Oration 64
Imperial Dio Chrysostom Greek- The reproaches that men bring against Fortune I, for my part, would count the greatest of encomia upon her. The obscure reversals of their affairs, at any rate, they refer to her, and when they have undertaken something on their own judgment and failed, they suppose that they have been robbed of it by Fortune, on the ground that she is able, if she will, to secure everything. You may hear her blamed by farmers and merchants, and by the rich on the score of their money, and by the beautiful on the score of their bodies, and by Pantheia on the score of her husband, and by Croesus on the score of his son, and by Astyages when he was conquered, and by Polycrates when he was taken. The Persians, too, found fault with Fortune after the slaughter of Cyrus, and the Macedonians after the death of Alexander. 2. Indeed, men charge even their private passions to Fortune: Medea her love, Midas his prayer, Phaedra her false accusation, Alcmaeon that he wandered, Orestes that he raved. I shall tell you, too, a Cyprian tale, if you wish. The old days produced women of renown also: Rhodogune the warlike, Semiramis the regal, Sappho the musical, Timandra the beautiful; and so too in Cyprus there arose Demonassa, a woman at once statesmanlike and a lawgiver. 3. She laid down three laws for the Cyprians: that the adulteress should be shorn and made a harlot—her own daughter committed adultery, and had her hair cut off according to the law, and was made a harlot; that he who took his own life should be cast out unburied—this was Demonassa's second law; the third, that none should kill a plough-ox. And she having two male children, the one died for killing an ox, and the other, who took his own life, she did not bury. 4. For a while she held firm, childless though she was, and continuing to legislate; but seeing a cow lowing over its dying calf, and recognizing in another's case her own calamity, she melted bronze and leapt into it. And there stood an ancient tower bearing a bronze statue, fused into the bronze both for the security of the monument and as a likeness of the story; and there was an inscription upon a stele nearby: "Wise I was, yet not in all things fortunate." 5. Come, then, let not Fortune be condemned by default, nor let us fear the uproar of her accusers. For perhaps she herself will lend us some aid toward speaking well of her. The craftsmen seem first to have shown her power by the manner of her fashioning. For first she stands ready for action; then with her right hand she holds a rudder and, as one might say, plies the seaman's art. What, then, did this mean? Was it because seafarers above all need Fortune, or because she steers our life as though it were some great ship, and saves all those who sail in it? The Assyrians until the luxury of Sardanapallus, the Medes until the rearing of Cyrus, the Persians until the crossing, the Athenians until the capture, Croesus until Solon? 6. Oedipus was at first a fortunate man. For Fortune, counterfeiting in his case that he had suffered nothing, gave him ignorance, which was like not having suffered. Then at once he ceased to be fortunate and began to know. But I call even his blinding good fortune. Let Tellus look upon his children, and Cydippe, and Aeolus, and any other father who was fortunate; but Oedipus, if he had recovered his sight after his blinding, would have won only shameful spectacles. 7. With the other hand the goddess holds ready a gathered store of fruits, declaring the abundance of the good things which she herself bestows. This, then, was the golden race, and certain isles of the blessed, having food unbidden, and the horn of Heracles, and the life of the Cyclopes. For by the right hand she has shown that life belongs to those who have toiled, and that thereafter the abundance of good things comes of itself. Tantalus, then, was idle in his old age; for this reason, surely, he was blessed only as far as his lips and fortunate only in his eyes; and all those things, snatched away, are gone—the pool and the fruits and the food and the drink—by Fortune, even as by a gust of wind. 8. Fortune has been called by many names among men: her equity, Nemesis; her uncertainty, Hope; her necessity, Fate; her justice, Themis—a goddess of many names in very truth, and of many turns. To her the farmers have given the name of Demeter, the shepherds of Pan, the sailors of Leucothea, the helmsmen of the Dioscuri. "Lightly she diminishes the conspicuous and exalts the obscure; lightly she sets straight the crooked and withers the arrogant." 9. This, then, was Zeus—Fortune holding in the right hand the weapon, and in the left the sceptre—because to the warlike among men she gives kingship as well. Then Euripides blames the sailor who "crosses untimely the waves of the wide sea," and in what follows he reproaches him, saying that "they entrust themselves to slender hopes." 10. O son of Mnesarchides, a poet you were, but in no way wise. For it is not to pitch that they entrust their lives, nor to ropes, nor does a three-finger plank of pine save them; rather they have entrusted themselves to a sure and mighty thing—Fortune. Wealth is weak, if Fortune be not present, and friendship unstable, if Fortune lend no aid. She saves both the sick man at his end and the swimmer in the sea, and Agamemnon over his thousand ships, and Odysseus borne upon his raft. 11. Why do you fear, coward? Is it the breadth of the sea that frightens you? Poseidon will indeed see you, and will summon the winds, and will take up his trident, and will rouse all the squalls—yet he will not kill you. For Fortune does not will it. "Thus now, having suffered many ills, wander upon the deep, until you come among men nurtured of Zeus." 12. Such is the word of a god overcome by Fortune. She it was, too, who made the ancient race of your forebears, the autochthonous and earliest Athenians, who boast the earth as their mother, Demeter as their nurse, and Athena as their namesake and ally. For first she led them forth from Athens to Euboea; and when, dwelling there, they could neither be gladdened by the sea nor fed by the land, and could not even endure the shame of the thing—having become islanders instead of mainlanders—Fortune, in the second place, devised something better. 13. For Euboea is venerable, truly; but which of you could have borne to dwell upon rugged land, and live beside a narrow sea, and endure many reversals of fortune, more numerous than those that happen in the strait? Then they would have had to put up with the Boeotians and the dullness of the Thebans, and after that with the Athenians, treating you no longer as their children but as their slaves. For this reason she led you here and settled you, with the one hand contriving and directing your voyage, with the other bountifully giving and bestowing the fruits. The intention of the rest, then, it is hard to conjecture. 14. But for myself, O Fortune—for it is to you, perhaps, that the speech might justly be addressed—if someone were to raise me on high and carry me aloft upon the back of some Pegasus, or upon the winged chariot of Pelops, spreading out beneath me the whole earth and its cities, I would not choose the luxury of the Lydians, nor the frugality of Attica, nor the poverty of Laconia, nor Croton—for they are poor—nor Sybaris, because they do not toil, nor the Scythians, because they do not farm, nor the Egyptians, because they farm for others; nor Libya, "where the lambs are at once horned"— 15. the good fortune of shepherds. Nor Egyptian Thebes, "which is of the hundred gates, and through each two hundred men go forth with horses and chariots"—the life of grooms and gatekeepers. "In Delos once, beside Apollo's altar, such a thing I marked—a young shoot of palm springing up." An altar does not suffice me, when I have nothing to sacrifice; nor do plants suffice me that cannot nourish me. "Rugged, but a good nurse of youths"—neither is this one rugged, and it is a nurse of youths. 16. "Mistress of all, revered city of the Athenians"—say it not, man! Those men are masters no longer. "How fine, too, your dockyard appears!" But after the Hellespont and Lysander, it is a shame. — "And fine is the Piraeus"—for you still behold it with its walls; "and what other city ever had such groves?" It had them, but, being laid waste, it cropped them short, as a woman in calamities. "And it lies, they say, in a fair quarter of the sky." And how, when they are stricken with plague and disease, and the greater part of them perishes by the climate rather than by the enemy? 17. And let no one be vexed that I have made such mention of our fathers. For we could not otherwise attain the foremost place, save by contending with the foremost. Indeed, an old soldier prided himself on having proved better than his father; nor is it any shame to Athenians, being fathers, to be surpassed by their children; for their children will share in your virtue, while being inferior by their own standard. How, then, could you not feel gratitude to Fortune for all this—both for your race, that you are Greeks, and for the change, that from poor men you have become prosperous? Socrates, at any rate, counted himself blessed on many grounds, both that he was a rational creature and that he was an Athenian. 18. But Diogenes the Cynic boasted against Fortune coarsely and altogether without breeding, saying that, though she shot many shafts at him as at a target, she could not hit him. I cannot endure a philosopher so reckless. Do not slander Fortune; she does not shoot you because she does not wish to, but for Fortune, when she wills, it is easy everywhere. And I do not mention those brief Laconic matters—the Spartans enslaved to the Persians, and Dionysius at Corinth, and the condemnation of Socrates, and the exile of Xenophon, and the death of Pherecydes, and the wretchedness of Anaxarchus; but of this very difficult target itself, with how many arrows did she hit it? She made you an exile, brought you to Athens, introduced you to Antisthenes, sold you into Crete. And if a staff and a wallet and a meagre, simple life invest you with your conceit, know that for these too you owe gratitude to Fortune; for it is by Fortune that you play the philosopher. 19. There was also Timotheus, a general of the Athenians, who was fortunate in everything, and could not bear to be mocked; and once he grew reckless against Fortune, and again began to be unfortunate. Who would ever have hoped that a barber would rule the Indians, that a shepherd would be king of the Lydians, that a woman would lead Asia? That a tunic and a woman would kill Heracles, that a slave and a cup would kill Alexander? For Fortune always keeps in herself the largest measure of what is royal, and she casts down those who exalt themselves beyond nature. Alexander, at any rate, did many reckless things. 20. He could not endure to be called the son of Philip, but falsely claimed Zeus as his father; he despised the Dioscuri; he reviled Dionysus, though he was enjoying that god's gifts so bountifully; and he killed Cleitus the wise, and Philotas the handsome, and the aged Parmenion, and his teacher Callisthenes, and he had a mind to kill Aristotle, and plotted against Antipater. Therefore Fortune compelled him, while still alive, to confess that he was a man. 21. Being wounded, at any rate, he said to his friends: "This that flows is not ichor, but real blood." And in dying he fully confessed that Fortune was something great and in truth invincible. For that man who had escaped both the hoplites of the Thebans and the cavalry of the Thessalians, and the Aetolian javelin-men, and the Thracians who bore the sabre, and the warlike Persians, and the race of the unconquerable Medes, and great mountains, and impassable rivers, and insurmountable cliffs, and Darius and Porus and many other names of nations and kings—this soldier died in Babylon without battle and without wounds. 22. And what need is there to tell of those who succeeded to his kingdom, or of those who came after them, and of their boastful names—Thunderbolts and Besiegers and Eagles and gods? Of these, the one was refuted by death; another found Fortune loftier than himself, though he seemed to walk on the ground; and Demetrius the Besieger, having become a captive, died ignobly of wine and drunkenness, besieged by Fortune. Why, then, do tyrants pride themselves on their walls? Why does Amphion sing? Why does Deioces labour? Why does Semiramis build? Why does Apollo hire himself out for wages? Why does Meles go round the wall with the lion? For Cyrus will master the Medes, and Zopyrus the Babylonians, and the Mardian the people of Sardis, and the horse Troy. 23. "For Fortune is a great turning of the scale, or rather the whole of it," as someone said. She it was, too, who found Pindar exposed in Boeotia, and Telephus in Arcadia, and the kings of the Romans in Italy; and to the one she sent bees, to the others shepherds, to Telephus a hind, and to Cyrus either a dog or a woman. Eumenes was the son of a wagoner, yet nonetheless he became a king; Heracles was the son of Alexander, yet he did not reign; unburied, at any rate, he was brought to Olympias, and, having mourned him, she too died, the mother of the god. 24. And the mother of Darius did obeisance to Alexander, and—what was more humiliating—to Hephaestion. And what of the king of the Libyans? Did he not sack five hundred cities of the Romans? And, lifting up his tunic, did he not show his citizens that it was full of Roman seal-rings, each of which he held as spoil from enemies slain by his own hand? Yet, having done all this, he died ignobly, having contended much and in vain against Fortune. 25. For this reason men seem to me to entrust all the great matters of their affairs to Fortune, making magistracies and military commands assigned by lot; and brothers thus divide their possessions among themselves. So Polynices too, had he taken good counsel, ought to have drawn lots with his brother for the kingship; but as it was, he himself perished and destroyed his brother along with him, having entrusted the matter to seniority of age, not to Fortune. 26. "Now shake the lots, every one of you, to see who shall be allotted it; for this man indeed shall profit the well-greaved Achaeans"—and being allotted, he did profit them; whereas Hector was worsted because he trusted to judgment, not to Fortune. "For two jars lie set upon the floor of Zeus." These are the treasuries of good things for men, kept by the gods; and Fortune dispenses them according to what is due, to orator and general, to poor and rich, to old and young. 27. To Croesus she gives gold, to Candaules a wife, to Peleus a sword, to Nestor a shield, to Pterelaus a golden lock of hair, to Nisus a purple lock, to Alcibiades beauty, to Socrates wisdom, to Aristides justice, to the Lacedaemonians the land, to the Athenians the sea. Then in turn she took these things from these men and gave them to others. And the life of men seems to me to differ in no way from a procession in its daily reversals.