Oration 80

You perhaps wonder, and think it strange and the conduct of a man by no means in his right mind, who, having withdrawn from all those things about which the many are in earnest—who has, in a manner, let money and reputations and pleasures be borne away down the stream—goes about being neither farmer nor shipowner nor soldier nor general, not cobbler, not carpenter, not physician, not orator, nor practising any other of the customary occupations, but in this odd fashion comes and goes and takes his stand where he has no business at all, but just as chance and impulse may direct;

who scorns council-chambers and theatres and assemblies, but holds his own assembly alone by himself, and looks on at men who are not dancing nor singing nor boxing nor wrestling, but buying and walking and chattering and quarrelling—at one moment giving his close attention to all these things and taking far more delight in them than children at the games and in the theatres, not pushing forward nor lying awake nor jostled; and at another moment again neither hearing nor seeing any of them, but not even reckoning that they exist, considering instead what he wishes and doing it without fear.

For my part I count this a splendid and blessed thing, if a man can be free among slaves and independent among subjects—a thing for which the Lydians waged many wars against the Phrygians and the Phrygians against the Lydians, and the Ionians and Dorians and all the races besides waged many wars; yet, out of a senseless longing for a counterfeit independence, no one has undertaken to live by his own laws. All of them squabble over the laws of Solon and Draco and Numa and Zaleucus, as to which of these, and not those, they shall follow—though none even of those lawgivers laid down what they ought. Indeed they say that Solon himself declared that he proposed to the Athenians not the laws that pleased him, but those which he supposed they would use.

It is plain, then, that he wrote bad laws, if he wrote laws to please bad men; yet for all that, he himself used these very laws, bad as they were and not pleasing to him. Plainly, then, none of these men had any share in independence, nor were they in earnest, nor did they make war in order to be free; rather, having shut up within their walls a free and abundant slavery, they then defended themselves with battlements and towers and missiles, so that it might not get in to them from without—just as if a man, when his ship had sprung a leak and the surge was within, should keep watch and take pains lest it should break in over the top. Just as they say, then, that the Trojans were besieged and died for Helen's sake when she was not within, but in Egypt, so these men suffered the same fate: they fought and contended for freedom, when it was not with them.

Yet, for all that, those men used to say that they suffered everything for the sake of the laws, and men now say that justice consists in whatever provisions they themselves, in their ill fortune, draw up, or take over from others like themselves. But the true and sovereign and manifest law they neither see nor make the guide of their life. And so, just as in the noonday, when the sun is shining, they go about carrying torches and brands aloft, abandoning the divine light and following smoke—and that too if it shows even a tiny spark of fire. The law of Nature, then, is let go and has died out among you, you ill-starred creatures; but axones and tablets and pillars and useless markings you keep.

And the ordinance of Zeus you transgressed long ago, while you consider how no one shall transgress the law of this man or of that. And the curse which the Athenians laid down concerning the laws of Solon, against those who should attempt to abolish them, you do not know to be more sovereign in the case of his laws—for it is wholly necessary that the ordinance which holds the universe together should be backed by a curse—except that it does not, as there, pursue the children and the line of those who do wrong, but each man becomes the cause of his own misfortune. The man, therefore, who endeavors to keep this law safe so far as he is able, and to guard it at least for his own part, I for one would never say is out of his mind.

But far more do I marvel at you and pity you for the harsh and lawless slavery in which you have yoked yourselves, having cast about you not one bond only, nor two, but countless bonds, by which you are throttled and crushed far more than those dragged along in chain and collar and fetters. For those may even be released, and may break loose and flee; but you ever make your bonds the stronger, and fashion them more numerous and more powerful. And do not, because you do not see them, count this argument false and not to be believed; but consider what manner of bonds Homer—your own wisest of men—says held fast Ares, swiftest though he is of the gods who hold Olympus: "fine as a spider's web, such as no one could so much as see."

Do not, then, suppose that Ares, who is a god and strong, was thus fettered by bonds fine and invisible, but that you, who are the weakest of all creatures, could never be caught by unseen bonds, but only if they were well wrought of iron and bronze. Your bodies, then, being solid and for the most part sprung from earth, need such things to master them; but the soul, being somehow invisible and fine by nature—how should it not meet with such bonds as Hephaestus himself made? Yet you have made yours stiff and adamantine, plaiting them by every device, and surpassing Daedalus himself in skill and zeal, so that every part of your soul is bound fast and nothing in it is free or independent.

For what was the prison of the Cnossians and the winding of the Labyrinth compared to the crookedness and the hard-to-find character of your folly? What was the Sicilian guard-pit of the Attic captives, whom they cast into a certain quarry? What the Caeadas of the Laconians, and the chamber among the Persians full of ashes—or, by Zeus, if harsh fathers, as the poets' tale has it, kept certain maidens guarded "in enclosures of bronze"? Nor do I myself seem any longer sober in my words, having dwelt at greater length on the calamities of mankind and on the shameful and grievous slavery in which you are all enslaved—from which it is not possible, by getting hold of fine threads, to come out with the help of a foolish maiden, as they say that famous Theseus was saved from Crete, unless, I think, Athena herself should stand beside one and save him at the same time.

For if I were willing to tell of all the prisons and bonds of senseless and wretched men, in which you have shut yourselves up, I might seem to you a most savage and base poet, performing tragedy upon my own household calamities. For not only, as those whom you have judged criminals are pressed at the neck and hands and feet, but at the belly too and at each of the other parts, are men held fast by a bond and constraint peculiar to each, varied and manifold; and it seems to me that a man, seeing it, might be delighted at the sight and greatly admire the contrivance.

For first, I think, there took her stand before each man a mistress, harsh otherwise and ill-disposed and treacherous, but to look upon cheerful and smiling toward all—"a very Sardonic smile." Harsh is Pleasure, and she carries bonds, by her own nature flowery and soft at the first, such as kings or tyrants are likely to be bound with, and all who are called the children of the blessed; and than these nothing is harsher, nor does anything grow more closely into a man and press upon him.

After her came another, bearing a collar of gold or silver. This she puts round a man and drags private persons over all land and sea, and drags kings, as Hesiod says, and hauls the generals of cities to the gates, that they may open them and betray. And she says that she cares for those whom she destroys, and makes them happy—just as Cyrus once bound Astyages in fetters of gold, as though, plainly, out of care for his grandfather.

It would be a great labor to go through all the forms of the bonds. But there is one of them that it would be wrong to pass over, the most paradoxical and most elaborate of all, which the harshest mistress bears: with gold and silver and stones and gems of every kind, with the horns and teeth of animals and with shells, and besides with purple dyes and a thousand other things, she has fashioned, as it were, a costly and marvelous necklace, and has copied in it many shapes and forms—crowns and scepters and tiaras and lofty thrones; just as those over-elaborate craftsmen, in constructing couches or doors or the roofs of houses, contrive to make them appear as something else—I mean, when they liken the projections of doors to the heads of wild beasts, and pillars likewise.

And there is besides in this a sound and a voice of every sort, of clappings and of cluckings, and these bonds resound. Again, then, she casts this round demagogues and kings. But, lest we ourselves be carried far afield by the image, as though following some phantom of a discourse—as Homer represented Achilles, following the phantom of Agenor's son, going far astray—it is enough.