Oration 19

Some of my own kinsmen had long been begging me to give them audience; and many of the citizens too were said to be eager to behold me, supposing that I had something more than other men because of my wanderings, the change in my way of life, and what they fancied to be the hardship of my body. At last they even reproached me, declaring that they were being wronged. I, however, was unwilling to go near to the very borders, but thought such conduct entirely characteristic of a man wholly chafing under his exile and longing to return—just as those who have left nothing in the cup plainly are exceedingly thirsty.

Having come, then, to Cyzicus, I spent my time there and held myself ready, in case any of my friends should wish to consort with me. And indeed that saying about the citharode, as men report it, saved me, by my singing them a certain song. For when the best of the present-day citharodes arrived—one who, as some say, is inferior to none even of the men of old, nay, not even to Arion of the sea, divining this no doubt, for how could they know the truth without having heard him?—as soon, then, as they perceived that the man was in town, at once there was an irresistible eagerness, and everyone was making his way to the council-house.

So I too, thinking that I also was permitted to hear and to take part in so fine a feast among three thousand men and more, came among the first, in full confidence. For I am fond of listening and genuinely fond of the Muses, though not at all versed in music; so that, if I had chanced to be born in the time of Orpheus, I think I should have been the first to follow him, even if I had to go in the company of fawns or calves, feeling no shame at all. For even now I suffer this very thing often, whenever I have come into a sophist's lecture, because of the lack of self-control that besets me with regard to discourses; and I herd together with such cattle—fair and comely, but otherwise noisy and eager to frisk.

This is what I feel toward the sophists and rhetoricians, almost all of them. Just as the poor call even the moderately well-off blessed, because of their own want, so I too admire and cherish those who are able in any fashion to speak, because I myself am unable to speak. The art of the citharodes, however, and, by Zeus, of the actors, seems to me to differ by no small degree as regards pleasure. For their voice is fuller and clearly more melodious, and their diction is not extemporized, as is that of the rhetoricians, who for the most part attempt to speak on the spur of the moment, but is the work of poets who have composed it carefully and at leisure.

And most of it indeed is ancient, the work of far wiser men than those of today—the whole of comedy; and of tragedy the strong parts, it seems, abide—I mean the iambic verses—and portions of these they recite in the theatres; but the softer parts, those that have to do with the songs, have flowed away. Just as, I think, with men of old, whatever parts of the body are firm endure with time, the bones and the muscles, while the rest grow less. And so the bodies of men utterly aged are seen to be slack and shrunken; whereas those old men who are stout from wealth and luxury, with nothing strong any longer about them, but with fat instead of flesh, are seen to be well-nourished, in the eyes of the many, and younger than they are.