Oration 79

Come now, in the name of the gods, on what grounds is it most fitting to admire a city, to think highly of it, and to call it blessed—a city the greatest and most powerful of all? Is it for the excellence of its laws, the decency of its citizens, and the self-command of its rulers? Or are these things small, of no account, and easily come by for any chance person, while it is for a multitude of inhabitants, an abundant market, and the lavishness of its buildings that the city must be called blessed—and for the fabrics of the Seres and the Babylonians, and because they roof their houses with gold, and everything is full of silver and amber and ivory, just such things as Homer described in the palaces of Alcinous and of Menelaus, exceeding both the truth and well-nigh the possible, as though the whole city were furnished in that style? And, by Zeus, is it to be admired for its paintings and statues, which never profited their former owners at all; rather, the very people from whom these things were carried off one may now see as slaves, abject, and poor?

For if there were any benefit in bronze well alloyed, and in mixing-bowls and altars and censers elaborately wrought, then the city of the Corinthians would have been prosperous and would have been inhabited for a long time, keeping safe her own settlers and citizens. And again, if it lay in stones of fine hue and varied veining, then the city of the Teians or the Carystians, or of certain Egyptians and Phrygians, among whom the very mountains are variegated—indeed I hear that the most ancient of the mountains are of that same rock—and yet they are no better off, no more fortunate, than men utterly humble and wretched.

And if the possession of gold conferred any benefit, there would be nothing to prevent the Ethiopians of the interior from being reckoned the most blessed of all, where gold is held in less honor than lead is among us, and where, they say, evildoers are bound in thick fetters of gold—yet they are none the less prisoners, base, and unjust. To call rich men blessed, men who possess much wealth but in every other respect differ not at all from the utterly worthless, is just as if a man, seeing those prisoners coming forth from their dungeon, should envy them, and should judge that the one wearing the larger fetters was the happiest of all.

And if ivory is a marvelous and much-fought-over possession, then the Indians are by far the most fortunate and the best of all, among whom the bones of elephants lie cast aside and no one goes near them, just as here the bones of oxen and asses; and in many places, they say, the skulls of elephants, tusks and all, are built into the very walls. And what need is there to speak of the Celts, where they say a certain river carries down amber, and a great quantity lies everywhere along the banks, thrown up by the waves, like the pebbles upon our shores? Formerly the children at their play would scatter it about; but now even they gather it up and guard it, having learned from us that they are wealthy men.

Do you reflect that all these peoples—I mean the Celts and Indians and Iberians and Arabs and Babylonians—receive tribute from us, not for their land or their flocks, but for our folly? For if certain men, having prevailed by arms, compel the conquered to pay them silver, that is called tribute, and it is the mark of men not very fortunate nor brave to render levy to others; but if certain men, with no one having marched against them and no one compelling them, but out of silliness and luxury—which they value above all things—willingly send silver, over a long road and across much sea, to those who could not even easily set foot upon our land, is not what happens altogether worse and more shameful?

Except that, by giving little worthless stones and, by Zeus, the bones of wild beasts, they receive silver and gold, exchanging useless things for useful ones. And I marvel most of all, when I often consider, that the Medes were content and rejoiced when they took over the possessions of the Syrians, the Persians those of the Medes, and the Macedonians those of the Persians; and they supposed that they had then become fortunate and were faring better, just when they held the possessions of the wretched and ill-fated. I have said this not idly trifling, but because of such things—the very things upon which men set all their zeal, and for the sake of which the many admire those who possess them—there is no benefit at all; nay, the whole of them together is not worth a single drachma. Nor could men ever become happy while foolish and senseless, not even if they should dwell in the park at Susa, which, they say, was raised entirely aloft.