fought battles not slight, the memorials of which were even now in her gates. And further, when your army needed clothing and the general had perished, they brought the general into the city and buried him within the present gates, and to the soldiers they distributed their tunics, man giving to man. Such were they toward you the rulers; but toward their kinsmen, what were they? To write all would be no small task. But once, when earthquakes and continual famines had befallen this lower
- region of Asia, and some had even been destroyed by chasms, and a manifold calamity held the cities, with grain and money and by leaving nothing of their zeal undone they saved certain of the cities—the Chians, the Erythraeans, the Teians, the Halicarnassians. For the things, then, in which this one city then sufficed for the others, there is now not a single one able to give her aid. The hope from you alone remains. And indeed before this she carried off the prizes of valour for her deeds—territory and suits of armour and spoils—with which you honoured her; but now she has won the first prize of calamities from the deity, the release of which lies with you. And what is most of all worth saying and marvelling at is the reversal of her fortune. For the temple now sunk down is said to have been won by her with such distinction that, when a contest arose, Asia was preferred above the other provinces, and of the cities in Asia Smyrna so far above the rest that the rest of Asia obtained only seven votes, while to the city alone there fell four hundred. This, then, perhaps she might recover through Asia, if it seem good to you; but the setting right of the whole belongs to you alone, to whom the gods have given such great things. Whenever, then, I look to the magnitude of the calamity, no speech seems to me to suffice, but everything falls short of the due measure; but whenever I look to your virtue and nature and readiness toward benefactions, it comes over me to fear lest I seem to have spoken more than enough. I think, indeed, that this is not so; but if it is, you will pardon me, I know. For a man, taken by calamity, utters many things even beyond his own custom—especially such a calamity as he would never have expected.