§ 7.1  From the Areopagiticus; or, [The Plea] for Free Status for His Son, Rufinus
Men [i.e., Areopagites] who long ago made decisions for the gods on who should [legally] prevail and now make decisions for the Athenians on the granting of free status . . .24

§ 7.2  So, in obedience to the law, I shall speak only with reference to the matter at hand. I have been both a sophist and a father among you. You know whether or not I am an accomplished sophist, for I am always speaking, and my life is lived in lecture halls. Whether or not I am an Attic father, the present occasion will show.

§ 7.3  For I find it intolerable not to call the son of Athenians free. I entrust my son with freedom even before he reaches the legal age. He is mine, he is an Athenian, he belongs to a city that honors its own antiquity as a commonwealth more than others honor their fathers’ old age. . . .

§ 7.4  This young man is a descendant of Plutarch, through whom you educate the whole world. He is a descendant of Minucianus, who obtained free status for many people on many occasions by means of his eloquence. I have brought before you the descendant of Nicagoras, my own son. [In mentioning these ancestors of my son], I am making a list of sophists and philosophers for you, and they are truly the nobility of Attica. . . .

§ 7.5  I have often spoken as a sophist, now I speak as a father. . . .

§ 7.6  You have given me a son of the Attic race; accept him now as one made free by your decree. Free my son for me by your decree and let your free voices resound with [his], so that as an Athenian—which is the same as saying as a free man—he may speak and propose laws among you and, if the gods are willing, play a political role in your commonwealth.

§ 8.1  A Monody for His Son, Rufinus
I am utterly wrong in speaking now that Rufinus lies buried; nonetheless I shall speak, since fate has preserved me solely to lament this tragedy. For it would not be right for me to fail to mourn in words the child of eloquence. And what a glorious subject to speak on! Surely, [my son], glorious fortune has preserved your father’s eloquence for you. I do wish that I had been speaking next to your tomb, that your grave had been my platform—a platform of the thrice-happy. As it is, you have been snatched away from me without having spoken to me, without having addressed me, without having embraced me for the last time.

§ 8.2  Fate actually seemed to give birth to tragedy before you died, from that day when it deprived me [by my absence] of my enjoyment of you and separated you from my hugs and kisses. But why do I bring a charge against fate? It was I who was responsible for losing you, my child, [by my departure]. Why did I separate myself from your embraces? You were the spoils of an envy aimed at me, an unjust spirit’s incidental victim. Oh, what a tragic and cruel day that was! What light shone on me before that, what darkness then took its place! I had stood there every day with my ears ready to take in much-desired news [about my son]. I always kept watch for a messenger who would tell me that Rufinus was coming. What great news that would have been. But what news the [evil] spirit was preparing for me instead!

§ 8.3  At night I used to think about a bath, a house, and riches for you— about all the things that human beings consider the finest. During the day I worked to provide such things for you. Little did I know, wretch that I was, that I was preparing a tomb for you instead of a bath, a grave and a mound instead of a house, gifts for the tomb—the most tragic offerings there are for human beings—instead of riches and luxury.

§ 8.4  Would that you had not been born at all, my dear son, or at least that you did not shine on me so much and so greatly with your soul, your body, and your virtues. You were already a public speaker as soon as you spoke your first words. You made the whole world hang on you with your still unintelligible whimperings. Pericles was the love of elite ears from all over the world, but he became a public speaker only after studying under Anaxagoras; you, on the other hand, were a public speaker right in your swaddling clothes. Alcibiades won over his whole audience with his [physical] beauty, but he was already at the peak of young manhood and in his teens; you had this effect on people when you were still at the breast, taking your mother’s milk. Oh calamity worthy of Aeschylus’s grandiloquence! What shall I lament? What shall I praise? I shall say what those who were familiar with you know and what those who hear about you suppose.

§ 8.5  O you who once were the adornment of the Graces but now that of the Erinyes! Alas, on account of you I have acquired epithets quite opposite to the ones I had: I was once called thrice-happy because of you, but now I am called thrice-wretched. For what land did you not traverse in reputation? What place did you not fill with your fame and your young qualities? Heracles needed to do much traveling and to endure the Twelve Labors, I suppose, in order to get the whole earth to witness his virtue; but you, with your wonders, have gone beyond the Pillars of Heracles for us [in reputation] without even leaving your circle of acquaintances. How you have ensnared everyone with your charms!

§ 8.6  Fathers exalt other children, I think, by commonly and often making up things about them. But in your case the normal situation was reversed: your father was silent or said little about your fine qualities, being apprehensive of fortune’s spite because of the greatness of your virtue. It was everyone else who told your father about your fine qualities! Thus by your wondrous nature you enslaved people of every station and of every age all by yourself.

§ 8.7  What [evil] spirit cut off my hearth’s golden lock of hair? What spirit extinguished that most bright fire of my glory? What grave’s dust covers that sacred hair that you began to grow for Dionysus shortly after you were born? What dust covers those eyes that in their beauty almost put the sun’s rays to shame? What Erinys carried off the blush of your cheeks and the soft and sweet smile of your face? Alas, Dionysus, how did you put up with the seizure of this young man, consecrated [to you], from your precinct? The Erinyes have erected this trophy both against you and against my hearth.

§ 8.8  What a gloomy Bacchic festival! Oh, how Cithaeron has been outdone by the misfortunes that I have suffered! Alas, Demeter and Kore, you did not take care of your hearth-initiate. He is being initiated all right, but in an underground precinct, and, I think, with some gloomy and bitter spirit instead of a father as celebrant of the rites. He beholds, not the fire of the daduchs, but the torches of the Erinyes and the Poenae. Why did I not pass away first? Why did I, the father, not precede my son in death? Why was I not preparing a place beneath the earth where he could lie, since the envy of the Erinyes deprived him of a bed in this upper world on which he would have lain with a wife? For what mourning have I been kept alive! I have dared to speak on every subject, avoiding only laments. I was unaware, of course, that I was being kept alive to lament my own misfortune.

§ 8.9  I am wrapping you in words, my child, since I have been prevented from wrapping you in a shroud. I am building you a sepulchral mound with words, since my absence kept me from heaping up the one over your corpse. And what words I am uttering about you now after the equally noteworthy ones of an earlier occasion! For your burial follows my plea for you before the Areopagus [i.e., Orat. 7], your death follows my obtaining free status for you. Because of you, it seems, the spirits who are neighbors of that court [the Areopagus] remembered their ancient names, being unable to bring any charge or accusation against you.

§ 8.10  For who loved his father as much as you did? Who was more just in his relations with his kin and parents? I and your mother, ill-starred parents that we are, used to compete with one another in our love for you. But you would put an end to that competition, approaching each of us in such a way that we both thought we were winners of the prize. Oh how the words you spoke flowed with honey! What a voice you had, sweeter than the nectar that is praised and celebrated among the gods!

§ 8.11  Long ago you were giving thought to your departure from this world, long ago you were making clear to those capable of reading the signs that you were too good for life here on earth. For what old man was as attached to the worship of the gods as you were? What seer or priest would run to sacred precincts and altars with such divine inspiration? What sacred pipe sounded hymns more sweetly than your tongue did? What lyra, what kithara played paeans to the gods that were more melodious than what came out of your mouth?

§ 8.12  O you who earlier exceeded the limits of your age in your possession of the virtues and have now done so in your dying! O you who in your love of your sister deserve more praise than the Dioscuri! For they waged war on Helen’s behalf but could not prevent her from being carried off; you though, were a phalanx for your full sister, stronger than any wall. Who, even among the very solemn, was more naturally made for self-control than you? You kept away from what was harmful on your own, often not even waiting for someone to tell you to keep away. Once you knew that something could lead to harm or disease, you would never have touched it, not even with the tips of your fingers, not even if you were drawn to it by thoughts of thousands upon thousands of happy outcomes. And if you did ever come into contact with something harmful in ignorance, it was enough to tell you so, and you would immediately heed the warning.

§ 8.13  How could one marvel [enough] at your courage? Severe attacks of disease get the better of people who are otherwise invincible. But you, relying only on your soul’s fortitude, always stood firm against all the diseases that attacked you—and they were serious. Perhaps it was for this very reason that that evil and savage spirit, having striven to defeat you and worsted by you so many times, in the end used a treacherous and deceitful contrivance to knock you down. Even so, you did not yield to the spirit until the very last, as one can learn [from those who witnessed your death]. You succumbed in body, but not in mind. He kept trying to strangle and overpower you, while you, with a noose around your neck, continued to call out the name of your dear nurse Athena, until he isolated you from all your allies and thus was able to tighten the noose. For he knew that, when your father was present and fighting by your side, he had often gone away defeated.

§ 8.14  How much time will be needed to end my attachment to your fine qualities? What mix of Egyptian drugs will detach me from them. How can I look upon the plain of Athena now that you are gone? What place in the countryside or in the city shall I look upon without immediately being filled with lamentation, tears, and all manner of wailing? If I go to the council-chamber, I shall think that I see you on the speaker’s platform trying to win over the members of the council. If I go before an audience, it will remind me of my gloomy tragedy, for it was before audiences that everyone often praised you en masse.

§ 8.15  Even the best of the Athenians all let the acclamations go to you alone. It was you alone who caused all alike to rejoice when you outdid them, some because of the goodwill engendered by their love [of you], others perhaps out of fear of what might happen [to you] in the future. The former you won over, the latter you unsettled—no, you carried off the victory prize in every contest in a spirit of goodwill and love. How can I look upon the Areopagus? When you were not yet three years old, you astonished everyone there with your seriousness, like someone who had already been learning the ancient stories about that court for some time. You outdid your father there by maintaining a silence that was more remarkable than his eloquence. You were more reserved and imperturbable than the members of the court. On that occasion one could see the always pensive council smiling for the first time. You touched their souls, and they fell in love with you. Not even gods pleading their cases before those judges had managed to touch their souls in this way.

§ 8.16  How shall I be affected when I look out at audiences who have gathered to hear [my] oratorical displays? It was you who used to convene such gatherings at our home for me, although in your character you gave me something sweeter than all the voices of the world. In the future, the places that I formerly loved the most will be hostile to me; all the places I previously preferred I shall regard as unfriendly. The beautiful grove that I planted for your wedding has become your grave.

§ 8.17  Where will you embrace me if I come [back to Athens]? In our house? But you deserted that house, having left it behind as a reminder of my gloomy tragedy alone. Well, will you embrace me in those sacred groves, thick with trees? I shall find you there, but I shall find you offering me streams of tears instead of kisses. O sweetest child, how you paraded [in death], as they tell it, from the city to a place that was once pleasant but is now more tragic than Cithaeron! Not the way you once paraded with your father, sometimes on horseback, sometimes in a carriage. O you who often said things more marvelous than what men have written in serious memoirs! What day went by, what journey or place was there, in which one did not hear your pleasant voice or a well-aimed remark from you?

§ 8.18  By your death you have barred me from the gates of the city. For how will my eyes be affected if I pass through them? You have barred me from Eleusis. For how shall I, who bring a charge against the goddesses of that place [Demeter and Kore], enter their sacred precinct? How shall I put my trust in a Dionysus who has failed to protect for me my son, who was consecrated [to him]? How shall I sacrifice to Athena, who did not shake her Gorgon [aegis] at that [evil] spirit in defense of you, my child? How shall I pray to the god of our fathers, a father myself in grief over what happened to my son? How can I go before a Greek audience to make a lament for you the introduction to my rhetorical displays? How shall I tolerate my suffering when I look at your coevals? How, after setting my eyes on my young students, can I endure my woe? When I was away, you shepherded them for me, guiding all of them by kindnesses rather than words.

§ 8.19  You were a guard to my years through the love people felt for you; for with you in mind people were ashamed to do any injury to me. They all respected your youth more than my old age. Oh you shameless words! Rufinus lies dead, but you keep pouring forth [from my mouth] with youthful insolence! Oh unfortunate tongue [of mine], previously the instrument of the Muses, but now that of a crude (ἀμούσου) spirit! Let this rhetorical display of mine be part of the painful dirge being sung for him.

§ 8.20  O sweetest son, once much-desired, now lamented more than anyone else. In the past you were the support of my house, now you are its dark and gloomiest sorrow. You shone more quickly than the morning star, but you were also quickly extinguished. When the sun first saw you, you showed me a day brighter than all other days; and after I got that tragic and unfortunate news [of your death], you showed me one darker than all others.

§ 8.21  What shall I say that is worthy of your qualities? What sort of mournful and tragic music shall I compose in order to bewail you as much as I wish? What hopes I had for you! To what bad luck my [evil] spirit has condemned me! I now lament the person who I hoped would speak more forcefully than Minucianus, more solemnly than Nicagoras, more eloquently than Plutarch, more philosophically than Musonius, more intrepidly than Sextus—in a word, more brilliantly and better than all of his ancestors. I myself yielded the prize to you when you were still a boy. I regarded your words as better than mine. I always preferred your inarticulate speech to my serious efforts. But the [evil] spirit has robbed me of all this and gone off, letting me have laments and tears instead of you.

§ 8.22  Accept these libations, then, which I pour out for you by the banks of the Melas [Black] River. The experts would know if this river ever confirmed the appropriateness of its name on some other occasion by the character of its waters. But in the present circumstances it really did turn dark and black for me, more dismal than any a Cocytus or Acheron. It is just as if the [evil] spirit waylaid me so that everything would be worthy of the stage and the tragedy—the place, the time, the knowledge of my misfortune. The time was night, the place was the Melas River, the message was that Rufinus was dead. In the middle of this was your father, simultaneously lamenting and writing a speech, torn between my labors and my tears.

§ 8.23  You, O child, have gone, of course, to the place to which the [evil] spirit led you. But, if possible, you will be immortal [here on earth] through your father’s efforts, even if you now surely observe everything from up there somewhere, frolicking with the gods-—playing with Eros, making merry with Hymenaeus, prophesying with Bacchus, being inspired with Trophonius. (It would not be likely, of course, that such a great soul went down somewhere into the netherworld instead of joining the company of gods.) I shall honor you with funeral competitions, I shall hand down your name to time, and I shall be more ambitious than the [evil] spirit at least to this end: that, if that spirit has your body and heaven your soul, your repute may be a possession of all humankind.

§ 9.1  The Epithalamium for Severus
One might perhaps regard it as useless to theorize about the art of composing nuptial orations. For when you have [the marriage-god] Hymenaeus and choruses and the freedom of poetic license, what chance does art have? But since the knowledgeable person should do nothing, even in cases such as these, without reference to the art [of rhetoric], it is worth saying a few things about this kind of oration. The best rule for nuptial orations should be to look to the poets for diction, to what is needed for the contents, and to the situation for length. If the oration has aimed to do all this, the written version of it will clearly show it.

§ 9.2  A nuptial oration has four parts. The first part functions as a prooemium: it reveals through elegant arguments the frame of mind in which the speaker has undertaken the rhetorical display. The second part addresses the question of marriage. Since this is a common human theme, we made it our own with fresh arguments and by the manner in which we expressed our thoughts. We also sweetly added some erudition to it, which those steeped in learning will not fail to notice. The third part of a nuptial oration has an encomium of the spouses. In reviewing the qualities of the [two] people being praised, it moves along quickly and [thereby] suits the matter at hand. The oration ends with a description of the bride, in which it presents a poetic beauty, the length of treatment being determined by the situation. the oration

§ 9.3  They say that, after the great victories he won playing the lyre, Apollo also sounded the wedding song over bridal chambers. If what the poets say is not sheer myth, he first struck up this latter kind of music amidst glens and caves when he sang these charming tunes to his beloved. So, my boys, since I am summoning my Muses to a wedding chorus and to love, it is time for me, too, to be done with serious music so that I may dance along with young girls in honor of Aphrodite.

§ 9.4  But one can learn from the poets themselves that it is very dangerous to try to come up with a song tender enough to please that goddess. Most of them, skilled as I believe they were in matters involving love, have shown Hera acting brazenly against deities and young girls. They left it to Lesbian Sappho to sing with her lyre of the rites of Aphrodite and to prepare the bedroom. After the contests, the poetess entered the bedroom; she readies it, makes the bed, gathers young maidens the bridal chamber, and leads Aphrodite to the Graces’ chariot along with her chorus of Erotes, who sport with her. She bound Aphrodite’s hair in blue, except for the parted hair on her forehead, letting what was unbound ripple in any breezes that might blow. Having adorned the Erotes’ wings and locks of hair with gold, she urges them on as they process and wave their torches in the air in front of the chariot.

§ 9.5  The duty done by Sappho must now be done by me. For the young man being initiated in marriage is not alien or a stranger to eloquence. Very recently he was a reveler in the camp of the Muses, then he suddenly leaped away from my precincts and took his merrymaking to Aphrodite. So it would be fitting for me to join the chorus at his wedding. The cowherd in the glens takes up his pipe when he sees a young bull he has raised brought to full maturity under the guidance of Aphrodite. Horsekeepers strike up a song when their colts start acting like adult males in their relations with mares. Chiron would not have remained silent in the case of Achilles, if the latter had not concealed his love for Hippodamia. And I understand that the pastoral god Pan played his pipe more forcefully when Dionysus took Ariadne to wife in Cretan caves.

§ 9.6  I want to tell you a story. Poseidon once loved Pelops. When Pelops was young, Poseidon taught him how to mount horses and to drive a chariot on the waves, keeping it skimming over the ocean’s surface. But when love of Hippodamia persuaded Pelops, too, to serve Eros and Aphrodite, then the god gathered together a chorus of Nereids and raised up a bedroom for him on a headland of the shore. The bedroom, I believe, was a wave, heaving and tall and curved up over the bed so as to resemble a bridal chamber. Poseidon sang a wedding song for Pelops. But I shall leave such things to the gods and to Poseidon. I shall begin my song of marriage from where it is reasonable and necessary, elevating my oration to the regions where the bedroom and marriage had their beginnings.

§ 9.7  Once there were God and nature. God needed generation, and nature needed someone who would impregnate. Marriage did not exist yet, nor had that which would bring forth been joined yet with that which could beget. So that this process would begin from on high, the All became a bedroom for the All, and from this marriage were born the sky and the sun and also the chorus of stars, the light of the moon, and the two poles, around which the first offspring of God’s first marriage revolve.

§ 9.8  After this marriage, nature showed forth a second marriage, that of Ocean and Tethys, out of which emerged rivers and marshes, and also springs and streams and deep wells, and the sea, which is the mother of all waters. Plants and animals were produced, the earth was inhabited, the sea received swimming creatures, and the air showed itself traversable by winged creatures. Marriage gave plants over to plants, rivers to streams, hail and rain to the earth, the Nile to Egypt—in a word, the male to the female. Then the Ister [Danube] fell in love with the sea near the Bosporus, the Rhine with the sea near the Celtic cities. Eros divided these two rivers, which arise from the same source, through the agency of desire, giving one as a bridegroom to the Euxine [Black] Sea and the other to the Atlantic Ocean.

§ 9.9  The last thing that marriage produced was the human being, who is a contemplator of the divine, although his work is limited to this earthly realm. (The idea that man is a child of the earth and that the Attic soil broke open at his birth and brought him forth as its offspring is a myth, an entertaining story of Attic charm.) Having produced this human being, marriage helped him discover and procure everything by which he makes land and sea his home. Through the human being marriage made furrows in the ground with the plow, launched ships on the waves, and tamed horses with the curb. It gave him weapons for war, festivities for peace, honor for old age, the bloom of life and the sweet hope of children for his youthful prime. Thus we sacrificed to the generative gods, we recognized Hera the matchmaker, and we erected an altar to Zeus teleios; the latter broke open the waves for the birth of Aphrodite, who was concealed in the ocean, and revealed her sparkling in the sunlight.

§ 9.10  As for the race of heroes, which is midway between divine and human nature, whose work would you say it was except that of marriage. For when marriage saw that it was totally forbidden to mix the upper with the lower sphere, it produced something between those two spheres so that it could bring the divine emanation over into the lesser realm. As a result of this, Heracles labors, Dionysus farms, Asclepius heals, and the Dioscuri guide the fortunes of those who cross the seas. Marriage would also have to be celebrated by the Muses because it produced them, by Apollo because it brought him forth, and by Hermes because it caused him to come into existence.

§ 9.11  Now if I should wish to speak of the loves of rivers, an endless throng of them would flow into my oration. For they all seem to me to love the ocean, and consequently they hasten on to it with great speed, each one wishing to greet its beloved before any other does. If we had to link the doings of rivers to marriage, then marriage would have been celebrated because of them. Marriage introduced Thisbe to a river. Thisbe and the river were mutual neighbors. Marriage changed Thisbe from a girl into water and preserved the couple’s love right through that change, uniting the flowing waters of the beloved and her spouse. Tradition knows of the river Enipeus as one who scorned love; yet, in order to provide an erotic myth even in this case, it came up with the story of Poseidon’s marriage in that river. The Enipeus swelled in joy, surging and bulging up to form a bridal chamber, as if, I think, haughtily disposed toward other rivers because it alone had been entrusted with Poseidon’s love. But why do I need myths from abroad? Marriage makes the Ilissus River mad with passion right down from its Attic source. And lest we find fault with the river because, like some lover, it perhaps gets tripped up in the presence of its beloved, marriage has not only adorned the river’s spring, but also the spring’s very name, having joined beauty of appellation to its flowing waters.

§ 9.12  So these (and all the rest) are the beauties of marriage; the poets sing of them, and it is customary to rehearse them at the bridal chamber. But this couple here especially confirm the charm of marriage. They have not been brought into this harmonious state by chance. Just as when a pair of colts of the same age is put under a single yoke, they quickly find concord as they run together; so too this couple, of the same birth and similar upbringing, have, in their completely identical circumstances, passionately desired union. It is said that, when Olympias, who was [later] blessed with the birth of Alexander [the Great], was once celebrating the mysteries of the Cabiri in Samothrace, she saw Philip, who was still just getting his first beard, during the rites. Upon seeing him, she fell in love with the young man and, having turned the mysteries into a prenuptial sacrifice, she vowed that she would marry him. . . .20

§ 9.13  The bride’s fatherland is a Thracian city named after King Philip. In the north, and west of the Bosporus, the Scythians to it, and south of it is the Aegean Sea. Her family was Thracian from the very start; they were indigenous, I believe, and traced their most distant roots back to kingly stock. People called Hermogenes and Medus and those who even now are preeminent among the Thracians share roots with her on both sides of her family.

§ 9.14  The bridegroom’s family are natives of so-called Diospontus. The head of that family, I believe, was the renowned Androclus. From this one root, as it were, innumerable sprouts broke off and shot forth all over the world, making many cities fortunate because of the family’s association with them. This is just what I hear about the Pelopidae, when the famous [head of that family] crossed over from Ionia to Greece and brought the honor of his name to that people. Others would consider it a great advantage if they could lay claim to the glory of Androclus in just one branch of their family. But this [bridegroom] has experienced what happens when rivers flow out from a single source, then diverge in a number of streams and come together again: the family of Androclus, after wandering around for a long time, has been tied down and amalgamated again in him. Those who say that Achilles was born of a divine mother [Thetis] also say that he was the son of mortal Peleus. Our bridegroom enjoys the equal good fortune of having this same mixture in his parents.

§ 9.15  So much, then, for the question of family. But the couple’s traits and [simultaneous] flourishing confirm their similarity much more. For they flourish equally, like buds from a single meadow in spring, buds that appear and open up at the same time. They have a remarkable similarity of soul. They are both self-controlled, of upright character, different only in the activities that they are inclined to by their natural propensities. She, through her spinning, has reaped the fruit of Athena’s craft; he, through serious application, has reaped the fruit of Hermes’ charm. Her concern is the shuttle; his is the spoken and written word. She holds a lyre; he clings to a book. Aphrodite loves her; Apollo has become very fond of him. He was the first of unmarried young men; she is the chosen one among girls. He, while still a young adolescent, got a beard sooner than his coevals; and she is quite ready for marriage. ([16] It was Sappho, of course, who compared the girl [in her poem] to an apple. Those who rush to pick her prematurely do even get to taste of her with the tips of their fingers; instead, she saves her grace, in its full bloom, for the man who intends to pluck the apple at the right time.)2. Sappho also likened the bridegroom [she was writing about] to Achilles and equated the young man’s actions with his. Just as poetry puts that famous hero in command of the whole Hellenic force in wartime, so too this young man [Severus], leading his own band, has won many great contests. If judgment is required, he wins through the use of his mind. If courage is needed, he overcomes his contemporaries. If it is a liberal disposition that the situation demands, he outdoes all his peers in philosophy. This renown of his is what won him this fortunate bride. For the Erotes know how to stir up the wedding fire, even when shooting their arrows overseas.

§ 9.17  In joining together Deianira, daughter of Oeneus, and Heracles, legend makes her someone who was fought over by [the river] Acheloüs and others. As if wishing to indicate that it was not ignorant of the [relative] worth of [potential] bridegrooms, legend gave the bride to Heracles and left the river a tragic loser. But I think that every arrangement is a decision of the gods—[in this case] so that, after [the bridegroom] has secured a foreign rather than Attic marriage, he will at least set up his bedchamber in Attic territory in order that this land may welcome and nurture the first offspring of the marriage and through you, [Severus], bring happiness to Thrace by means of Attic progeny.

§ 9.18  It occurs to me that I should not fail to mention and praise the woman who has been the orchestrator of this marriage. My art and hers have the same forefathers. She does not disgrace our [Athenian] race by her sex, for in her eloquence she is another Aspasia. In her wisdom she outdoes the foreign woman of Mantinea to the same extent that Athenians are superior to Arcadians. She obtains for the city [of Athens] a Thracian in-law who derives his name from that wise [city of ] Chalcis, as if, I think, she is eager to confirm the ancient story that love of Oreithyia brought the wind Boreas from Thrace to Athens and, through the young lady, linked the wind to the city. There are many fine things that one could say about this woman I am praising, but it would be especially fitting to admire her for what she did in the case of this marriage. For the gods saved this girl [i.e., the bride], who was almost on the verge of being caught by evil snares.

§ 9.19  But my oration has lingered outside the bridal chamber and has quite neglected the bride, as if unaware that it troubles the bridegroom by not yet having given a verbal depiction of her. Very well, we shall now conduct my oration into the bedroom and persuade it to encounter the bride’s beauty. “O beautiful woman, O graceful woman”—for Lesbian accolades suit you—rosy-ankled Graces and golden Aphrodite play with you, the Hours supply you with the meadow’s flowers. Leap nimbly to the accompaniment of song. Dance over the flowers. The Erotes have fashioned crowns of roses, which they cut from Aphrodite’s gardens whenever they wish, and are putting them all over your bed. Persuasion, Love, and Desire divided the whole of your beauty among themselves. [Desire] takes up a position in your eyes, sending out from them its irresistible flames. [Love] reddens your cheeks with modesty more than nature colors rosebuds, when in springtime they split open in their maturity and show the redness at the tops of their petals. Persuasion settles on your lips and lets its charm trickle out along with your words. Many curls appear on your head, reddish and parted on your brow. And if I want to describe the flower of your appearance, I would have to speak the words of poets: “What fairness of skin, white as milk!” These are the words a shepherd [the Cyclops Polyphemus] addressed somewhere in the works of those poets to the Nereid Galateia whom he loved, having used his skill to compose a song for her.

§ 9.20  Having brought together a chorus of Graces, he would have given this bride to the goddesses as their playmate. But if I had a poetic nature such that I could freely let my tongue loose on the subject of the bride, I would have spoken of her beauty like . Homer. I would have placed her, spotted with gold, in Aphrodite’s groves, not next to an altar of Apollo. I would have led the Muses out of Athens— and I fault the poets when they rob Athens of them and maintain that they belong to the Boeotians—I would have led the Nereids out of the nearby sea; I would have led choruses of Nymphs, resounding Dryads, leaping Satyrs, piping Pan, and Dionysus’s whole company out from wherever they practice their rites. As for Aphrodite herself, coming up from the midst of the sea with foam still dripping from the ends of her strands of hair after she emerged from the ocean, I would have placed her above the marriage bed with her sweet smiles and her commands to her children [the Erotes] to shoot arrows at the couple. If a song had been needed, I would have provided the following one: “O bride, you who are brimming with rosy love, O bride, most beautiful delight of Paphian [Aphrodite], approach the bed, approach the place where marriage is consummated, O gently playful bride, such a delight to your groom. Evening leads you on, and you do not resist; you honor the marriage goddess Hera in her silver throne.”28

§ 9.21  But tell me, where are the choruses of maidens, where are the choruses of young bachelors? My eloquence leaves the rest of the festivities to you. Let someone light a large torch. Let someone else sound forth. Let song take hold of everything. Headlands and vales, the pipes of shepherds and of all herdsmen are resounding, just as when Zeus was begetting the daughters of Memory [i.e., the Muses] on Mt. Helicon. I leave dancing to the dancers. I myself shall stand next to the bedroom and pray to Fortune, to Eros, and to the gods of procreation: to Eros, that he shoot every one of his arrows; to Fortune, that she give life; and to the gods of procreation, that they grant the birth of lawfully begotten children, so that one day we may join the drink-offering that celebrates birth with the cup that celebrates marriage.

§ 10.i  From the Speech Entitled “Diogenes; or, A Propemptic Oration. This oration is also dignified by a preliminary explanatory comment (προθεωρία), and the dialogue form has left its mark on it as it was being fashioned. from the preliminary explanatory comment

§ 10.1  The treatment we give to common themes is what makes them our own. Thus it is possible through the art of rhetoric to make propemptic orations seem older, even if they are a recent custom. And that is just what I have done. For I have put the present theme into the form of a dialogue without compromising the business at hand or destroying the dignity that is owed to the dialogue form. Although my discourse happens to be ethical, nonetheless in the manner of Plato I latch onto physical and theological considerations, mixing these with the ethical material. And since Plato hides his more divine discussions in myth, one should observe whether I emulated him in this. As for the other qualities of dialogues—I mean relief from monotony, arrangement of the material and interludes, also elegance and a dramatic flavor throughout—the written version of the oration will show better [than anything I might say here] whether or not I succeeded in achieving those qualities. Dialogues begin with a rather plain style so that the nature of the diction may produce a sense of simplicity; then in what follows they become elevated [in style] as the action progresses. Those whose ears have been prepared by rhetorical training to listen to orations may judge whether or not I have followed this pattern. from the dialogue itself

§ 10.2  It is a time for silence, not for words, whenever eloquence is saddened at having to send forth pupils from its flock. Nevertheless, eloquence must give expression to itself, regardless of what befalls it. So if it pleases all of you, I shall declaim to you the oration that the feelings of concern that have taken hold of me have engendered. . . .

§ 10.3  Although the two men were as distant from one another in their rule as the middle part of Europe is separated from the inland recesses of Asia, where they met was in their longing for this person, each desiring to anticipate the other in carrying off the first fruits of his tongue. . . .

§ 10.4  You did not follow the initiatory custom that specifies one time for junior initiation and a later time for senior initiation. Rather you accepted one and the same person at one and the same time as both junior initiate in, and priest (profhvthn) of, the holy rite of your teachings, and you allowed him to be filled insatiably with the waters that flow from those teachings. . . . [5]. . . as you refresh yourself under the trees. . . .

§ 10.6  Haven’t you heard that long ago these cicadas were human beings; then, when in their love of the Muses they were dissolved into song as a result of their endless singing, they changed from human beings into birds and went from one melody to another? . . . [7] Then having rallied myself. . . . [8] I know how to pull back eloquence’s bowstring. . . .

§ 10.9  Listen to the story. When Zeus brought human beings into existence, they had everything, just as currently arranged, except that Eros was not yet dwelling in their souls; this god, with his wings still high above this world, frequented heaven and shot his arrows only at the gods. But Zeus feared that the most beautiful of his works [i.e., humankind] might perish, so he sent Eros to be a guardian of the human race. Eros accepted this role from Zeus, but he did not think that he should dwell in all souls or consider every personality, both newly initiated and unhallowed, to be part of his domain. Rather he assigned the shepherding of the many ordinary souls to the vulgar Erotes, the offspring of the Nymphs; and he himself dwelt in the divine and heavenly souls, and by rousing them to a loving frenzy he benefited the human race in countless ways. So whenever you see someone who is of a sluggish nature and cannot easily enter into a friendship, realize that this person is not deemed worthy of the gifts of that Eros. And when you see someone of sharp and heated disposition who, like fire, turns eagerly to a loving friendship, realize that he enjoys the hospitality of that Eros. . . .

§ 10.10  For you tell me, dear Socrates, best of lovers, about one part of Cleinias’s virtue, his courage in the face of fears, and this is a quality that practice often bestows without having awaited the guidance of reasoned discourse. . . .

§ 10.11  That which once gave Pericles the capacity to speak freely when he was general in the city [of Athens] also gives it to him—namely, an honest character. . . .

§ 10.12  If you see this man barred from tribunals of justice, bewail the law because it has been overcome by money. . . .

§ 10.13  He reached his prime along with the emperor’s city [Constantinople], which marks the separation of great seas,25 and he laid the very same foundation for his own reputation as for the city’s. While that city, in swaddling clothes, was still being physically fashioned, he guided the rudder of other offices that were entrusted to him by the emperor. But when [Constantinople] needed a precise hand, such as is required to give shape to a statue, he returned to it so that he might be both beginning and end to the whole adornment of the city. . . .

§ 10.14  . . . cities raised up, peoples flourishing, the life of Tartessus, the horn of Amaltheia, the whole sum of happiness. . . .

§ 10.15  But why [am I] so enthusiastic about this young man? Every soul that has recently been separated from the upper sphere still carries with it the fresh vision of the delights that it beheld when it danced that happy dance with chariots of the gods. So whenever such a soul sees here on earth a beauty hidden inside [another] divine soul, a beauty that it observed with no encasement around it when it was in the upper sphere, it bursts with joy at the sight and rushes to the site of that beauty to join itself with [that other soul], having been lightened by both [correct] opinion and [true] knowledge. This is what I experienced in the case of this young man. I saw in his soul, as if in a mirror, an image of my own mind appearing, and I delighted in it. Consequently I yearned for and sought out his soul as if it were my alter ego. . . .

§ 10.16  It is burdensome, dear [soul], and extremely difficult to be deprived in the course of time of a close relationship that one had been granted. But we yield, as they say, to the decrees of necessity and of the gods’ will, even if we do so reluctantly. . . .

§ 10.17  So he is quite capable of preserving in memory anything that he might have worked on under a mentor . . . as a philosopher [he will preserve] his judgment, as [he will preserve] not only this eloquence [that he learned from me], but also anything else he wishes from the abundance of the Muses’ and Apollo’s meadows. Having culled the foliage of all learning from those meadows, he has made his soul a vernal crown. If there should be a need for someone to speak, you would no longer ask whose boy he is29 and to whom he belonged; so thoroughly has he become an image of his mentor, more exactly so than any picture could be. He would be a good helper, if it should be necessary for him to assist his mentor, but he would also be good acting in his own right. . . .

§ 10.18  Poets and, along with them, painters and sculptors rightly divest Eros of old age and make this god young and adolescent, indicating his faithlessness by his youthfulness. . . .

§ 10.19  O you who were so strong in eloquence, as I hear that the Thessalian Cineas was. That man, who traversed every land and sea with King Pyrrhus, caused cities to yield through his eloquence before any engines of war did. . . .

§ 10.20  For I am not this fellow’s teacher, I swear by my love of you, O eloquence, because of whom I cast aside the blessed happiness of my native land [Bithynian Prusias] and have taken up residence by the mystic banks of the Ilissus. . . .

§ 10.21  Alexander, who used his military trophies as boundary stones for the whole world. . . .

§ 10.22  For the heat of midday slips away, and the breeze tempers the sun . . . and to part the waves surging around the prow by means of the Zephyr. . . .

§ 11.i  From the Farewell [Talk] (συντακτική) to His Students, When H. Departed for Corinth

§ 11.1  Whenever serious lyre-players of the past hastened to another land, they did not depart in silence but took leave of their followers with song and melody. . . .[2] . . . not a melody that is out of tune and a trifling song . . .

§ 12.1  A Propemptic Oration to Flavianus, Who Had Been Promoted to the consulship of Asia
When Alexander, the son of Zeus—his great glory among the Greeks links him to heaven and to Zeus—when this Alexander, I say, filled the whole of Europe with his fame, he set out for Asia, wanting to link the continents with his wondrousness. He called for Timotheus’s pipe—it made a great sound, one worthy of such a great king—and, to the sound of its songs, he loosened the cables of his ships. . . .

§ 12.2  Come, now, I shall paint [a copy of ] the picture with my words; for words, I think, have their own paints for making representations of things. There was a ship and a sea in the picture. The sea, I think, was the Aegean; for there were many islands separated from each other in various parts of it, and because of them it was clear that the sea was the Aegean. It had not been depicted as rough and wild nor as casting its waves up to the very clouds themselves, which is how the Aegean often behaves in insolent assault on those who sail on it. Instead, the waves had been stilled into a calm, and all the water around the shores got purplish, as each wave itself was gently transformed into a blue-green froth. . . .

§ 12.3  For the Phrygians are reputed to be the first ones to play the pipes and to give cymbals a role in religious rites. . . .

§ 12.4  The other side of the ship, which was narrowing into the prow, had been formed out of actual gold. The painter’s skill deserves admiration for how this was done. For where the prow cut into the sea, the water shone because of the radiance of the gold and seemed to make the sea the same color as the gold. . . .

§ 12.5  Therefore, give me the skill of Zeuxis, the techniques of Parrhasius. . . .

§ 12.6  Of course, Delphi, the sacred city of Apollo, always serves its god and dances around the tripod while singing paeans. . . .

§ 12.7  As the Eleans conduct the river of Pisa [i.e., the Alpheus] forth to the Sicilian spring, they weep over it, as if, I suppose, they fear that it will attend to its departure and give its waters to others. . . .

§ 12.8  Perhaps nightingales and swans and all songs will fly off with you, [sir]. For our Muses are already daring to build boats; they threaten that they will flee and take to the sea, even if it is raging with waves. . . .

§ 12.9  Hurling the lyre from his hands, he enjoins silence on song. . . .

§ 12.10  The flagship [is] at anchorage, the sail [is] lofty, high in the air, ready to be spread open by keen sea breezes. . . .

§ 12.11  The meadows of the Hesperides are insignificant in charm, the Egyptian pyramids are insignificant in size; insignificant too is anything else that Persian or Assyrian hands fashioned and left as a wonder to posterity. . . .

§ 12.12  Rather, the journey [was] to dear Athens, which set you so on fire with its yearning [for you] that you carried its love [for you] around on your very tongue. . . .

§ 12.13  Why do you hesitate to reply, [sir], when the common glory of [us] all is about to relocate among others? . . .

§ 12.14  Legend deprived the Cimmerians, a western people, of the sun. Then, fearing that that story would be challenged, legend hastened to cloak it by talking about it ambiguously. But no poet would seem to be telling lies to us, if, after your departure, he expressed the wish to be deprived of the sun. . . .

§ 12.15  O dear fatherland, now I see that I have truly done you an injustice, scorning your love in my desire to gratify in every way a faithless lover. . . .

§ 12.16  But while following the rule about these matters, I have almost brought my oration into a state of disarray, even though the gods are fulfilling my desire. For again [he has] the scepter, again [he has] the seat of justice. . . .

§ 12.17  Ephyra [i.e., Corinth] produced this man, a city that not only with the majority of Grecian cities—but also displays its good fortune to a discerning eye. . . .

§ 12.18  Thus this man’s family glories in countless words [spoken about it] and in countless deeds of a similar kind. . . .

§ 12.19  Mention must now be made of the family itself, but not of every member of it; for an account that gave consideration to such a great number of , I think. . . .

§ 12.20  Those who were the fruit of that marriage carried an image of that man’s wisdom in their glorious souls. . . .

§ 12.21  The Ionian Gulf smooths the shore as it washes against it with its waves. Along this coast a chorus of Nereids danced, all white, the very color of the milk that would be set out thanks to the skillfulness of shepherds. The Nereids’ eyes were bluish, they had oyster-green hair, and white sea-foam was still dripping from the ends of their locks of hair. . . .

§ 12.22  She loves her bridegroom in turn and confirms their marriage with a gift, for she sends up a spring from the middle of the sea. The spring, as if knowing why the bride did this, deprives other sailors of its fresh waters, saving them as a drink of friendship to be drawn [only] by children of the bride. Song commemorates the same arrangement in the case of [the spring] Arethusa. . . .

§ 12.23  Let there be [ascribed to him] a soul that learns easily, one quick of intellect, with an innate memory, ready for eloquence, a soul clever at concealing [things] but even better at self-concealment—for this is wiser and, at the same time, more agreeable to the gods—a soul even more clever at evaluating any person it meets, one that resists pleasure but succumbs to friendship. . . . He is outstanding in wisdom, a skilled speaker, uncorruptible by friends, noble in fear, stately as a private citizen, fair in office. He exalts the private citizen with his high-mindedness and softens the bluntness of his power through reasonableness. You can see fortune escorting this man’s life along as if with a fair wind blowing at his back. . . .

§ 12.24  He was something of an old man,64 majestic in appearance, old-fashioned in how he lived and spoke. He was wise when he spoke and even better at listening, noble in every respect. At the very beginning of his adolescence, before his first beard got very long, he came to the attention of the emperor because of his remarkable qualities; at that time he was already brimming over with fame and causing the whole of Greece to take note of him. . . .

§ 12.25  At this point in the oration a poet would entwine the crown with roses and lead the Muses from Helicon . . . round about the city [i.e., Constantinople] where Europe, extending from Gades, ends and is cut off in the face of Asia by a strait of the sea. . . . 65

§ 12.26  He even proceeded down the Ister [i.e., the Danube] and did not fear a barbarian river that, when iced up, is like a plain. . . .

§ 12.27  When God, wanting to make him perfect in every virtue, once turned the wind of fortune against him so that it might be revealed to everyone what kind of mind he had when things got rough and life got stormy, and also so that he might win renown for his behavior in that kind of situation—in these circumstances, what poet or prose-writer could lend a voice worthy of that man’s accomplishments? . . .

§ 12.28  He faced not a Sicilian Scylla and Charybdis, but innumerable phalanxes of wicked men stirred up against him, worse than that savage Sicilian shepherd, the Cyclops; and he laid them low all over the earth, not with weapons intended for close fighting, nor with spears and lances, but by his sagacity and reason. . . .

§ 12.29  The so-called leader and head of the Telchines, having received a mortal wound, weeps and laments the war. . . .

§ 12.30  All of Asia—I don’t mean what we now call Asia, using the name of the whole continent for a mere part [i.e., Asia Minor]—begins way up in India and is separated and set off from the other continents in the east and the north by the Red Gulf and [the] Phasis [River], in the south and where the sun sets by Egypt and the Ionian Sea. From the Propontis to Pamphylia a side of it stretches along and gives shape to the continent. This whole side is washed by the Aegean, which has one and the same beginning with it. . . . The people who inhabit these cities clearly reveal who the ancestors were from whom, I think, they originally descended not by the cicada-pin and the chiton, but by their virtue and wisdom. . . .

§ 12.31  This Meles [River]—it is not right to pass over in silence a river that produced such a great tongue [i.e., Homer]—arises in the suburbs of Smyrna, where countless springs that flow forth near one another give birth to it. Because of them the river swells up and quickly forms a sea below them; it becomes navigable by merchantmen and the oar. After passing by banks on both sides that are lush with cypress trees and reeds, it shares its stream with the nearby sea, if “stream” is the right word; for you will hear no sound, nor would it seem to you that any water is moving along. The river is like a lover who wants to conceal a rendezvous with his beloved; it secretly mixes with the sea, calming the sea’s waves with its flow. . . .

§ 12.32  Since I wish to summon the wind in a poetic manner but am unable to express myself poetically, I wish to address the wind in accordance with the Muse of Ceos [i.e., Simonides].69 . . .

§ 12.33  Diffusing itself gently over the waves, [the wind] parts them as they surge around the prow. . . . For he [i.e., Flavianus] is eager to sail your sea, not in search of reckless love, but in his desire to initiate all the Ionians in the solemn mysteries of self-control. . . .

§ 12.34  Legend says that the Rhodians were rained upon with gold when Zeus broke open a golden cloud upon them. But no dubious tale will tell of the good fortune that all of you [Asian provincials] will enjoy because of this man; no, the wonders [he brings to you] will be right before your eyes. . . .

§ 12.35  The beautiful spring, of course, was destined to bring to all of you, not nightingales, swans, or cicadas, but the sun itself, which would illuminate Ionia with its golden rays. . . .

§ 12.36  Above all others, the colt who led my colts [was] holy and lordly, like the colts the Nisaeans train for the god Helios. Having equipped this colt with the Muses’ curb-chain and completely bound his hair with the Graces’ headband, I offered him as the first-fruits of my drove [of students] and dedicated him, as it were, to a god. . . .

§ 12.37  May gleaming stars appear, illuminating the sea voyage with their bright light. . . .

§ 12.38  My eloquence longs almost to anticipate the future. In the midst of its farewell songs it seeks to strike up a song welcoming [him] back. What it has in mind is what heights it will reach, I think, when it catches sight of him returning and is about to dance the Muses’ dance again in his honor. . . .

§ 13.1  From Another Protreptic Oration
Lysippus, you know, was clever of mind as well as of hand. He used his mind to create such daring works of art. He enrolled Opportunity (Kairovn) among the gods, then made a statue of him and explained his nature by how he represented him. To the best of my memory, this is what the statue looks like. Lysippus represents Opportunity as a boy of graceful form, at the peak of adolescence. He has hair on his temples and forehead, but, from there back, he is hairless. He is armed with iron in his right hand and is extending his left hand toward a balance. His ankles are winged, not to be lifted way up above the ground into the air, but so that, while appearing to touch the ground, he may escape notice as he stealthily desists from resting on the ground. . . .20

§ 13.2  Glaucus, waylaying, as I think, the very opportuneness (το καιριον) of the contest, in which the prize was a crown, just showed up and was the first to get the crown. . . .21

§ 13.3  For everything is good in season, and the archer who knows how to shoot his arrows at the right time (kaivria) is the one who hits his mark. . . .

§ 13.4  Nightingales fly from earth into the sky; for myth dares to lift birds up into the sky itself because of their song. . . .

§ 13.5  So they came to the swan, which was in a vernal meadow and just about to surrender its wings to the Zephyr and to sing. . . .

§ 13.6  To the Newly Arrived Followers of Piso
The physician gets control over disease through his knowledge of medicine, and the rhetor gets control over the masses through his eloquence.

§ 13.7  Whenever the sun makes you hot, and you want to seek shelter in the shade of a glen . . .

§ 13.8  . . . not when the Nile swells and has covered Egypt with its waters . . .

§ 14.1  From the Oration to the Newly Arrived Egyptian
The Egyptians call the [progressive] augmentation of the Nile “cubits,” and they measure the [rise of its] waters [in cubits], and the cubit is a cause of celebration for them. . . .

§ 14.2  A clever businessman amasses a large sum of money by increasing his wealth little by little. . . .

§ 14.3  And you will see that excellent generals are at first credited with only a few triumphs; then, as time goes on, they can proclaim innumerable victories. Themistocles was of rather small stature at Artemisium, for he excelled there against what were still [only] the [Persian] king’s servants. He was greater at Psyttaleia and really great at Salamis, for in the fight at Salamis he drowned the whole of Asia. . . .38

§ 14.4  It seems to me that Homer himself wrote about the ten-year war and destroyed Troy by fire only after that interval in order to show all humankind through his poetry that fortune gives good things to people only after hard work and the passage of time.

§ 15.1  From a Propemptic Oration
And perhaps it is well that you do this [i.e., end your studies?]. For a person who wishes to be praised must strive to do the kind of deeds that will earn him admiration. The actions that were a source of pride to Pericles were not sufficient for his children; in fact, since the children were unworthy of their father’s virtue, his reputation caused them to be subject to more censure than they might otherwise have been. Many other outstanding men have had children, for all of whom their fathers’ fame was more a proof of their own deficiencies than a source of praise for them. . . .

§ 15.2  How, then, you may ask, is the mind cared for? By virtue and eloquence (lovgoˇ). Virtue rules and presides over eloquence. Eloquence, like an adept servant of a good queen, executes and carries out virtue’s commands with all haste. . . .

§ 15.3  There is another uncountable group of virtues, all of which you will find when you have entered the shrines of learning. But I shall recommend these virtues to you [instead], as the nurses and mothers of those others, and I say that, through them, you will also get to the prey of the virtues that depend on them. . . .

§ 15.4  The boys, released from their teachers, were taking part in that procession. . . .

§ 15.5  The Phrygian Midas, when he wanted to capture Satyrus, put wine in the waters. He bound him with sleep and lethargy and thus made him his prey.

§ 16.1  From the Extempore Oration Given When Discord Arose within His School
What drug is there in my words, my friends, that is capable of stilling strife? Does my rhetorical skill aim at achieving the kind of dazzling result that Homer hints at through Helen’s mixing bowl, which that daughter of Zeus sets up in Menelaus’s palace for guests who were overcome by tears? Isn’t it true that Helen’s drug was not an herb, that she did not have an Egyptian’s ability to prepare a drink that would banish sorrow? Rather, her remedy was sweet and all-wise speech, which, like a drug, is able to extinguish emotions that swell up from the depths of the heart.

§ 16.2  Homer’s poem puts the story [of Helen’s acquisition of the drug] in distant Egypt in order to hint at the fact that that land is the mother of wise words. . . .24

§ 16.3  Once the king [Alexander the Great] was having rather base thoughts. Timotheus would not allow this; instead, by means of his music he lifted Alexander’s mind heavenwards.

§ 16.4  The king’s anger intensified beyond the point of moderation; Timotheus came to his side and removed the excess of emotion through his melodies. The king was disheartened; Timotheus immediately made him smile. Alexander surrendered himself to pleasures, but you would have seen him turn serious immediately after hearing Timotheus’s music. In a word, one could see that king take on whatever mood Timotheus caused in him through his piping. . . .25

§ 16.5  The Zephyr calms the ocean’s waves with its breezes. Won’t an Attic rhetor with his Greek eloquence put an end to discord merely by expressing himself? . . .

§ 16.6  Xenophon went on military campaign, for he had taken up the spear after associating with Socrates. . . .

§ 16.7  For what is of good natural disposition is well-tempered. . . .

§ 16.8  Alcibiades lived a voluptuous life when among the Athenians. In Lacedaemon he was grave. He alone outdid the Persians in luxury. But whenever he had to think out a speech and exercise himself in philosophy, he would turn everything into a Lyceum and an Academy through his conversations. . . .

§ 16.9  They, working hard on an account of these men . . . We shall be so advanced in wisdom . . .

§ 17.1  From the Oration Given at the Arrival of the Cyprians
The poets give Cyprus to the goddess Aphrodite, just as they give Delos to the god Apollo. For Cyprus is a great country. . . .

§ 17.2  Sappho and Anacreon of Teos do not cease invoking Cypris as a prelude to their songs. . . .

§ 17.3  They say that the well-being of this island has nothing to do with land and sea, but actually with heaven. . . .

§ 17.4  Its inhabitants [are] genuinely Greek in language. . . .

§ 17.5  The sea brought forth Aphrodite from Heaven, but the mystical teachings command that the precise nature of this birth be hidden. This heavenly being had to be born, then. The sea was immediately stilled and became calm, swelling in gentle waves around the newborn goddess. . . .

§ 17.6  One could say that the island [of Cyprus] is Aphrodite’s own meadow; and this island, I think, is teeming with Erotes. . . .

§ 17.7  Pandemos (vulgar) Aphrodite has nothing in common with the Ourania (heavenly) one. The former gives birth to Erotes who have an unhallowed and impure nature. But the latter’s children are golden, and so are their arrows; they take aim at newly initiated and undefiled souls. . . .

§ 17.8  May you yourselves take notice if I open my doors to welcome a false lover.

§ 18.1  From an Oration Addressed to the Cappadocian
Because of [Apollo’s] arrow, the Scythian [Abaris] was transported about, not only across the Danube itself and the Tanaïs, but also to every land and sea; and, of course, Apollo’s arrow is eloquence. . . .

§ 18.2  And a river there [i.e., in Cappadocia] that has a story connected with it is something Greeks can consider worth hearing about. Dionysus had gone to the Indians, a people who rejected his kindness. His army consisted of Bacchae and satyrs; his arms were fawnskins and thyrsi. As soon as the Indians saw the god, they were overcome. They threw away their weapons, and they who had been fighting against Dionysus up to that point became his chorus.

§ 18.3  Well, when they had been led into the territory of the Cappadocians, they encamped alongside the river for which they were about to provide a name. When they had to wash in its waters, the river was transformed, its silvery water darkening (melaivnetai) after coming into contact with the Indians. Thus they caused the river to be and be called what they themselves were. . . .

§ 18.4  Rumor leads the young man [to me?] from there [i.e., Cappadocia?]. . . .

§ 18.5  But my wealth is not the gold of Gyges or Lydian [gold], but boys in the bloom of youth, of a vigorous age, who, first of all, look proud and carry their heads high because they were born right from Zeus’s chest.

§ 19.i  Fine Things Are Rare Things From the oration he gave on the occasion when, having been asked to give an oratorical display (επιδείξις), he held off for a while and then spoke.

§ 19.1  The Persians busy themselves with the bow, and their whole life consists of the quiver and arrows. . . .

§ 19.2  Whenever he [a Persian] is feasting, arrows will not be lying far from the mixing-bowl; and, in a word, their bows are weapons for them if they have to fight and ornaments when they are at peace. . . .

§ 19.3  The [Persian] king himself trains in the use of the bow. . . .

§ 19.4  I praise the custom. It is a fitting test of industriousness. . . .

§ 19.5  For it is proper that things held in honor be rare. . . .

§ 19.6  Nature knew this law before the Persians [did]. A person would never have thought seeing the ocean to be something worthwhile, unless he had embraced the ends of the earth after fleeing from its middle regions. What repute would the pyramids have, if they were not a spectacle far removed from us? What repute would the stone statue of Memnon among the Ethiopians have, if his mother [Eos] had not placed it, too, inland beyond the view of most people? It is because of the statue’s location that we believe what they say about it to be true and not a mere myth—namely, that, once it has come into contact with the sun, it sounds forth and speaks like a human being. . . .

§ 19.7  Nature also gives human beings the rose bit by bit. It does not spring up and blossom all at once; rather it remains inside of its bud during much of its prime, emerging and breaking forth only after a long period [of concealment]. Nor can people gather the harvest whenever they want to; if you want apples or wish to pluck ripe figs, you must wait for the harvest season, which takes its very name from the word for harvest.. . .

§ 19.8  Time hated the bronze gong at Dodona because it resounded endlessly, and so it reduced the device to mere story. For familiarity has the power to breed a sense of satiety and, by its overbearingness, to sully what is available to us. . . .

§ 19.9  The sun, too, often annoys us because we get too much of it. . . .

§ 19.10  When we live on land, we seek the sea; conversely, when sailing, we look around for fields of grain. The seaman thinks that the farmer is lucky, and the man at the plow has the opposite view: he believes that it is the sailor who is happy. This is all the sport of satiety. Familiarity breeds satiety. Let us flee from satiety, my boys. In its arrogance it often shoots its arrows even at lovers. I heard this once in a proverb.

§ 20.1  From the Oration to Musonius, Proconsul of Greece
When I was very reluctant to go before audiences and eager to remove my eloquence from mass gatherings, you forced me to break this habit. The swan breaks its silence whenever it hears Apollo striking his lyre, and the shrill sound of the Zephyr leads the nightingale from the cave out into the light of the sun. . . .

§ 20.2  The sailor dares to sail over the waves, and the man who belongs to Bacchus leaps up boldly—the former, when he sees springtime calming the sea, and the latter, when he senses that Dionysus is shaking the thyrsus. . . .

§ 20.3  I do not think that a courageous poet would hesitate to compare you to Apollo himself. But your fondness for the bow and arrows goes only far enough to show that you have Apollo’s nature; those weapons of yours always remain unstained with blood. It is unlawful that the barbs of your arrows be touched by human gore. On the contrary, through your decision a person escaped the public executioner even as the latter was raising his sword up over the victim’s neck. . . .

§ 20.4  So too a colt is broken in well, and a puppy is skillfully trained, when the horse-breaker wants to raise his horse without using a goad or a whip, and the dog-trainer wants to raise his dog using only his hand to tame it. . . .

§ 20.5  What made Cyrus great among the Persians? His gentle and mild character. . . .

§ 20.6  For the city always fared well against the barbarians. . . .

§ 20.7  Once one of the valiant soldiers announced victory to the people. They marveled so much at his enthusiasm that, as a result of those words that he spoke to them, a bronze statue of him was set up among the Athenians. . . .

§ 20.8  O sprout of the Muses, O sweetest creature of the Graces!

§ 21.1  From the Oration to the Newly Arrived Severus
Achilles, of course, did not forget his lyre (lyra) even while battles were going on. The plains were gleaming with weapons, but he was in his tent tuning his kithara. As for the theme of his song: well, Achilles loved valor. Whether he was fighting or singing songs, he tried to make the glorious deeds of men come alive again. . . .

§ 21.2  There was strife among the gods over what they were enamoured of. But although Athena had weapons, she did not use them in contending [with Poseidon]. Nor did Poseidon aim his trident at [her], even though he was carrying it. Instead, she brandished the olive branch, and he in turn shouted at her with the sound of his waves. A vote settled their dispute, and Athena carried off the prize of victory. . . .

§ 21.3  But choruses of Muses and Apollo play in soft meadows. . . .

§ 21.4  And one played the aulos, another held a kithara, and yet another played the syrinx.

§ 22.1  From a Talk (λαλιά). Whenever the Muses dance together on Mt. Helicon, everything is filled with sound for me. The cicada sounds forth and, in its song, calls to mind a tale: “I,” as it says, “was always singing when I was a human being; and when I gave up one nature for another, I did not abandon my desire to sing along with a particular form of life.”36 . . . The race of nightingales and that of swallows, as well as groups of swans, dance together around the goddesses [i.e, the Muses].

§ 23.1  To the Comes Ursacius
The hierophant rejoices when he senses that all those religious beginners desire initiation; the poet is delighted when he sees his audience eagerly gathering to hear his poetry; and the general gladly gives the signal for war when he sees his soldiers thirsting for battle. . . .

§ 23.2  Every person, I think, is fond of what belongs to his own country. If an Egyptian should come here, he will find the Nile—that is, our conception of it—swelling in orations we deliver on Egypt. . . .

§ 23.3  Oratory can have the same effect that painting has; rather, any attempt to represent something falls short of oratory. That is how effective some [orations] are in tracking down the truth. . . .

§ 23.4  They say that the wise Abaris was ethnically a Hyperborean, but a Greek in language, and a Scythian as far as his clothes and outer appearance were concerned. Whenever he opened his mouth to speak, one thought that his words were coming right from the Academy and from the Lyceum itself. . . .

§ 23.5  Since a man from Illyria dwells among us, a poet would speak of his “golden countenance.”83 . . .

§ 23.6  They say that the Eleusinian youth [Triptolemus] was raised on high by Demeter so that he could replace the food of nomads with cultivated grain. But an arrow . . . he came to [Athe]ns and to the other Greeks . . . [and, although raised on Scy]thian plains, he understood the Greek language and . . . passionately desiring to visit [Greece?].

§ 23.7  Abaris came to Athens carrying a bow, with a quiver on his shoulder, and wearing a tightly fastened cloak. He had a golden belt around his waist and was wearing pants that stretched from his buttocks right to the bottom of his feet. He had pleasing eyes and a charming face, which revealed to those who met him that he had a Hellenic disposition. But when he entered the city, the council welcomed this speaker [of Greek, and] they examined his thinking [as well as] his speech, to see if it too was thoroughly Hellenic (?)85 . . .

§ 23.8  We find that, as with a lyre’s harmony, everything one heard him say was completely in concord with what he thought. He was pleasant to meet; he could carry out a great deed quietly; he was sharp in seeing what lay before him, but also providently kept the future in mind. He always yielded to wisdom and was a lover of friendship. He entrusted few things to fortune, guaranteeing everything by his judgment.

§ 23.9  When the Centaur [Chiron], having built the cave, was tuning his lyre in it, Aeacus, the son of Zeus, came to him to see the cave and the lyre. The Centaur put the swans from Mt. Pelion in a circle in the middle of the cave and played the lyre. Then the whole of Mt. Pelion was overcome by amazement, as the swans echoed forth in reply to the lyre. Aeacus marveled at the Centaur for his skill and at how the chorus of swans immediately started dancing around the lyre, and he brought [his sons] Telamon and Peleus to Chiron and gave them to him, to be watched over along with the swans. . . . to be satisfied with the meal I [provide], but if my eloquence skillfully provides food . . .

§ 24.1  To His [Former] Pupil Severus
But the grace of excellence attends not only the beginnings [of an art], but also anyone who has marveled at it and striven to achieve distinction in it himself. The fact that the seed of Phidias’s craft came from Daedalus did not make Phidias less famous than Daedalus; indeed, Phidias practiced his sculpting craft in full for the human race. Nor was Cratinus less famous than Epicharmus, nor were those who flourished at the time of Gorgias and Protagoras less famous than the followers of Tisias and Corax . . . to sharpen with their eloquence.

§ 24.20  With reference to these matters, my son, you will hear now [of rhetors?] . . . some of whom, so winged . . . extended their reputation along with . . . while others bloom in a Laconian manner . . . But he himself [Severus] recommended schooling under me [for his son?], expecting it to be an Olympic racecourse. Meanwhile, this was not announced in an ordinary way, as if [the young man] were “so-and-so, son of so-and-so.” He was the son of a good father. . . . His people and his family [were set forth?] in the announcement. As for his people: he hailed from [Diospontus . . . all the way to the other side through the Bosporus and the land of the Cimmerians. . . . Now some people . . . the hyparchic office . . .

§ 24.30  and, not least of all, [it] turns my attention toward you, and . . . Yet it is both unworthy to speak . . . what I myself have heard, they opened the imperial [doors] to that man . . . and immediately enrolled him among the emperor’s friends . . . in the manner of athletes, he gathered together those who . . . he began with an office [greater?] than the others [of his cohort] began with, as if . . . The Galatians were the preface to his honors, the Bithynians came next . . . as if hearing some Orpheus’s lyre. . . .

§ 24.40  The Muses let Orpheus strike up Calliope’s song so that, by playing his lyre in the midst of wild beasts, he might calm them, as he says, with his music. A myth that took up this story about Orpheus will be fresh in its application to that man [Severus], when, having given [himself?] over to wild beasts . . . so the job he got from the emperor was to guide peoples and cities. And . . . For who hunted down the essence of justice more than he did and with his speed? Who, after rightly hunting it down, made it public [as speedily as he did]?

§ 24.50  Who was as quick to act, yet as slow to punish a person in legal trouble? Who was so above bribery, so unable to withhold benevolence and pity from a person experiencing misfortune; so powerfully eloquent, but even more powerful in deed and action? They know . . . . . . in Homer’s words, “so that someone in a future generation may speak well of you” [Od. 3.200]—he [Hector?] led off [the Trojans] . . . he ordered battles (?) and armed them against the Greeks . . . having put to flight. What made Plato wise? Solon . . . of Heracles among the Greeks, Socrates . . . to virtue . . .

§ 24.60  a leader and chief of my own craft . . . to spur on . . . he set forth great deeds for us, and he [made?] some of them [i.e., ancestral heroes?] objects to swear by . . . to encourage the city to do [great] deeds. I shall also tell you a Laconian story. A young Laconian’s luck in warfare was often not going well. His mother was grieved by his setbacks, for Laconian women are remarkable lovers of [eloquent] words or [daring] deeds. She came up with the following device. There was a bronze shield in the precinct of Athena, the dedication of a war hero from the very house from which the young man hailed.

§ 24.70  The mother secretly took the shield—for even the Laconian mother of Lycurgus had acted presumptuously to palliate the ill luck of her son—and offered it to her son, who was shying away from battle, but before doing so said, “Victory or death.” The son accepted his mother’s watchword along with the shield. From that day on, as they say, he was recognized as the most renowned of all the Spartans and was proclaimed a victor throughout the city.

§ 25.i  To Scylacius, The Proconsul Of Greece. To Scyl[acius] . . . after he [Himerius] became an Areopagite . . . the oratorical display (τῆς επιδείξεως).

§ 25.1  Come now, after [receiving] the Athenians’ myrtle crown, . . . [attend to] the business of the Muses, dance with the Muses, even if I have faced the contest late and with great effort. Consider Achilles, son of Thetis, who stirred up war against the demigods: poetry armed him for battle very late, for he would not tolerate appearing on the plain to fight before he got arms from Hephaestus. But once a shield glittering with gold came down from heaven—a shield that, by its wondrousness, betrayed the hand of Hephaestus

§ 25.10  because it alone, by virtue of the skill [of its maker], could imitate nature in the craftsmanship it displayed. Achilles no longer would let himself remain in his tent and [only] hear the sounds of battle. He took the suit of armor, which the god had fashioned from bronze, and entered into war on the plain. . . . tokens of the finest men. An athlete rushes into every contest when he sees an excellent judge present. A soldier into war when, fighting under a noble general, he goes . . . A sailor has no fear of the sea when a [qualified] steersman is guiding the boat . . .

§ 25.20  I [would] gladly dance to Pan’s pipe because he knows . . . Apelles did not think that he should display one of his paintings unless someone knowledgeable about painting was about to see his work. [I know that horsemen] gladly had Alexander [as a leader] because he knew the art of horsemanship best of the Macedonians. I hear a story about the Ethiopic Muse as follows. A spring gushes out from the spurs of her mountains. It is said that it broadens out from a small flow into a river. The Ethiopians call it the fount of Dionysus, and the nature of this stream of water is such that it fades away if someone who is uninitiated wants to drink from it

§ 25.30  then it swells up again if a Bacchic worshiper approaches to touch its waters. Whence for us, O . . . the sign a trumpet (?), which first was so prominent in the imperial palace that . . . later having let loose its bolts upon Ionia. When he set that region, too, in order . . . What, then, O eloquence, what, by the Muses, O friends, shall I do? What Mu[se?] . . . do you wish. He [Scylacius] desires, he desires to know and learn [that?] that trumpet . . . Zeus . . . Chiron’s lyre, because it alone of [the instruments belonging to] the Centaurs . . . to praise the race of Zeus . . . a helpmate to our words. The wings of poets

§ 25.40  are light, and therefore . . . neighboring on my words. Come, let us entrust the hymn to this [lyre of mine?], having tuned [it] . . . The ancients, having allotted nobility to the mind and to the family, some of them . . . that the conjunction of each occurs rarely in human beings . . . was lucky to have a portion of this good fortune . . . no time to seek on high, for there is one at hand who will give verbal testimony . . . It is said that two races flourished among the Greeks, one descended from Zeus through Aeacus, the other from Poseidon through Theseus; one Attic

§ 25.50  the other, the earlier one, of Aegina. Let anyone from these two races prevail in whatever field he wishes; he will win the victory, of course, because of this [race of his]. The distinguishing mark of [each] race is not some shoulder, as the Pelopidae say; rather, justice is the excellence of the Aeacidae, and benevolence shows who the elite Athenians are. . . . The occasion does his virtues’ actions an injustice if it does not allow the oration to list all of them, so one must mention as many of them as possible. You marvel at [his?] courage and justice and self-control (?) . . . What are his virtues’ deeds? Proof of his courage can be found in [the freeing of] the Pisidians who were formerly slaves, . . . the ingenious measures taken with regard to the Maeander River. Judgments of the justice of leaders . . .

§ 25.70  first to rule one’s own soul and to keep one’s hands off of all [money]101 . . . Let us speak, beginning with the Maeander . . . That river surpasses the Nile in nature as much as it falls short of it in magnitude. The soil that the Nile bestows upon the Egyptians is wondrous to tell of. But [the Maeander] has deprived sailors of the sea and given farmers furrows, in place of waves, to break through with their plows. You could see a plain where there previously was a sea, a fawn leaping about instead of dolphins; you will hear the sound of a herdsman’s pipe instead of a sailor shouting a command.

§ 25.80  For the nature of the place is as follows: The gulf, coming forth . . . separates the island [of Lade] from the city [of Miletus].102 This Maeander . . . had turned dry land into a gulf. When this man [Scylacius] saw nature being wronged . . . comparable in extent to the sea (?)—for inlets appeared everywhere, and the place made it possible to sail . . . this lake, which became spoiled over time by [an excess of ] water, [he] . . . by means of a canal dug on the plain . . . he gave a lake to the inhabitants . . . 10. They say that Cyrus the Persian got angry at the Gyndes River because it overwhelmed his Nisaean foal and covered over the animal with its waters

§ 25.90  he broke down the waters of this river, which was previously navigable, into a series of canals in order to make the Gyndes crossable by Assyrian women. You, however, were not in search of a lordly foal but had seen [the area] being wronged when you [diverted the river’s waters to] where it is natural for them to flow, and you gave back to the city its harbors and . . . it was done like this. And what great deed did you do in the case of the Pisidians? Well, robbers were devastating the Pisidians. [The area’s workers] could not safely traverse it . . . Plundering drove [them] away. But when this man appeared, with the law supporting him, the whole lot of robbers . . . he put out of business. Under your jurisdiction people stopped daring to disgrace justice through bribery . . .

§ 25.100  they went off, having learned not to inflict outrages on such a goddess [i.e., Justice]. O . . . of all, O dwelling place of all wisdom! These words for the time being . . . we . . . for you, like a . . . of eloquence . . . May [I] set up the same [krater of friendship?] for you a third time and often. But you . . . of [your] tenure of office . . . eloquence, in order that [I?], having learned the solemn my[steries] of Right (Themis) under your [administration of ] justice . . .

§ 26.i  To the Newly Arrived Ephesians, Mysians, and Fellow Citizens of the Speaker. Largely [aimed] at . . . who had become [Himerius’s] pupil and was attending his school against the wishes of his parents.

§ 26.1  When Apollo had set up his prophetic tripod and was foretelling the future to people who came from everywhere, all peoples and all cities visited the god, persuaded to go by his reputation . . . [Apollo], rejoicing, I think, in their embassies, [established] prophetic days for those who came [to his oracle. Let me also speak my “prophetic” words] again. For the people must, I think, taste of the sacred laurel and of the god and his spokesmen. . . . [Mys]ians and Ionians. For the one group, descended from Heracles,60 and the other group from Ion, from long ago . . . the settlement

§ 26.10  of Ionia, because of which the Ionians are almost considered to be Athenians, from where does tradition insist that they set out if not from Delphi and . . . ? So they sacrificed to the Attic Muses, [honoring their land?] with their eloquence, as was the custom at Olympia whenever they [held] a festal assembly [there] in honor of the [god] . . . [Whoever] boasts of [Hera]clids as ancestors, let him first tend to the sacrifices . . . but, instead of these sacrifices, the Muses . . .

§ 26.20  I propose at the outset [of a young man’s career] a fervor for accomplishment, inasmuch as it is customary that . . . [Achilles] was . . . in battle as a result of the teachings of Chiron . . . and Socrates equipped Alcibiades for life’s labors more than . . . did. . . . Perhaps most people will not find this [following] story unappealing . . . A young man asked for a first-rate trainer so that [he might win a victory at] the Pythian Games. But his city and his father led him off to another competition. Someone else [urged him?] to forget about [the latter competition] and to trust the [first-rate] trainer . . .

§ 26.30  the god granted [the young man] a victory and sent word to his father . . . [There are some descendants] of Neleus [here]—for my lecture hall is open to all . . . It will not be a swarm of bees, all clustered together, that will lead the emigration for me . . . [but, rather, the Muses?] . . . so as to still everything with their song, in order that . . . the whole of Attica, just as Orpheus’s lyre, introduced from across the sea, made the island of Lesbos, around which the billowy Aegean is parted, musical, although it had been unmusical before that—his lyre made it so musical that the wonders of that music were spread abroad to all parts of the earth.

§ 27.i  To the Students from His Fatherland [Prusias. This was delivered in the g[ymnasium?]

§ 27.1  . . . It is time, then, my boys, to tune up my lyre for my fellow citizens . . . The Muses have brought here, to see me speak, [a group of young men] who love eloquence so much that . . . but my words will make you alone, [my fatherland], their subject again; and on this occasion . . . these [young men] are dancing [with me] in honor of the Muses, but they have waited until this point in my . . .

§ 27.10  of this phalanx of students at the common hearth of guests (?) . . . And I hear this from Hesiod, too, who commands . . . wise and beautiful words. How can the Muses’ poems not . . . but also the gods have the same view about the fatherland. [Apollo] loves [Delos] . . . ; he stabilized the island, which tossed around [in] the sea’s [waves] before he appeared. Dionysus loves Thebes because he brought Semele’s birth pangs to an end there. Pan is proud of the Arcadians, Aphrodite is proud of Paphos, and the Dioscuri are proud of the city on the Eurotas River [i.e., Sparta]. Homer does not bring on most of the gods from heaven,

§ 27.20  but from mountains and cities, calling Hera “Argive,. Zeus “Dodonaean,” and Apollo “Lycian-born.” As for the god of my craft [Hermes], perhaps [eloquence?] . . . because it gratified the god by calling him . . . [I find that Homeric figures] had similar fond feelings toward their fatherland. [Odysseus], called (?) . . . , loves little I[thaca], despite the fact that he often hurls his ashen spear against Troy, and that he alone . . . Homer does [not] assign [Nestor] . . . to Mycenae, rich in gold, but to little Pylos . . . Anacreon adorns the city of the Teians with his songs, and he leads off the Erotes from there. Alcaeus adorns Lesbos [with his songs] and mentions Mytilene

§ 27.30  everywhere in them. Neither Simonides nor Bacchylides has neglected Iulis. Stesichorus not only freed Sicilian Himera from tyrants, but also adorned it with his words. My friends, what shall I do for the city that brought me forth? I do not ride on a chariot pulled by free-ranging horses and am not a poet; so, come now, let me fortify the city with human exemplars and with prose oratory. [After all], Lycurgus [fortified Sparta] when, with the help of the god [Apollo], he [gave] the Lacedaemonians their laws; [whereas Babylon and Nineveh?], which [once] flourished with their lavish [walls], are now known only by their paltry ruins. Time has [hardly] preserved [the walls of Troy] . . . for human memory.

§ 27.40  [Cadmus merely] erected . . . , [but the Theb]ans’ walls [were put in place] through Amphion’s lyre. Socrates himself publicly . . . always . . . and restored the city with rhetors, and Aesop made Phrygia known for fable alone. When someone faulted Plato for not serving the state in some military or civilian capacity, he said, “Not me the . . . of Chabrias . . . pupils (?) of Plato.”6. I also want to tell you something about Pythagoras. [Although he was from Samos], he spent his time not in Samos, but in Italy. It turned out that his fatherland Samos was [not the center] . . . of his philosophical teaching. So, since he thought it dreadful if the city

§ 27.50  where a person spent his earliest years was not adorned by his achievements . . . , [he made sure] that not only Samos, but the whole of Ionia [was regarded as] blessed because of that [philosophy of his].68

§ 28.1  To the Comes Athenaeus
What in the world inspired that great ringing sound of Homer. Wasn’t it the glory of men? . . .

§ 28.2  Pindar [Ol. 1] sang at Olympia of Hieron’s glory to the accompaniment of the lyre. Anacreon sang of Polycrates’ fortune, from which offerings were sent to the Samians’ goddess. And Alcaeus referred to Thales in his songs, when Lesbos an assembly. Now Sappho with her lyre, alone of women, loved and therefore dedicated all her poetry to Aphrodite and the Erotes. She would make and charms of a girl the reason for her songs . . .

§ 28.3  For even if these are blissful encomia, they would seem to be encomia of fortune. But I seek after virtue, and I want my praises of men to be based on virtue . . .

§ 28.4  There are two signs that a person has the virtue proper to ruling, the emperor’s judgments of him and his subjects’ love of him . . .

§ 28.5  When time enrolled this man [Athenaeus] in the ranks of [adult] men, he became an emulator, in every respect, of the man of Paeania [i.e., Demosthenes]. For just as the speaker’s platform and the courts claimed Demosthenes after [he was readied by] Isaeus,109 so too assemblies and eloquence made [Athenaeus] their own; he had control over everyone and was admired by everyone . . .

§ 28.6  It is appropriate to examine his nature as well as his actions. And one will find that both his deeds and the nature that has allowed those deeds to be successfully accomplished are equally celebrated. What are the marks of this nature? He has a sharp mind, lofty sentiments, he does the right thing without hesitation, and he has an affable disposition. If he needs to speak, he outdoes Pericles; if he needs to act, he imitates Alcibiades. Or we could say that he is “patriotic and too strong to yield to bribery,” which is how history has characterized Pericles. In acting he is much more fervent than the son of Cleinias [i.e., Alcibiades], and in every action of his he is no less harmonious than any lyre at all . . .

§ 28.7  Egyptian myths make clear that this is the kind of person Proteus was, as they turn him now into water, now into a tree or fire. Wanting thus to indicate that he had an adaptable nature, they turn this Proteus into diverse shapes. So [too] the Athenians have portioned out this Hermes logios through the whole city and greet him under various appellations in various sections [of Athens]111 . . .

§ 28.8  Before he produced his large [Athena] Parthenos, Phidias sculpted a small one on the Acropolis. Since this [small] work of art did not give scope to Phidias’s skill, Pericles urged him to put the effort into it that its size allowed and to save the full power of his skill for the large Parthenos112 . . .

§ 28.9  These are the first-fruits of friendship and eloquence for you. My words are prophetic, and they can even foresee [more] things of the kind [you have already enjoyed] and better things as well; they predict good fortune, rule over the Greeks, honors from the emperor, and words of praise.

§ 29.i  To the Roman Privatus, the Teacher of the Proconsul Ampelius’. Son.

§ 29.1  Desire for the Eleusinian fire even led Anacharsis the Scythian to the mysteries. This Anacharsis was wise and a lover of virtue. Although he was Scythian both in outer appearance and in what he had tasted of eloquence, he immediately became Attic in speech and gave up the Scythian language; that is how remarkably well his disposition overcame what had been customary for him and how effectively his love of virtue transcended ancestral habit. He also busied himself attending to the rest of the Athenians’ marvels—their handiwork, their language, their crafts, their learning, and their laws

§ 29.10  Nothing escaped this lover of learning, not a [single Athenian] street, holy precinct, or story. . . . gave, and he came to know about how Poseidon contended for it. . . . [He learned about the olive branch] that prevailed, and the wave that resounded on the crest [of the Acropolis], just as . . . causes . . . to make noise. [. . . Then Anacharsis went] to Solon—for Solon’s fame had reached him, the belief that [Solon] . . . [could] speak like someone divinely inspired. What gave him this [fame], I think, was. . . . When he was inside [Solon’s] house, Anacharsis . . . the story . . . [Solon] was bringing [Anacharsis], enamored [of his wisdom] up to that point, back to . Scythian mentality, and he summoned him . . . , [although?] previously [he] often [. . . him] to poetry

§ 29.20  so that Anacharsis too might. . . . and to tell some other stories, by which one might better. . . . Polycrates was a youth. This is the Polycrates who [subsequently] was not only king of Samos, but also of the whole Hellenic [Aegean] sea, by which the land [of Asia Minor] is bounded. Anyway, this Polycrates loved the music and songs of Rhodes and persuaded his father to support him in his love of music. His father sent for the lyric poet Anacreon and gave him to his son to teach him what he desired to learn. Under Anacreon the boy worked hard on the lyre to achieve kingly virtue, and he would fulfill the Homeric prayer

§ 29.30  for his father by becoming better [than everyone else] in all respects. And Homer marvels at Achilles’ teacher Phoenix for teaching the young man how to act and speak when Achilles was in Thessaly—for it was there, in company with Achilles, that Phoenix taught him virtue— and for being everything to him in loco parentis when Achilles was at Troy, for he was with him there, too. Thus this hero became so great in deeds and words that he was almost solely responsible for the making of Homer’s great poem [the Iliad].

§ 30.i  From the Oration He Gave When He Returned from Corinth

§ 30.1  Poetry [i.e., Homer] admires many aspects of Odysseus’s mentality, sometimes calling him “sprung from Zeus” and sometimes “resourceful” . . . , [but it especially] seems to admire how [. . .] his love of Ithaca and his desire never [to injure?] the memory of his subjects . . . as he thinks [of his fatherland], the Lotus-eaters’ fields seem barren to him, [their land?] seems parched and unpleasant . . . Of course [he] also [rejects] the Sirens’ song, having applied not wax, but yearning for one’s city to [his comrades’] ears. This excellent king . . . for a good ruler

§ 30.10  certainly must always be with his subjects, I think. If fortune should physically separate him from them, then he should at least keep his mind focused on them and not be separated from them by any infatuation. I know what Odysseus went through; the poem about him explains my own state of mind. When I was separated from you and was among the sons of the Ephyraeans [i.e., the Corinthians], their land . . . seemed depressing and gloomy to me, the waters of Pirene seemed briny, and the Crisaean [i.e., Corinthian] Gulf seemed agitated even in a gently heaving calm. I was utterly laid low, overwhelmed by my yearning for you. But why dwell on this? I have eloquence back, I have Athens back and . . . very sweet. This is the finest Attic honey. Let me not, though, completely object to being away, beginning

§ 30.20  . . . The hierophant seems sweeter to initiates after a long absence; so does the helmsman to the ship. To those who [want?] to dance in chorus . . . Sometimes even the sun, whom human beings regard as great, hides itself, so that we may look upon it again with eager eyes as it rises up from the ocean. Also, they say that, when Xenophon, the historian and skilled general, saw that he was prevailing as he moved through the [Persian] king’s territory and was now in possession of Byzantium, he wanted to make trial of the ranks to see how well disposed they were toward him. So he hid himself from them for a while and then suddenly

§ 30.30  reappeared, as if coming from somewhere else. The men embraced him when he returned, as if he had been away for a whole year, and addressed him with every [imaginable] title. Satiety, then, is an evil thing, and it causes injury to many a fine situation. We remedy it by limiting our exposure [to others].73

§ 31.i  From the Propemptic Discourse to Ampelius

§ 31.1  My boys, I was to be, I alone of the Greeks was to be the one who would find the trap that would prevent this man [Ampelius] from escaping. Yesterday he was threatening to flee in his carriage, but today we have seen him easily captured in my nets. . . .

§ 31.2  Since Simonides of Ceos, when sending Hieron off from Sicily to another land, took hold of the lyre, took hold of it and mixed tears with the sounds he made; and since Philammon, son of Apollo, a victory song and sang it to Jason of Thessaly in the midst of the heroes (this was after Jason obtained the golden fleece, which he brought as a prize to the Greeks upon lulling to sleep the sleepless serpent, and while he was fulfilling the mission of the sacred trireme [i.e., the Argo]) . . .115

§ 31.3  Won’t the pipe sound for those who have put the crown on their heads at Olympia and exalt their garlands with song? Then won’t Athenian eloquence also send off those who have run the race of glory with unfaltering resolve? . . .

§ 31.4  People have a variety of honors for those who excel. There is fat in Sparta, a cup in Thebes, land among the Argives, a painting in Sicyon, among the Medes, and a table among the Sybarites. But for the people of Attica, the crown of honor is an elegy, an oration, or a poem. These are ancient gifts. Nothing at all can overcome them, and they do not allow the passage of time to triumph over them. . . .

§ 31.5  It is said that even Alexander [the Great] gave the arts of old something to contend about. So when Lysippus and Apelles assigned themselves the task of representing his form, the latter gave expression to the king’s nature in paint, and the former in bronze. But since speech goes beyond the body and busies itself with the beauty and charms of the soul, let it be [regarded as] a painter who does not deceive. . . .

§ 31.6  . . . unless he has an officer in command at the bow who is skilled in the whole of seamanship. For when it comes to action, the inexperienced become disconcerted, whereas the well-trained confidently display the skill they have learned. . . .

§ 31.7  Keep a straight and even course from the gates to the turning-post. . . .

§ 31.8  Are you mild? You have this virtue in common [with Ampelius]. Do you hate evil? He has fought against evil with you. Did you avoid any contact with unjust gifts? This man also barred the gates of his soul against outrageous gold that is contemptuous of justice. For he understands that justice with meager resources is no reproach, whereas wealth with injustice is an enemy of virtue and of honor. . . .

§ 31.9  Praise begins where [praiseworthy] actions begin. But, after making that point, what should one say? What should one refrain from saying. For it is difficult to speak and ungrateful not to speak. Consider how, when people behold the beautiful features of statues, their eyes are held fast by the first thing that strikes them; then, as they subsequently focus on other features of the statue, they don’t know what to look at first. But wait a minute! Why do I need an ancient statue? Consider instead how, when people behold some new piece of workmanship, they are compelled by the beauty that embraces the whole thing to look at all the features of it together; then, as feature after feature wins over their desire, their viewing becomes fragmented by the wondrousness [of the individual parts]. So, too, all your achievements, which strike us everywhere, require some kind of narrative other than what we can provide for you; they are not content with the current conventions of eloquence. . . .

§ 31.10  Should one tell of your deeds or of your judicial decisions? Of your attention to detail or of your concern for the whole? Of your care for the poor or of your gentle chastening of the powerful? . . .

§ 31.11  But because of you even Sparta is luxuriating, having exchanged its dirty locks for a fine head of hair. Who could worthily tell of the endless number of buildings [you erected]? The Propylaea and the Parthenon were enough to satisfy Pericles’ ambition, a royal residence was enough for Darius, a golden vine was enough for Artaxerxes—a work of Theodorus of Samos, the useless object of a Mede luxuriating unnaturally. But you have urbanized everything between [Thermo]pylae and the farthest recess of the Peloponnesus. . . .

§ 31.12  There was a street in the very middle of the city [of Athens] called Collytus after its deme. It was honored by its use as an agora. Because of the street’s ancient glory, this man [i.e., Ampelius] went to the place, attracted there by what he had heard about it. When he saw it, he was amazed by the nature of the place, but what he felt more was shame on behalf of the city because of the poor condition the street was in. He would not allow the city to suffer embarrassment any longer over the matter. . . .120

§ 31.13  [Ampelius is] valued by emperors, cautious with tyrants, kind to the peoples [he comes in contact with].121 He excites respect from the wise, is most pleasant to the elderly, is loved by people of all conditions and ages. . . .

§ 31.14  Literature [Hom. Od. 4.382ff.] causes the Egyptian sophist Proteus to change into many forms; then it represents him, thus transforming himself, as overcome by those lying in wait for him. . . .

§ 31.15  Just as poetry [Hom. Il. 18.187–238] says that Achilles, having no arms, achieved victory as the result of a shout alone. . . .

§ 31.16  For often what is right in our midst escapes notice, while what is rarely seen always wins a spectator. But intricate craftsmanship decks out a work of art, welcoming the spectator who is passing by and the person shopping in the agora. . . .

§ 31.17  One [city] erects a colonnade, another delights in [constructing] pools. A bath makes one [city] feel pride, a domicile for the [archon] basileus that is named after that official does the same for another. Each [city] produces something, and they all positively pride themselves on your most excellent achievements. . . .

§ 31.18  You made believable the stories about how stone can be in love and lament and can pour forth tears, like a lover robbed of his beloved. So I fear that longing for you will cause suffering and that some people will themselves give rise to strange tales by taking on a different nature and becoming flowers or trees. . . .

§ 31.A1  Thinking it outrageous that sculpture and the arts associated with it were being so presumptuous toward the gods . . .

§ 32.i  From the Oration to the Prefect Anatolius

§ 32.1  When Achilles in Homer was weeping over the slaughter of his friend [Patroclus], Zeus, having sent him a sign from heaven through Hermes, ordered him to take up his weapons. Come, then, let us too, as if with approval from on high, turn misfortune into a festival, and let us dance in honor of [Apollo], the leader of the Muses. . . .

§ 32.2  After [the battle at] Cyzicus, Alcibiades returned to Athens with the victorious fleet. The whole city turned out to meet him, some applauding him, some crowning him, others weeping, and all of them escorted Alcibiades with words of praise. . . .

§ 32.3  The great prefect has become the prey of my rhetorical skill. . . .[4] Gently singing in the Hypodorian mode . . .

§ 32.5  We are not dealing with fables, with Attic fictions, as the Laconians jestingly call them at the city’s expense—Dionysus, the foreigner from Thebes, or Poseidon, who expressed his love for Athens with his wave— but with a real encounter [with Anatolius?]. But [the] education [Athens offers] and [its] laws, the root and metropolis of [its] blessings . . .129

§ 32.6  . . . that Heracles, son of Zeus, struggled through his labors and cleansed the human race of evil solely by means of his club, and that through myth this club is established as a subject of story . . .130

§ 32.7  He plants his soul with this plant himself, irrigating it with Attic waters. . . .

§ 32.8  Fine things are always rare, and they win immortal glory for those who contrive them. . . .

§ 32.9  The wise Anacharsis was the first to come to the Greeks from Scythia, and Pelops was the first to come from Lydia. Pelops, borne over the calm sea on immortal horses, received as a reward for his unprecedented feat [the right] to give his name to the land [i.e., the Peloponnesus]. Alexander was the first king to bathe his fame in the [Indian] Ocean, and Cyrus was the first . . . to ride his horse out of Babylon. . . .

§ 32.10  [My] praise [of you] is still off shore; [my] oration is at sea and spies no anchorage. . . .

§ 32.11  Music won fame for Timotheus, and wisdom brought repute to Pythagoras, but it was rhetoric that caused golden likenesses of Gorgias to be erected. . . .

§ 32.12  So it is perhaps best for me, after capturing the nature of this man [Anatolius] in a portrait of him, to imitate the example of Phidias. Phidias was not ignorant of how great Zeus was nor of the many ways in which he was great, for his soul was wiser than his hand was skillful. So since he wanted to capture the nature of Zeus in one statue, he mixed ivory with gold and, in one statue, formed an image of the Olympian god, huge as it was, for the Eleans, but also intended this Zeus for the rest of humanity as well. . . .

§ 32.13  I want to paint a picture for you with divine colors, for earthly colors quickly get washed away with the passage of time. If it pleases anyone to call the picture a glorious decree, I shall not disagree. . . .

§ 32.14  In my view, whenever this great body that we think of as the earth and as the center of that divine universe is corrupted by the disease of evil, then the spindle of Lachesis, having split heaven with its threads, leads forth from Zeus’s hearth a pure soul, who delivers to us the essence of divine apparitions. This soul brings justice, it brings courage from that hearth. Such a soul is simply absolute prudence. A countless band of cognate virtues follows a soul of this kind: sublimity, magnificence of judgment, independence of tongue, hands that cannot be bribed, a yearning for friendship, love of the truth, a steadfast mind. . . .

§ 32.15  For nature takes precedence over art. . . .

§ 32.16  Not using friendship as a basis for judging virtue, but assessing friendship on the basis of virtue. . . .

§ 33.i  From the Oration to Phoebus, Son of the Proconsul Alexander, . . . [entrusted] to him [i.e., Himerius] by his father after his schooling in Corinth.

§ 33.1  It is reasonable, I think, that those who have come from a lesser tongue [i.e., teacher] to the door of a sophist should also find stories about sophists. So here is one about the sophist Isocrates. His name and his orations, I think, are well-known to all, for it was because of him that sophists’ tongues scorned those of poets and embraced a law of their own. Now this Isocrates always opened up the doors of his royal school to lovers of eloquence by means of an oration . . . He desired thereby to provide young men with an introduction to his teachings

§ 33.10  especially anyone who was naturally suited to learning and of royal family . . . and another person was considered to be worthy of this favor. Isocrates’ works quite rightly indicate [who that person was]. [In the past] I have explained that he . . . , but I want to tell all of you, too, about this. The Cyprian tyrant Evagoras had a son [named Nicocles, who loved] the Lyceum, breathed forth Mt. Lycabettus itself, and in every other way was purely Attic. When his father saw [that he yearned for Attic eloquence] and, in his desire for it, developed an attachment to all things Attic, he deliberated about his son . . . so that [he might leave] . . . the Cyprians a worthy heir of his own glory. Now Isocrates held the Athenian chair [at that time], and his glory extended

§ 33.20  as far as the sun could see, because he had purified rhetoric, which was inflamed with strange diction as a result of its ancient aberrations. By means of his skill he had brought it onto the right path, a regular and orderly one . . . When Evagoras saw that everyone who desired to acquire the genuine art of rhetoric flocked to Isocrates from everywhere, [he decided] to send his son [to him]. Isocrates welcomed Nicocles. In addition to training him in the rest of learning, through his hortatory [remarks he] . . . , having taken the zealous young man as a partner in his own exertions—for when eloquence lacks love, it is incomplete, in my opinion, and without wings. When Nicocles took his fill from this font and became the kind of person in deed as [he was in word, he showed himself] to have become a true disciple [of his master’s] eloquence.

§ 34.i  To Arcadius, the Physician and Comes
[Himerius] addressed these words to Arcadius the [physician and comes] . . . Arcadius happened to have previously heard [Himerius’s] epithalamium; and wanting [to put him to the test [as a possible teacher for his son]?] . . . , to which [Himerius] addressed himself. . . . [Why] don’t we give [him] a taste of our own [lyre]? Why don’t we show him our own armed Muse, under whose aegis [we undertake] to initiate. . . . For [our Muse] just now gave an account of young people playing around the bedroom and outdoing the grace of poets with their charms. But now we are faced with another contest, another racecourse, and a Muses’ precinct open to holy initiates. For the unhallowed set their sights on a vulgar initiation . . . [and on initiators] who will show [them the unsanctified instead of?] the holy. But the soul brought up with every kind of learning

§ 34.10  [desires], like . . . , to seek out [the Muses’ fonts] so that it may draw from them to its fill. Now many fathers, [misled] by the number [of sophists], risk their dearest charges on a toss of the dice; and, as you might expect, they are very quickly punished for their ignorance through what befalls their children. [Peleus?] . . . , and likewise he was the one who procured for his son [Achilles a teacher who would have] such great authority over him, since he trusted no one but himself [in this matter]. . . . There were many Centaurs at the time of Chiron. Peleus, though, sent his son, not to any of the others, but to Chiron. Some Athenians at Athens initiated [their sons?] in . . . as well as in [the mysteries of ] Eleusis and Demeter, but the father

§ 34.20  . . . sent [his son?] to Athens to participate in these rites [here]. I want to tell a story that applies to the business at hand. They say that Solon, who was a lover of wisdom, traveled around the whole world, always hunting down some bit of wisdom. He came to Lydia, was also seen by the Ionians after being among the Lydians, and then went on to the land of the Egyptians—and what wisdom did he not learn among them, what excellent learning did he not bring to the Greeks from there. When he reached the Greeks, he found Aeschylus. The latter was still young; and, after Thespis and those who produced tragedy before Thespis, he was just then lifting [tragic] poetry way up off the ground

§ 34.30  so that he would be able to address the spectators from on high. Solon marveled at tragedy and often went, along with his son, to see Aeschylus’s plays, so that the two of them might learn the tragic stories from those plays. They also say that, when Democedes, that famous man of Croton and the first to bring Greek medicine to barbarians, went to hear Pythagoras after he had been to Susa and among the Medes, he marveled more at the bliss of Pythagoras’s wisdom than at the [Persian] king’s wealth.

§ 35.i  From a Protreptic Oration Addressed to the Students Who Came Over [to Him]
A protreptic oration addressed to the students who came over to him [i.e., Himerius] from other sophists and on the question of [stylistic] variety. . . .

§ 35.1  . . . [we see them now?] looking closely at my rites. So where were these young men initiated in [the mysteries of ] the Muses? Why [didn’t they from the first enter] the open [doors of my school]? Well, then, let us lead these initiates forth now; let us show them the mystic fire now. But before . . . I want to sing a preliminary song. Let this song be a sacred image that explains to them where the [true academic] home of young men is to be found . . . [In the past] it took some time for people in Athens to find the Lyceum and to begin their studies with Socrates

§ 35.10  They were busying themselves here and there [with study] . . . but [still] were not tasting true learning and philosophy. When by good fortune, like . . . , they looked upon Socrates’ philosophy, they threw away all other instruction and, like . . . , gave themselves over to his teachings. So just as when, on the stage, engineers position [cranes for a change in the action], one could observe how those men too, after beginning to associate with Socrates, [were changed] . . . in their lives, their learning, and quite simply in every way. He who had a high-spirited soul came to be called courageous by tempering his emotions with reason. He who led a luxurious life achieved self-control by moderating his nature

§ 35.20  By removing the mist from his soul he acquired a different kind of sophistication and . . . [learned] to honor his oath and to reverence the gods. For what person who had learned to swear by a dog or a plane tree would not subsequently have become much more piously cautious when swearing by the gods? And it was only after Alcibiades left the sophists that he filled the whole world with his trophies. It was at that time that [Plato] rightly learned to love . . . , and [he . . .. Philolaus, who appears as a genuine lover [of knowledge] in Socrates’ conversations [Pl. Phaedo 61d] . . . [not?] only the theaters, but also wrestling-schools and byways and drinking-parties . . . and it was not his habit to be very concerned with astronomical phenomena

§ 35.30  as was the case with other [philosophers] . . . [But just as] musicians, by giving expression to their skills on a whole range of instruments, entice every one of their listeners by [appealing to] the appropriate part of their souls, so too did [Plato] capture every ear that heard him . . . [by offering] a multifaceted learning. That the sophist Orpheus perhaps also had a similar talent [is hinted at] in the stories about him . . . [Myth] gathers for him an audience of every kind of creature, I think, to hear him play the lyre, convinced that his resourcefulness and versatility [would enchant] his listeners. And Homer, in his admiration of Odysseus, has made clear the many sides of Odysseus’s skillfulness

§ 35.40  by means of one utterance: “Tell me, O Muse, of a resourceful man” [Od. 1.1]. For lack of versatility creates a dryness in everything. [Wise men have even found a multiformity in] the laws of nature. For they divide time into a variety of seasons, and they divide . . . the motion of the heavens. They traditionally separate the soul into three parts, and this whole universe . . . of various elements. [Even] the governor of this whole universe in the heavens, who the leading wise men declare [is called] either Apollo or the Sun, [is multifaceted] . . . , he who delights the choruses of human beings as he appears to them in [various] forms. If you desire a musical lyre, [his tunes] sound forth (?) nearby. [If some] ailment [plagues you], the Paean Apollo is at hand. If the earthly medium is weary, the song sent [to him by Apollo] is not weary

§ 35.50  If [you want to see] the heavenly torch [i.e., the sun] . . . , he favors everyone with it. (But I suspect that the Cimmerians, a dejected people who do not have the sun and live in a [perpetual] night, have actually come to hate the sun they have never seen.)5. The meadow owes its sweetness to the fact that it teems with every kind of flower, and it is the necklace [graced by] a beauty gathered [from stones of various kinds] that is valued. Why do people marvel at the peacock more than at other birds? Isn’t this because peacocks are so variegated in their coloring. . . . And Sybaris is famous because of the variety of its cuisine. The sea, too, varies its nature and takes on many forms. It becomes wine-colored when it flattens out the waves into a calm surface, but it takes on a dark look when it is stirred up and provoked by the winds

§ 35.60  At one time it . . . with white foam, [at another time] it surges . . . Don’t we marvel at Alcinous’s royal palace and the Phaeacian gardens because [in their hospitality . . .]? Homer’s [poem] allows their land, through a variety of blessings, to have the fruits of all the seasons in one season and to enjoy the horn of Amaltheia. [Their land] has been honored . . . by those who perhaps [regard] those blessings, too, to be a metaphor for eloquence. For what gift more beautiful than eloquence could fortune have given the human race? [It is varied], as was Socrates’ voice, and so was Homer’s poetry, Pythagoras’s music, Herodotus’s history, and [Mt. Helicon’s sounds, for to Mt. Helicon] the Muses brought [all] kinds of instruments from everywhere and made the sound of all of them the valley’s lyre

§ 35.70  . . . [and] because of Socrates [men?] imitated the [Muses’?] rite. But, as [I] have said, it is time to light the fire.

§ 36.1  From the Propemptic Oration to Flavianus
You flee from me, my friend, as I labor on a better lyre tune to greet you after your stay in Libya [i.e., Africa]; you have suddenly pushed me aside and compelled me to sing a gloomy song. We did not yet see the spring, and now a Hellespontic storm strikes us and freezes our soul. We did not yet see the sun, and now it directs its rays elsewhere and threatens to bring night to the Greeks. We are gloomy before we smile, we pray to the gods of the wayside before offering sacrifice in honor of your arrival. . . .

§ 36.2  [I think?] that [my] eloquence is being tested, an eloquence less daring than the hand, hesitating to do what wax and iron desire to do. . . .

§ 36.3  For [your] fame was always crossing over the sea from Libya to the Greeks. . . .

§ 36.4  He depicted the breeze in a wanton and playful state, like the Lydian women whom painters depict, artfully making them appear intoxicated on their canvases. . . .

§ 36.5  So having briefly drawn our oration up on land from midcourse, we shall now allow it to flow down through Libya. . . .

§ 36.6  No one prevails [over Flavianus], because everything [in him] evokes admiration. . . .

§ 36.7  For my oration, having followed [its] desire, was almost diverted to another path as it moved along, as if by a forceful stream. So it must be brought back to Libya. . . .

§ 36.8  For they say that they were mad with a heaven-sent love for one another. . . .

§ 36.9  [Flavianus] has a nature that, from the very start [of any undertaking], points to his divine pedigree. What he says, both at home and in public, is filled with every kind of learning. By these traits of his Pericles was shown to be second in persuasiveness, Themistocles was shown to be rather dull in quickness of judgment, Plato in his nature, Solon in his law-giving. . . . And everyone knows that, whereas other individuals glory in a single quality each, this man glories in all of them. . . .

§ 36.10  “What shall I do? What decision shall I make? Shall I send [Flavianus] as an [urban] prefect to the Romans? But a people used to luxurious living are unacquainted with a serious governor.”142 . . .

§ 36.11  “Perhaps Carthage is annoyed with me, a city of Africa that once in its bravery was opposed to Rome, a city that feeds the whole of Italy with all the beautiful things it produces, a city that fails to be first only to the degree that it feels humbled by [the city of ] Rome. A great city, I know, is in peril, and the whole land [of Africa] is presided over by a bad government.” . . .

§ 36.12  Absolutely all Greeks between [Thermo]pylae and the Ionian Gulf in the west, from one side [of Greece] to the other, bear witness in public theaters to the goodwill they feel toward me. . . .

§ 36.13  “Let us send him [Flavianus] as the great holder of the reins of justice.” This was the emperor’s judgment, and the golden tablets of office immediately overtook his decision. . . .

§ 36.14  Having reached this point in my oration, “what shall I say first, what next, what last” [Hom. Od. 9.14]? For [Flavianus’s] actions are everywhere set in motion, they are all equal, and it is just as hard not to speak as to speak; the former is hindered by the number [of his deeds], the latter by their magnitude. So I must say not everything that it is possible to say, but everything that I am able to say. . . .

§ 36.15  Seeing him [i.e., Flavianus] conducting his convoy in a storm as though the sea were calm, and sporting on the waves as though in a harbor, some yearned for him as for a passionate lover, and others shuddered at him as at one who was unconquerable by any fear at all. . . .

§ 36.16  They provided a greater procession [for Flavianus] than the one for Hephaestus. The people sang out in reply to the waves, the applause from the city answered the surf, the shouting from Carthage overpowered the sound of the sea. . . .

§ 36.17  Let everyone, old and young, pardon me if I speak like an epic poet; for love knows how, yes it knows how to compose an oration subject only to its own laws. . . .

§ 36.18  He suffered from a disease that was greater than his fortune but not lesser than his wickedness. Let no one be amazed if, in his sickness, he acted thus against this man. From time immemorial, lesser men have been finding fault with excellent public officials. Cleon falsely accused Pericles, Nicias had to defend himself against Hyperbolus, Demades brought Demosthenes to trial, Cleophon indicted Alcibiades, a man of Seriphus reproached Themistocles. For those who envy the outstanding good fortune of others are forced to make up by their boldness for what they lack in merit. . . .

§ 36.19  Then he really showed what the difference is between virtue and a knavish character. . . .

§ 36.20  For favors that are done with ease, even if they are great ones, are naturally regarded as small ones because they require no inconvenience at all. . . .

§ 36.21  Alexander, desiring to raise up a city in Egypt after experiencing great ordeals, fulfilled his wish merely by laying the groundwork for it. . . .

§ 36.A1  What cities have not experienced the virtuous actions of Flavianus? . . . [A2] [He?] conducted a day-long procession through Carthage illuminated by fire and torches. . . . [A3] What unusual lyre tune can we ever come up with that, at one and the same time, bids a person adieu and welcomes his arrival?

§ 38.i  [To the Proconsul Cervonius]
This is the first talk (λαλιά) in Athens that he [Himerius] gave in the praetorium. It was addressed to the proconsul [of Greece], Cervonius, who set the theme for him and restored the city. [Himerius] upbraids, in a controlled manner, [his rival] sophists and those who had recently derided him.

§ 38.1  Behold now, O noble one [i.e., Cervonius], the Muses’ arts are reviving themselves together with this new city of yours. They were laboring to appear to the Greeks earlier—for nothing beautiful, I think, wishes to be hidden—but “‘twas on thine account,” as one of the lyric poets has already sung, that they saved the fruit of their labor for you, so that they could display it in its maturity and in due season.

§ 38.2  They say that, before the god Apollo appeared to humankind, this neighboring island of Delos was hidden in the deep, moving and tossing about under the sea. But after the god appeared and brought [the island] to light, it immediately came up from the depths to the surface, stood firm in the midst of the waves, and no longer swam about.

§ 38.3  Come, then, my boys, for this man also brings me to light. He is like the gods whom poets often transform into various human forms and shapes and bring into the midst of cities and peoples, gods “who come upon both the insolence and the good order of humankind” [Hom. Od. 17.487]. (For example, Homer thus put Athena on display, as Anacreon and Euripides did Dionysus.) In like manner, this man appears and commands me to pay no regard to the silence or to the confinement of eloquence in darkness, conditions that obtained before his arrival. He orders me to make eloquence public, to bring it out onto center stage for the Greeks; and eloquence is indeed about to strip for the Muses’ racecourse, as though obeying a divine command. Now I do not believe that I am a poet. But I am a friend of the divine chorus of poets. So let me tell you an Attic tale, like a prenomic song sung before the contest itself begins.

§ 38.4  There was a time when the Athenians more than anyone else welcomed the sophists, when the sophists and their activities were everything to them. Thus those who practiced this art came to Athens from everywhere and hastened to associate and spend their time there with the young. Various auditors were enthralled by various sophists, some by Gorgias of Leontini, others by Prodicus of Ceos. Some thought that they should study under Hippias of Elis, since he advertised a resourceful and multiform kind of wisdom.

§ 38.5  I hear that Socrates was also alive at that time, a man of true wisdom and an extraordinary lover of eloquence—not the eloquence made for the general populace and the masses, but the kind that, when it enters into the delicate souls of the young, causes them to bear fully formed fruit in season. When a few young men happened upon Socrates as he was conversing and marveled at how accomplished he was in eloquence and learning, they would decide that they should no longer go to the sophists but should stay with Socrates himself and philosophize and converse with him.

§ 38.6  When this was revealed to the sophists, well, I cannot say whether or not they got angry at him, for I do not like bringing accusations against these very wise men now. But certainly people like Callicles and Thrasymachus, men connected with Gorgias, often set to work at slandering and making fun of Socrates. Some of them joked about his face, saying that he was snub-nosed and had an unpleasant appearance. These sorry individuals did not know that Socrates used to pray to the gods that he would have an internal beauty! Other sophists latched onto some other outrageous slander against him, trying in this way to turn him away from associating with the young.

§ 38.7  Their device almost worked. What prevented it from doing so was that one of Socrates’ friends happened to go to Delphi to the god [Apollo], and he asked him who was wise among those currently alive. The god, from his very tripod, gave Socrates [himself ] this designation in a truthful and loud voice. Being a prophet and brother of the Muses, the god knew precisely, I think, who had true wisdom and who had a spurious and fraudulent wisdom. His pronouncement reached the ears of all Greeks, and Socrates was encouraged and began to make his eloquence public. It was all over for Callicles. This, then, is the Attic tale I have for you, my boys.

§ 38.8  And what, eloquence, will you do for this noble man [Cervonius]. He has brought you, hidden and invisible to the Greeks, out into the light and into their midst. It is not right for you to be silent; but if you speak, you will inevitably be put to shame if you do not maintain his reputation. So I shall now want to sing him a paean or short song that I have composed, as if to some god. Then on some other occasion, if God grants it, I shall pay the debt of gratitude owed to him with full rites.

§ 38.9  O eye of Justice and of Right (Themis)! O priest of the Muses and of Hermes! O most beautiful creature of Athena herself, to whom you beautifully make a return for your trophies! Neither Pindar himself nor that Siciliote [Theron] to whom the Boeotian lyric poet gave the title “upholder of the city” [Ol. 2.7] would resent the fact that we call you by that same title. Because of you, this city is young again and awakened after being much in decline. After shedding tears and lamenting, it begins to feast and dance, as if the earth had just freed it to do so. The Naiad nymphs, as a daring poet would say, have left their groves and play on Attic streets. Everything shines and has bloomed as in a vernal meadow. Flocks of youths who before were recklessly leaping about are now quietly grazing, are now quietly housed in their pens, as if Orpheus’s or Amphion’s lyre had been plucked.

§ 38.10  Now every Siren is moved on your account, every barbitos and lyra sounds , peoples and cities sing of your deeds. Now the sacred vessel departs for Delos, carrying an Attic chorus to the god [Apollo], the kind they say Theseus established for him after leaving Crete. Let that chorus sing a hymn asking that this man govern Greeks for a very long time. This is what I sing to you for now, you person dear to the gods. And if the Delian god [Apollo] grants me the favor, I shall pay my debt to you in full in the future.

§ 39.i  [The Discourse in Thessalonica]
[Himerius] delivered this [discourse] in Thessalonica when, upon the summons of the emperor Julian, he was hastening to the East. He was officially invited by the city and [two] dignitaries, the vicar [of the diocese of Macedonia] and former sophist Musonius, and the consularis [of the province of Macedonia] Calliopius. He addressed the end of the oration to the Musonius who had been proconsul of Greece [Achaia] and was present on the occasion.

§ 39.1  Once, when Simonides was hastening to Pisa to honor Zeus with a hymn, the Eleans got hold of his lyre, and the populace publicly ordered him to sing of Zeus’s city before singing of Zeus himself. So what, friends, tell me, what do you order me to do? Do you want me to interrupt my hurried course for a short while and give you a taste of my Attic pipe? This is certainly what some of you are praying for, and they are true neighbors of Pieria.

§ 39.2  Well, then, I gladly submit to your command, and I regard your pressuring me to be to my advantage; for nothing that the beloved does is a burden or troublesome to his lover. When Anacreon was on his way to Polycrates’ court, he was glad to address the great Xanthippus [at Athens first], and Pindar was pleased to salute Hieron before addressing Zeus. Alcman, who joined the Dorian lyre with Lydian song, happened to be carrying his songs through Sparta on his way to the shrine of Zeus Lycaeus; but he did not pass by Sparta before greeting both the city itself and the Dioscuri.

§ 39.3  I also hear a story about Ismenias the piper, who was summoned from Thebes by Alexander [the Great] to make the latter’s victory celebration resound with song after a slaughter of the Persians. Ismenias learned in Phocis that the Delphians were celebrating the Pythian games with sacrifices. When a Delphian embassy promptly approached him and asked him not to pass by their festivities in silence, he welcomed the embassy and honored the city with song. This was a favorable sign for the king [Alexander] since [Ismenias’s song] was a victory prize for Apollo.

§ 39.4  We, then, would not sail past a city that is brimming with so much virtue; for silence is not Attic, nor is it worthy of the talkative city [of Athens]. Xerxes, admiring the foliage of a plane tree in Lydia, bedecked it with gold. He did not know how to speak; he was as poor in eloquence as he was rich in gold. But from us it is only reasonable that your city demand the gifts that our rulers have at their disposal.

§ 39.5  Such gifts suit this city of yours because of all its virtuous behavior and not least of all because of the zeal that it displays for wisdom, even though it is surrounded by people who almost all speak foreign languages. To the north the Paeonians press upon it. The next neighbors of the city are the Illyrians, who in turn pass that role on to the Moesians. Thrace borders so closely on this city of yours that it touches its suburbs. Your city, in isolation, maintains the Greek language like a golden center point and keeps it free of contamination by any neighboring tongue. Thus I censure and find fault with the Thracian tale that robs this city of Orpheus, Calliope, and awards him to the mountains of Thrace. Because there are no human beings there to listen to him, the tale creates an assembly of wild animals for him.

§ 39.6  So everything about this city is Greek—its language, its walls, its dress. It begins high in the mountains, lifting the ridge above it, like a peak, high up into the middle of the heavens. It then comes down to the shore, where it divides itself into countless cities, scattered round about, but it peoples the central area with one city. It rides at anchor on the very waves, as if annoyed because the adjacent sea does not allow it to spread out as much as it wishes.

§ 39.7  Your city, of such great size, is adorned on all sides: here there are places of assembly (ajgorai)v ,48 nearby there are baths, colonnades are found throughout the city, and religious shrines everywhere. One would be unable to decide what to marvel at first. Just as those who observe the vernal sky have to look at every single part of it because of the beauty of the sight, and whatever first overpowers an observer holds his attention, so too this city astonishes people both as a whole and in all its individual parts.

§ 39.8  But I have not yet proclaimed the greatest feature of the city’s Greek fortune. An Attic Muse shepherds the city. The sophist’s chair has embellished the vicar’s chair; rhetorical skill has given more grace to the good luck [of office] than it has got from it. For a helmet is more glorious when it protects a glorious head, a shield when it covers an Ajax’s chest, a tribunal when a Cyrus gives judgment from it, a lyre if a Pindar or an Anacreon plucks its strings.

§ 39.9  Look all around you, by the gods, and see how the Greeks, who once conquered everyone with their weapons, now do so with the virtues of their men in office. The advantage of having every city guided by the Muses’ rudders for the whole world. But since this was impossible, he has taken the single most beautiful possession he has [i.e., Musonius] and has given it as a gift to this victorious city. In so doing he has aroused my rhetorical skills more than they say that the olive crown aroused the Olympic victor Cylon. That man wanted to be a tyrant but fell short of his desire; but you, [Musonius], have conquered by surrendering yourself to an emperor, and even before having armed yourself.

§ 39.10  In representing the life of Achilles, Homer has him take up the lyre on one occasion and the spear on another; and you too, [sir], have intermingled your deeds and actions with your words. This is how Pericles led the people; this is how Themistocles governed. The platform held the orator, and the arena of war held the general. Oratory stood before the assembly, and trophies stood in the face of the enemy.

§ 39.11  I understand that just such a mix of talents characterized Alcibiades. When he was full of the Lyceum and of what he had learned in the Lyceum, the image he projected was that of a very skilled speaker. He dazzled everyone into submission to himself. After leaving the Lyceum, he gave himself to the vicissitudes and activities of a public life. When he gave as much effort to arms as he had given to his studies, he became a military victor. The Hellespont saw his name inscribed on two trophies. The great king [of Persia], the Macedonians, Thrace, and all humankind saw him get the better of everyone—now militarily, now verbally. That is why he was the only general deemed worthy of a Pythian proclamation.

§ 39.12  But since Alcibiades, eloquence, Athens, the Lyceum, an Attic sophist [i.e., the vicar Musonius], and auditoria filled with his presence have been mentioned, come let us also honor Nicias by our words—Nicias, who was Alcibiades’ colleague, and whom we revere as a good general over the whole course of his life. Rather, if it is agreeable to all of you, I will give you a full account of him. When the city of the Athenians was at its height, with the Lacedaemonians lying dead at Pylos and the [Athenian] people directing everything, Alcibiades and Nicias shared the generalship. They were rivals of one another, when doing so was to the benefit of the city.

§ 39.13  With such a pair in control of everything, the city was filled with true happiness. The council deliberated under the guidance of the laws, there was prosperity in the marketplace, sacred processions were held and divine rites celebrated, vice was nowhere in sight, the rule of law and the rudder of reason were everywhere. Alcibiades spoke, and Nicias drafted laws. The one was general in the city, the other sailed around the Peloponnesus. Alcibiades was quick to understand [what the situation demanded], and Nicias was skilled at converting those views into a finished piece of legislation. They jointly held the generalship and jointly manned the rudders—just as when waters that emerge from a single source split into two rivers in the course of their flow but are connected with one another by the beauty of their nature.

§ 39.14  Well, I would love to remain among you for a year and keep composing speeches. For whether one is seeking the islands of the blessed or an Ethiopian meadow of boundless fertility or the horn of Amaltheia, your city would satisfy everyone’s desire. And so I forgive and pardon Odysseus for having composed a very long speech at Alcinous’s palace; by prolonging his stay there he was delighting in his love of the place. Yet how much more worthy of respect than Homer’s Alcinous is your own—I mean the man with the same name [as your vicar].

§ 39.15  Despite the remarkable qualities of this city, who will not [also] praise a man who has honestly guided the rudders of the Greeks in the company of a sweet Siren; for a persuasiveness always sits upon his lips. Who is warmer in friendship? Who is as well-suited for whatever fortune may bring? Who is as great when fortune comes with favorable winds, but no less stately if the breeze dies down?

§ 39.16  Wait! The sound of chariots seems to strike me; “the din of swiftfooted horses strikes my ears” [Hom. Il. 10.535]. I seem to hear the emperor saying, “Think of your great-hearted return [to Constantinople], glorious Odysseus.” So accept this cup of friendship for now, however little it contains. If the gods ever permit me to return, I shall address the city again after seeing the emperor, as I have now done before seeing him.

§ 40.i  The Discourse (Διάλεξις) in Philippi
[Himerius] delivered this [discourse] extempore in Philippi when, having been summoned by the emperor Julian, he went off to the court. The first part of the speech [is aimed] at the city, the last part at [Himerius’s] pupil Severus, who arranged for the oratorical display (ἐπιδείξεως) to be given.

§ 40.1  Sometimes the swan sings by the ocean and, with its melody, outdoes the loudly resounding sea. Sometimes it sings by the eddies of the Cayster River and the waters of the Hermus or the Hyllus. On occasion it finds a small spring of pure and translucent water; it is delighted by the spring and, after washing its wing, honors the waters with song.

§ 40.2  Will a sophist, then, appear to be less vocal than a swan? Will he rush past an ancient city in silence. Philippi, you know, was a city [of the] ancient [world] even before Philip. Its population was Attic. It was the work of Callistratus, who gave the city the language it deserved. Rather, let me say that, given that there are two blessings universally held in high regard, wisdom and good fortune, your city has obtained one of these from each of your two founders; through the Athenians it got wisdom, and through Philip it took pride in its power and good fortune.

§ 40.3  Come, then, let me set up a krater here for Zeus, god of friendship. Let me pay back the altar of Zeus, god of hospitality, with a gift of eloquence. For this is an ancient law, that one should pay back those who have initiated a friendship from the resources one has. The husbandman honors others with sheaves of grain, the grape-presser with bunches of grapes, the hunter with his bag; all honor others with all the things from which they make a living. The guest swallow comes with her melody, the cicada with his song, the nightingale with her Attic odes, no doubt to remind those who speak Attic Greek of Athens. She does not judge locations in which to exercise her voice on the basis of their size; she is happy with any grove that can resound with her songs.

§ 40.4  Of course, even Homer knew this law to which I am referring. Thus, wishing to inscribe this law on everyone, he imposes wandering on no one but an orator, so that [that orator], Odysseus, may, by speaking, make the ordinance unshakable. So Odysseus spoke on Ogygia and filled the great island with his eloquence. Again, he spoke among the Phaeacians and made Alcinous’s city great by means of his oratory.

§ 40.5  When Gorgias of Leontini—for, as it advances, my oration has discovered that a sophist and not a poet was the originator of the law we are considering— when Gorgias went on an embassy from Sicily to Athens, he amazed the city with his oratory. He had to proceed from Athens through Boeotia, but he did not pass by Plataea before addressing that ancient city.

§ 40.6  Now since our rule has been ratified by the customary practice of a sophist and the utterance of a poet, come let us also get the approval of philosophy. There was a man named Hermias, of the stock of Atarneus. Atarneus is a city of the Mysians, not large but a splendid place to see, and named after a Mysian king. Now Hermias was a pupil of the Stagirite [i.e., Aristotle], one of those most closely attached to him. With all the virtue Hermias possessed, he affected his mentor deeply, causing Aristotle to love him from the bottom of his heart. Aristotle gave many indications, as one can hear told, of his love of Hermias. He trained him thoroughly in eloquence and taught him virtue, and Hermias was the only one of Aristotle’s pupils whose death he honored with an elegiac poem. But let me tell you now about the strongest evidence Aristotle gave of his devotion to Hermias.

§ 40.7  The great philosopher happened to be summoned to Asia by Alexander [the Great] to be both herald and observer of his Persian victories. When in the course of his journey he reached Atarneus and saw that the whole of that small city was thirsting for virtue and wisdom, he did not pass by it in silence but saluted the city and Hermias with a short composition.

§ 40.8  This, O friends, is my thank-offering for your hospitality. If the gods permit it, I shall set up fuller kraters for the city on another occasion.

§ 41.i  [The Oration in Constantinople]
[Himerius] went to give a display of his eloquence in Constantinople when he was traveling to the emperor Julian’s court, to which he had been summoned. He was initiated in the Mithraic mysteries before giving his oratorical display. He then delivered his oration to the city and to the emperor who had established the initiatory rite [in Constantinople].63

§ 41.1  I have cleansed my soul through Mithra the Sun, and through the gods I have spent time with an emperor [Julian] who is a friend of the gods. So let me now light not a torch, but an oration for the emperor and the city. Attic law commands initiates to carry light and stalks of grain to Eleusis as signs of a civilized life. But for our [fellow Mithraic] initiates let me propose an oration as a thank-offering, since Apollo and the Sun, I think, are one and the same, and words are children of Apollo. Having begun, then, with the gods, let us now address the city.

§ 41.2  Again there are Attic Muses [i.e., Himerius] in your midst; again Athens addresses its own progeny. It seems to me that the whole of learning is a friend of this city. That is why, when Constantinople was about to bring forth a man divinely fated to be emperor [i.e., Julian], the city left it to the Muses to be the midwives of his character, so that he might surpass [all] those who had ever prided themselves on the good fortune [of the imperial throne]—surpass them, I mean, in virtue rather than in [mere] good fortune. My own learning was destined, as if by some better fate from on high, to belong to this city. Let me tell you what the greatest proof of that is. When this learning of mine, after enduring Attic contests and winning the great garlands of the virgin goddess [Athena], had to leave Attica and sow the rest of the earth with the seeds of learning it got there, fate did not take it to the Rhine in the West, nor did it carry it to the fabulous waters of Ocean. No, fate brought it, while still in its prime and sprouting its first beard, to you, so that it might plait together a hymn for the city from still tender buds. But when its hair turned gray, when it got gray locks, it praised the emperor on his own, so that this city might again be a prelude to the hymns of praise to be offered to him. Let us now, then, first address the city, beginning with what it is proud of and rejoices in.

§ 41.3  O city that lit the torch of freedom for all humankind! O city that conceived and brought forth a fortunate infant! O city that brought into the light a child who was even better than one whom your mother-city itself brought forth! For the first offspring of your mother-city was Cecrops. He was not yet a genuine human being, since, from the waist down, he had his mother’s [serpentine] coils, and he did not yet speak Attic Greek. But your offspring, of course, has an unmixed nature. In him there is a conjunction of the highest good fortune and the highest virtue; both shaped his birth, I think, and they were present, not in half measure, but in full.

§ 41.4  All lyres have made the island of Delos, which had the honor of being the place of Apollo’s divine birth, the subject of poem and song, even though it is a small island, almost hidden by the waves. But you are not what people call an island or an [ordinary] city; you are almost a complete continent that has given rise to a city, and what poet or prosewriter would not hymn you with good reason? I marvel and am amazed at all your other features, too. For you are the beginning of Europe and also its end, and you have been allotted the same role in Asia. With you the billowy [Euxine (Black)] Sea comes to a halt, and the Aegean issues forth from you.

§ 41.5  The great Bosporus is your neighbor—straits that all poets and all orators vie with one another in praising, straits that calmed the sea for Zeus’s beloved [Io] and, in my opinion, prophesied that they would nurse in their bosom an emperor sprung from Zeus. For it is said that it was by Zeus’s decision that Inachus’s daughter Io was transformed from a maiden into a cow and swam these waters, giving the straits their name as an indication of what her fortune had been on that occasion.

§ 41.6  Who could find great or beautiful enough words with which to hymn your great size or beauty? This city begins to be bathed by the waters that are almost halfway across the straits. It extended itself quite a distance to the west, making a great city out of the mainland that welcomed it and leaving not even its crannies vacant nor the that circumscribes whole peninsula. Once spread out over the whole shoreline and all the plains, it then actually turned the sea itself into part of the mainland and forced it to become part of the city; it has turned what by its nature is rolling and constantly on the move [i.e., the sea] into something immobile.

§ 41.7  Now when Homer wanted to make Sparta’s great size clear in his poetry by giving it an appropriate epithet, he call it κητωέσσαν, meaning “of considerable magnitude.” If this really is the right word to use to describe a city’s size, then I should apply it to you, [Constantinople], not Homer to Sparta, although this city, in my view, does not have size . For just as in a necklace gold the gems, so too Constantinople combines the flower of beauty with its great size. Hence the city’s gold causes people to look now here, now there. The wonders of its craftsmanship attract those who behold them. Its senate- house shines forth, its baths are enchanting, its theaters also win people’s favor. Everything here is, quite simply, Aphrodite’s kestos!

§ 41.8  I have not yet mentioned the greatest and most beautiful ornament of the city, an ornament that shines on the city’s splendor more brightly than any gold and makes its beauty more colorful than any artificial dye. I am referring to the divine emperor. The city that brought him forth is every day the recipient of countless favors from him, and countless ornaments and crowns from him wreath its head. He does not favor it merely with great and beautiful buildings. He has also washed away by his virtue the darkness that was preventing us from lifting our hands up to the Sun and has thereby given us the gift of raising us up to heaven as if from some Tartarus or lightless life. He has raised up temples to the gods, has established religious rites from abroad in the city, and has made sacred the mysteries of the heavenly gods introduced into the city. He did not heal everything gradually, as those with human skills heal the sick, but all at once with benefits of [spiritual] health that took immediate effect. After all, one would have expected someone who links his nature with the Sun both to give light and to reveal a better life.

§ 41.9  He also builds up the reputation of the city by his daily actions and deeds, just as the deeds of Romulus exalt Romulus’s city, and the famous trials of virtue endured by Heracles exalt Heracles’ city. If anyone should ask the Athenians why they are so much more high-spirited than other people, they begin with Theseus and trace their long line of successes from him. Danaus is an ornament to the Argives, just as Lycurgus is to the Spartiates. Lycurgus was the beginning of Sparta, for before his time people almost refused to live there. The Amphipolitans, reassigning their city from Hagnon to Brasidas, pride themselves more on the virtue of that Laconian [i.e., Brasidas] than on the marvelous features of their land that nature has given them. What better ornament is there for this city than such a great emperor, who is so proud of his native land?

§ 41.10  In building up [a verbal picture of ] an Assyrian city, the Carian Muse—I mean Herodotus’s Muse [Hdt. 1.178–80], almost superior to poetry—divides and walls the city by means of a barbarian river [i.e., the Euphrates]. But your wall is a great emperor and the sea, the emperor making a wall of arms for the city and the sea protecting it with its waves.

§ 41.11  The population of a city of such size had to be proportionately large. For if the stars are an adornment to the heavens, a city’s glory is its inhabitants. Those who call themselves a race sprung from their native land trace their cities’ origins back to a mythical founder. They invent stories that go against the laws of nature because they lack any connection with higher beings. This was your condition. But a family that derived from the gods mated with unstable humanity and by mating produced a family of heroes. This stock commingled with you and truly made this city a reflection of some heavenly world.

§ 41.12  Consequently—and given that the whole city is so attentive to it—philosophy dwells among you, both foreign-born and native philosophy. Like a good bee from undefiled meadows making honey, it feeds on the whole city. Now it buzzes in the theaters and through its personal efforts unites you to the Academy and to Ariston’s son [Plato]; then it fills the souls of the young with the whole of virtue, just as they say that Pythagoras did when he was fortifying Italy against the Lyceum.

§ 41.13  When poets were building Athena’s ship the Argo, the first vessel and the one that opened up your shores, they favored it, I think, with a divine cargo; for this vessel, which alone was the work of Athena, had to be rowed by heroes. Like the Argo, you too, [Constantinople], have a divine crew—not the crew of a single trireme, but that of a whole city. The nature of this cargo of yours is such that from beginning to end it is made pure by the gods.

§ 41.14  And where in the chorus shall we place [i.e., the prefect] of this city? Clearly in first place. Think, for comparison, of a circular shield: whatever point you touch along the edge that runs around it is regarded as the first. Thus it is clearly quite essential that he who will sit at the rudders of the city be a master helmsman. If a city is small, then a man who is a counterfeit governor and uninitiated in the art of governing is only a small danger; for any damage he does, minimized by the city’s fortune, is hidden from general view. But I think that a city of high rank needs a person of high rank to steer such a great sea of a city. Let the city’s helmsman be gentle (h[pioˇ), to use Homer’s word, so that he may have this paternal designation that comes to him. Let him be mild in his words but quick in his actions so that he will not give offense by shouting but will be seen in action before people even expect any action to be taken. Let him build up the city, but only if its inhabitants rejoice in his projects and are not distressed by their cost; for if the city rejoices in his projects, it will not have the feeling that any money is being spent. Let him deepen the harbors and surround them with porticoes, which are a welcome relief for sailors from their toils at sea. Let him build temples to the gods; may he propitiate the higher powers and make them friendly to the city. Let him extend the portico whose royal character is confirmed, I think, by its beauty and size. Let him shun unjust gain because of an inclination to be just, not out of fear of the laws; for the latter motivation is a mark of cowardice, whereas the former is a mark of temperance.

§ 41.15  It is reasonable to expect that he will be properly motivated if he is of noble birth, has been raised with a proper education and exposure to good literature, has plenty of royal standards to guide him, has so great an emperor as a witness to virtue, and receives the honor of office as a reward for his justice and not for a payment of gold. Homer has represented the man of Pylos [i.e., Nestor] as having a sweeter voice than the other speakers at Troy. But this [urban prefect of ours], who holds such a great office, governs such a great city, and keeps the whole senate subject to his scepter, has a voice sweeter than honey, whomever he talks to. Thus he clearly outdoes Nestor, because, however much he is outdone by Nestor in age, he is superior to him in the charm of his eloquence.

§ 41.16  Well, I have yielded to my love of the city, and I see that my words are leaping without restraint around their beloved. I fear that, if they stay here longer, they may suddenly end up suffering from forgetfulness, as if among some Lotus-eaters. So let me, let me now skillfully corral them in and set my eyes on the emperor. And let my love [of the city] be stirred up once again, [on another occasion], by all the arrows it wants to be the target of.

§ 42.1  A Discourse (Διάλεξις) Addressed to the Prefect Salutius
Who after Themistocles is wise, and who after Miltiades is earnest, and who after Aristides can resist a temptation of gain? Who outdoes Pericles in eloquence, who is more fervent in action than Alcibiades? Who is as fortunate in generalship as Nicias? Who has the mark of Phocion, an excellent judgment? Who is as untouched by accusers as was Cephalus— something he always boasted about? Who, with the same disposition as the Laconian, is so good to his friends? . . .

§ 42.2  If I had the excess of gold that everyone says Croesus the Lydian, Midas the Phrygian, and Cinyras the Cyprian had . . .

§ 42.3  They say that such was the friendship of Heracles and Theseus,165 who breathed one breath on behalf of the whole of humanity and, by their virtue, cleansed the whole earth and sea . . .

§ 42.4  King Agesilaus, too, who was lucky to have Antandrus as a secretary and adviser, was once so exalted among the Ionians that Agesilaus himself seemed to be [their] king, while all of the Ionians loved him, for they knew that in times of need he would speak out against [their enemies]. Likewise, we see the great sun move in conjunction with the change of seasons so that, by its light, it may sustain each season as the latter peaks in line with time’s movements; yet the sun still remains unmoved in its nature. Likewise again, I think, they say that Themistocles yielded command of the fleet to Eurybiades yet seemed actually to remain its commander throughout.

§ 43.1  To Flavianus the Proconsul
Homer, wanting to honor virtue through the person of Odysseus, composed a whole poem [about him]. . . .

§ 43.2  Peleus, already old and no longer able to wield the ashen spear, sent Achilles to Troy to fight in the army. . . .

§ 43.3  But you, while wielding the inspired ashen spear in your vigorous right hand, were yourself seen to be father and teacher of the Attic race.. . .

§ 43.4  Now Pindar’s lyre, which sang its strains to Hieron, the tyrant of Sicily, ensures that that tyrant will always be a subject of song among human beings; and the tongue, which outdoes all the Muses and all trumpets and has hymned you with words, will never allow forgetfulness to challenge your deeds over the course of time. . . .

§ 43.5  See how Attic eloquence distinguishes you with a golden wild-olive branch, like some Olympic victor such as Glaucus or Timasarchus or [like] the gloriously triumphant one himself; see how it binds your brows with chaplets and wreaths from the Lyceum and the Academy. . . .

§ 43.6  So when the Egyptians see that Apis is born, they form a judgment about their future prosperity from the signs on the bull. . . .

§ 43.7  Iolaus, helping Heracles with his tasks as the latter struggled through his labors, was fitting for him, and so was Patroclus for [Achilles], son of Peleus.

§ 44.i  On the Birthday of His Students A talk (λαλιά) on the birthday of his students, which [Himerius] presented when about to depart for his fatherland [Prusias].

§ 44.1  Although Homer’s Odysseus was longing for his fatherland and the memory of his kin, Alcinous the game-master induced him to display his prowess in return for the hospitality shown to him. The festivities were a public event; the sport was being dedicated to the gods; and in the midst of everything were all the Phaeacians, clad in white. Now Odysseus was present only in body, because yearning for the land that had reared him was taking hold of his mind. Still, he did not shrink from the competition, preparing himself to perform while the king [Alcinous] was watching him. The explanation of his frame of mind is as follows: although he loved his alone, the inducement he found for [prolonging further] his absence [from his fatherland] when he was thus summoned to action [among the Phaeacians] was that he would be leaving a memorial of himself behind.

§ 44.2  Now, my friends, isn’t my situation the same as that of Odysseus. Couldn’t our predicaments be similarly represented? Come, then, let me, with one and the same effort, both celebrate a birthday and make my separation [from home] less painful, as I emulate in word that man of Ithaca, who long ago competed in deed. A display of the voice’s music is similar, I think, to a demonstration of the body’s strength.

§ 44.3  O most beautiful and revered season of the whole year, in which Demeter and Bacchus, [who represent] the choice products of the land, join together! Demeter has already been working at the threshing-floor and is bringing her work to an end; Bacchus begins before she finishes and causes his gift [the grape] to succeed hers. Hail to these two stewards of life, who have assigned a single time of the year [to their work]. This [young] man of mine belongs in their company, in third place. I am ashamed to refer to him as a mortal, yet I refrain from calling him a god; the latter would subject me to the charge of brazenness, the former would be putting forth a lie. I’ll call him a hero, and I am convinced that I shall thus be able to give him both mortal and divine praise. [Young man], your mind takes no delight in pretending that praises that belong to others are yours.

§ 44.4  You do not have, as a distinguishing mark, the ivory shoulder of the descendants of Pelops. We cannot praise you for the very sharp swiftness of foot that belonged to the descendants of Perseus. Your badge is not the golden knot of hair worn at the top of the head by the descendants of Cecrops. No, what you have is self-respect, grace, and nobility of character.

§ 44.5  Now if you deemed Egypt worthy of your birthday and [yet] are celebrating this pleasant festivity here [in Athens], [at least] hear about what is most excellent in that land. And what would that be? What is it that has adorned that land? You are familiar with the Nile’s love life, for you have heard the sound of his waters and furthermore have seen that marvelous river with your own eyes. You are familiar with the Nile’s consort too, who carries in her womb and brings forth all manner of fruit. The greatest aspect of their relationship is that, when the river recedes, it does not withdraw so much that it cannot still love and be loved by its consort. Also, people have stood to contemplate the size of the pyramids, and they have marveled at Apis, in the form of a bull, as he predicts the future. Meroe’s sound and the din of the Cataracts would often detain travelers by their wondrousness. That marble statue of Memnon, which produces through an inanimate sound an animate utterance, has been regarded as a divinity who salutes the divine Sun. These are the great excellences of Egypt; these are what adorn your [birthday] celebration.

§ 44.6  Add to these wonders my modest Muse, if you wish, a Muse that may be pleasing to many but prefers one person alone. Tradition holds that the most sweet-sounding Xenophon, he who outdid swarms of bees in his eloquence and imitated oozing honey in his narrative, did not regard the hero Alcibiades as a friend, even though the son of Cleinias [i.e., Alcibiades] was his classmate and loved [him] alone and had heard Socrates’ teachings together with Xenophon. Tradition also holds that Xenophon was not keen on associating with the magisterial Plato, for he knew that Plato had many friends in his philosophical circle and would transfer his love [from the resourceless] to the wealthy. Xenophon would associate only with Cyrus, and he provided Cyrus with an excellent arena in which to be schooled. I don’t know from my own experience whether Cyrus recognized Xenophon’s worth. But I do find that Cyrus is constantly honored by Xenophon.

§ 44.7  Now, most excellent fellow—for you outstrip my eloquence by your resources of character—do not judge this thank-offering of mine by its length, but rather by its intention; ascribe the weakness of my song solely to the [limited] time I have for it. The men of Andros, a people not unversed in expressing gratitude, once experienced kind fortune from Apollo. When they subsequently wanted to pay the god back, they merely lit a fire, since they had no better sacrifice to make. The god was pleased with their manner of thanking him, accepted the fire’s flame alone, and preferred this symbol of their homage to a drink-offering. I, O friends, speak only a few words, but there are greater sentiments within me to which I am giving birth. I hope to present them to you, [young man], when they are mature and it is the season for them.

§ 45.i  A Talk (λαλιά) Given upon His Student’s [Recovery of His Health. The talk includes a treatment of envy.

§ 45.1  The swallow opens the theater of its voice after the winter’s cold and does not hide the song produced by its beautiful tongue once it sees that luscious spring has bloomed again. Cicadas sing in the walks once the month hostile to budding passes, the month I have heard poets call “leaf-shedding.”61

§ 45.2  Thus it is not unfitting for me to play my appropriate role too and once again to greet those I love with song after they have been ill. What a day that was that recently presented itself to me, when an attack of fever seemed to plague everything! I shared in the suffering, my friends; I got a taste of the disease through my love [of its victim]. I was not physically ill, but my mental suffering was worse than any physical suffering. And I cannot fault my mind for having been in that state

§ 45.3  for, as Demosthenes said, when the head is ill, every ailment suddenly befalls you. So too, when the helmsman is ill, the whole ship suffers with him; and when the leader of a chorus lies sick, the chorus remains joyless. So naturally at that time I beheld the sun rather dimly. The Nile seemed to me to be dejected, even though it was in flood. It was as though I had exchanged my present existence for the very dark life of the Cimmerians. But now we have dismissed the envy [of fortune], and festivity takes over the future.

§ 45.4  My friends, I want to tell you a story that has a bearing on what has happened. Dionysus was still young, and the race of “Telchines” sprung up against the god. Bacchus started growing up, and all the Titans were bursting with envy. Finally, not able to contain themselves, they wanted to tear the god apart. They prepared snares and readied drugs and the stings of slander against him and tried to trick him about who they were. They hated Silenus and Satyrus, I believe, and they called them sorcerers because they pleased Bacchus. So what happened as a result of this? Dionysus lay wounded, I think, and bemoaned the serious blow he had suffered. The vine was dejected, wine was sad, grapes seemed to be crying, and Bacchus’s ankle was not yet in any condition to move. But crying did not win out in the end, nor did victory go to the enemy. For Zeus the overseer had his eye on everything. He got Dionysus back on his feet, as we are told, and let the myths drive the Titans off.

§ 46.i  To Those Individuals Laying Snares for Him and to the Proconsul Basilius
[Himerius] gave this talk (ἐλάλησε), coming forward to speak after the other sophists. The first part is directed, in an ironic and, at the same time, striking manner, at those who were laying snares for him; the last part, at the proconsul [of Greece], Basilius, the son of Basilius, who set the theme. [Himerius] hints that he developed the topic extempore.

§ 46.1  What love of my eloquence, dear friend, has got hold of you? Who persuaded you to let my Muse, cast out and dishonored as she is, into your ears like something great and splendid? By the very Muses, haven’t you taken notice of my situation? (Perhaps I still have left to me the option of invoking these free and happy goddesses. For the hostile proclamation issued against me has not reached them. They do love the champions of Apollo and Hermes and sport with them. And a malicious and harsh command may have force over human beings—although not over those who are highly noble—but surely such a command is shooed away from any chorus of gods.)

§ 46.2  In any case, do you understand, my friend— and I call you, as well as the Muses, my friend—that it is just as if I am under a long siege? For the whole population is at war with me, some of their own accord, some by agreement with others. I have no idea of what complaint against me has caused this war. They say that they hear it said that I want to dance in honor of the Muses.

§ 46.3  Now the Libethrii, who lived near Mt. Pangaeum, admired and took delight in the Thracian Orpheus, the son of Calliope, before he revealed to them the songs he had learned from his mother the Muse. But once he took up his lyre and sang a divinely inspired melody to them, the wretches were overcome by envy. Having dared to commit an act of womanly insolence against him and his melodious songs, they were subsequently turned into women in story.

§ 46.4  They also say that the Phrygian storyteller Aesop, who was laughed at and made fun of not because of some of his tales, but on account of his looks and the sound of his voice, was very wise and therefore a priest of Apollo, and that the people of Delphi, even though they lived next to the prophetic god [Apollo], were so ignorant of the man that, by an unjust decree they got passed against him, they hurled him down from a rocky precipice and did away with him.

§ 46.5  But neither did Orpheus’s mother neglect him after [having taught him how to play] the lyre, nor did Apollo neglect the Phrygian [Aesop]. Instead of Orpheus’s lyre, which they chose to dishonor, the Libethrii got madness, a lack of music, and silence. Song fled from them, it went into the wilderness and won over oak trees, rocks, country birds, and a small band of shepherds. Even though [his country associates] uttered few sounds, Orpheus delighted in them more than he did in the voices of the Libethrii, because, being musical and quietly listening to his song, they sounded forth clearly in response to his lyre. As for the people of Delphi, they paid a penalty to their ancestral god [Apollo] for their violent treatment of Aesop.

§ 46.6  These matters were and will be a concern to the gods of eloquence. But now we must compare you to the leader of the Muses himself [i.e., Apollo], taking Sappho and Pindar as our models. In their poems they equip him with golden hair and a lyre and escort him to Mt. Helicon, carried by swans, so that he may dance there with the Muses and the Graces. Or we could imitate poets inspired by the Muses who, once spring has first shone forth, crown Bacchiotes—this is the name lyric poetry calls him by, meaning Dionysus—with vernal flowers and clusters of ivy berries. These poets lead the god, now to the high peaks of the Caucasus and to the vale of Lydia, now to the crags of Mt. Parnassus and the Delphic rock, as he leaps and leads the Bacchae in the cry “euoi.” While this is going on, we are told, the earth, as if aware of the god’s coming, flows with honey and milk and with rivers of nectar itself for Satyrs and Bacchae to draw from. It smiles sweetly and with golden gleam and swells everywhere with flowers, so that the god can leap and play in them. And it seems to me that earth does all this appropriately for the god.

§ 46.7  Do you desire to see my eloquence? Am I getting a sign from you to speak? Yes, I obey you. Because of that sign I have persuaded my eloquence to have no fear of the contest, to produce something, to show others what it has conceived, and to allow [what it produces] to reside in your sacred precincts, just like the gods’ sacred birds residing in [hallowed] groves. In fact—and I accuse myself before you [in saying this]— that eloquence of mine has threatened even more, that, once kindled and having dared to strip [for action], it will wound itself and you, its father. Look, it is emboldened, rises up, puts together all its charm for you, and sets its spells in motion. It is already dancing and, through me, is singing a song to you.

§ 46.8  O son of a divine person! O offspring of a consular father! O you who have received the scepter of your father’s virtue, and no less a scepter than that which Homer [Il. 2.204–5] gives to the king of the Achaeans, bringing that accoutrement to Agamemnon from Zeus on high! You are an evening star, I think, “of all stars the most beautiful.”179 This is Sappho’s song the evening star [frag. 104b Campbell].

§ 46.9  They say that Peleus of Thessaly, already old and because of his age not ready for war, bedecked his son Achilles with his own arms when the latter was still young and just getting a beard. He sent Achilles to Troy to be a general to the Greeks, and he sent him, not from the girls’ apartments and the house of Lycomedes—let us not believe the myths on this point—but from Mt. Pelion and from Chiron. Hence right in the midst of battle Achilles played his lyre

§ 46.10  and sang what the Centaur [Chiron] had taught him. He frightened the Trojans with his golden weapons and saved the Greeks. But you come to the Greeks for our benefit, not with golden weapons for us, but with a golden Justice and a golden Right (Themis), the assessors of your father. Justice and Right received you in their bosoms when you were born; right from the time when you were in swaddling clothes they nursed you, not with bees’ honey, but with respect for law and with learning, by which the soul’s nature is reared and fostered. They first led you to Zeus’s daughter [Athena], and they [now] proudly bring you to the goddess [i.e., to Athens] as their offspring.

§ 46.11  It was a poet’s role to give wings to Fame, to send her westwards through the skies and announce to your father your reputation and what the Greeks are saying about you, and to organize a chorus of swans around Fame and make you the subject of the birds’ song. But these things to poets; I sing my own melody now and perhaps shall do so again.

§ 47.i  To the Same Basilius during the Panathenaea at the Beginning of Spring

§ 47.1  “Hail, dear light, who in your smile display such beauty of face!. Having taken a song from lyric, I shall sing it to you at your arrival. I would have gladly persuaded my words to become lyrical and poetic, so that I could say something about you that has a youthful verve to it, as Simonides or Pindar did about Dionysus and Apollo. But my [prosaic] words are proud and hold their heads up high; they frolic without the restraint and beyond the confines of meter. So I made a little request of poetry, to give me a song of Teos (for I love this Muse), something from the stores of Anacreon. I come to you bearing this hymn, and I have added something to the song myself: “O light of the Greeks, of us who dwell on the sacred plain of Pallas [Athena] and in the groves of the Muses!”

§ 47.2  For you persuade me now to speak and sing. You appeared to us, yes, you appeared as Homer [Il. 7.4–6] says a fair wind comes to exhausted sailors, or just as the evening star is likely to appear to those about to dance in honor of Aphrodite. People who are worn out as [those sailors were] yearn for a messenger of peace; people who are fleeing from storms and clouds desire to see the bright sun.

§ 47.3  Now, my boys, spring has really come. Now I feel that season in the air. Now the nightingales’ songs seem to me to be a joyful ode, not a lament; and I agree with those who say that the birds are striking up a song in praise of the gods, not for the boy [Itys]. I leave that Thracian myth to the Attic swallows. I am convinced that they, along with the nightingales, are also striking up a vernal song, not a mournful ode.. Now the waters of the Ilissus are ample and clear, and perhaps the river is again portending the mysteries of Deo. If swans ever made song with the Zephyr around the banks of the Ilissus, as they do at the Cayster and the Hebrus, they will fill these banks with their music now more than before. And even if a person never saw these birds at the river [Ilissus] on a previous occasion, he is predicting that their music will [now] come to Attic meadows.

§ 47.5  Who of you has seen how the very earth is blooming and has sprouted? Crops appear before their season for you, [Basilius], and show their mature spikes, when even their vernal [spikelet] flowers seemed wondrous to those who saw them. The earth is crowned and adorned, not with the anemone, violets, and the rest, but with the gifts of Dionysus and the gleaming wreath of Deo,186 as if, it seems to me, the gods are giving these gifts to the Greeks because of you, [Basilius].

§ 47.6  When the Lydians celebrate Dionysus beside the golden river. Lydian tradition refers to the Pactolus as “golden”—they are maddened by the god and break into dance. This celebration occurs when the sun, which is responsible for the changes of season, brings spring to them. This is marked neither by the songs of birds, which are numerous and sing sweetly in groves, nor by meadows turning green with sweet and delicate vegetation. No, it is when Dionysus has left Nysa and the Ethiopians for the Lydians and has come in revelry to Mt. Tmolus and to the Pactolus, it is when the Lydians see that the Bacchae have been incited to begin their leaping that they regard spring as arriving and welcome the season along with the god. So Dionysus brings spring and his Bacchic revelries to the Lydians, but you bring them to us and to eloquence. You madden not bacchants and Satyrs, but priests of the Muses and of Hermes. You give yourself to us to address and hail. You are a great signal to us to form a chorus presided over by the Muses. We hail you instead of shouting “euoi.”188

§ 47.7  Let no one of you be amazed if eloquence wishes to compare this man to gods. I do not agree that Homer may compare Agamemnon, king of the Achaeans, to three gods [Il. 2.478–79], whereas I am not permitted to do the same. On the contrary, who would not rightly find fault with me if I do not wax poetic and stretch the truth, especially since I can say more in the case of this man than Homer has said about Agamemnon?

§ 47.8  O friend of the gods, fit to be compared to the gods! I think that perhaps it is fitting for you, because of your countenance, to be compared to Zeus with a Homeric quotation, for a Homerid would surely say of you that your eyes make you “like unto Zeus who hurls the thunderbolt” [Hom. Il. 2.478]. But it is even more fitting, I think, to compare you to Zeus because of the beautiful qualities of your soul. For “no [word] of yours goes unfulfilled once you nod assent to it” [cf. Il. 1.527]— and this was said in praise of Zeus. No person will ever boast that he employed deception in describing you, not even if he should say that he possesses Homer’s kestos, to which poetry [the Iliad] says that Zeus himself yielded.

§ 47.9  Apollo too is a friend to you and therefore, I think, like you. He is the leader of the Muses and organizes choruses of the Muses on Mt. Helicon in Boeotia. (There too the Muses make shepherds poets.)190 This is the very thing that links you to the god, for you have made Attica a workshop of the Muses’ activity (mousikh¸ˇ), just as Apollo has done to Helicon. And you order me to engage in the Muses’ activity, giving me the signal yourself, just as the god gives it to the Muses, the maiden [daughters] of Zeus.

§ 47.10  Greeks honor Poseidon the horse-god and sacrifice to him at the Isthmus [of Corinth], showing him as a charioteer even in statues. Would someone other than you be rightly compared to this god? Would a person who calls you a student of the art mastered by this god be wrong in so designating you? How could it not be that Poseidon, the teacher of horsemanship, belongs more to you than to the young man of Pylos? The latter, carried along slowly by his horses, shamed the god’s art; but you, it seems to me, would make Bucephalas himself and Pegasus and the immortal team of Achilles submit to the curb-chain and the whip.

§ 47.11  Now Homer in his verse [Il. 3.237, Od. 11.300] lauds Castor, the son of Zeus, for his excellence in horsemanship; he bestows this skill by itself on him, as though, I think, it alone is enough to honor even Castor, son of Zeus.. A horse made Bellerophon the Ephyraean a worthy subject of song and music, a horse made Darius king in Persia, and a horse made Alexander great among the Macedonians. But what caused great kings to be praised are mere playthings, I think, to you.

§ 47.12  I want to tell you a local story about this city and the festival to which you come. It is very sweet and admirable not only to see the Panathenaea, but also to say something about it in the midst of the Greeks, whenever the Athenians in the course of this festival carry the sacred trireme in procession in honor of their goddess. The ship sets out directly from the gates [the Dipylon], as if from a calm harbor. Moving from there as if on a waveless sea, it is carried through the middle of the straight and level course (δρόμος) that descends and divides the porticoes stretching out on either side of it. In those porticoes Athenians and others gather to do their buying and selling.

§ 47.13  The crew of the ship consists of priests and priestesses, all of them eupatrids, crowned with golden or floral wreaths. The ship, upraised and lofty, as if having waves underneath her, moves on wheels, which are fitted with many axles that run straight under the vessel. These wheels bring her, without hindrance, to the hill of Pallas [the Acropolis], from where, I think, the goddess watches the festival and the whole festal period.

§ 47.14  The ship’s cables will be loosened by a song that the sacred chorus of Athenians sing as they summon the wind to the vessel, asking it to be present and to fly along with the sacred ship. The wind, aware, I suppose, of the song of Ceos that Simonides sang to it after [singing to] the sea, immediately follows upon the Athenians’ songs; it blows strongly and favorably at the stern, driving the bark forward with its blast.

§ 47.15  They say that, when the sun drives its horses to the middle of the sky and causes summer to come, the Egyptian river Nile pours over the land of the Egyptians and conceals their fields with its floodwaters; it turns Egypt into a navigable sea and a land traversed by boats.

§ 47.16  But the sacred trireme of the maiden [goddess Athena] moves through dry land without need of any incredible Nile flooding. Rather, clearly resounding breezes blowing from Attic pipes send this vessel forth. The greatest marvel, though, is the evening star itself shining forth along with the sun, the only star appearing along with it in broad daylight and lighting a torch with its father [the sun] over the ship.

§ 47.17  You too have appeared to us, “of all stars the most beautiful” [Sappho frag. 104b Campbell]. For the Athenians call you Hesperus. You brought a fortunate festal period to the Greeks, and with auspicious signs you promise us a prosperous future. That is what this populace has said, and I am persuaded by their words.

§ 48.1  To Hermogenes, The Proconsul of Greece
The Greeks once longed for Philoctetes after he was attacked by disease, and they offered many prayers to the gods [to get him back]. After his illness abated, he took up his arrows, desiring to find out if he could again hit his targets. It was Odysseus who, being with that famous Philoctetes, urged him on into combat and signaled him to start exercising his skill—that Odysseus who was the foundation for almost the whole of Homer’s poem [i.e., the Odyssey] and let himself be hymned in music and song. For Homer does not give much attention to Achilles, son of Thetis, in his poem [the Iliad], describing [only] his battle at the river Scamander and his run [around Troy]. But, as for Odysseus, he appears everywhere in Homer’s epic verse; the poet is overwhelmed as he exerts so much effort on Odysseus. So the Greeks considered Odysseus responsible for Philoctetes’ victory and for what he accomplished at Troy through his skill with the bow.

§ 48.2  But you, my friend, order me to “shoot” for the Greeks by taking up the Muses’ songs rather than Heracles’ bow and arrows. Behold how I obey you in this too. If I also played my lyre in the past, when I yearned to address in the midst of the Greeks, I now wish [first] to bring an accusation against the Attic Erotes with the support of all of you, my boys, because they have stifled [my] song for so long and have allowed this man to be cherished [exclusively] by his Ephyraean lovers.

§ 48.3  Oh, how could I explain how silently we passed through the winter? The ridges of Mt. Hymettus were getting white, the Pleiades were quickly setting. The sun no longer wished to burn brightly; it was a gentle and soft sunlight that summoned the Muses to come from Mt. Helicon. And they came and organized the usual choruses in Attic meadows. The winter, now in full force, had taken hold of all the land. Bands of young men danced around their leaders, and the shepherds’ pipes were ready for Attic song, eager to sound their song for the leader of the Muses [i.e., Hermogenes].19. But that leader himself, whom the Attic people summoned and the maiden goddess [Athena] yearned for, greeted the Attic Muses from afar. So how shall I not find fault with the Attic Erotes for this?

§ 48.4  What I would need now are songs of Teos, what I would need now is Anacreon’s lyre. Whenever he was scorned by a boy he loved, he knew how to use that lyre against the Erotes themselves. I would have used his very words against them: “You are insolent and wicked, and you don’t know whom you should shoot your arrows at!” Perhaps I would also have uttered against the Erotes the threat that Anacreon utters against them. He was once in love with a beautiful young man. When he saw that the young man was not paying much attention to him, he tuned his lyre and issued a threat to the Erotes, telling them that, if they did not immediately wound the young man for him, he would no longer strike up a song in praise of them.

§ 48.5  Having been in that situation, I congratulate poetry if it is allowed so much that it can even utter a serious and terrible threat against the Erotes themselves. As for me, the art of rhetoric wrongs me in not having taught me to play the lyra or the barbitos, but only to dance this prose dance for the Muses. So I shall let poets be frenzied and shall find fault with the leader of the Muses in my own way.

§ 48.6  Tell me, then, [Hermogenes], why do you disdain the concerns of the Muses so much? Why have you neglected Attic theaters so much, you sprout and offspring of the Muses? Aren’t we actually obligated under your supervision to engage in the activities the Muses oversee? Didn’. God bring you to the Greeks so that eloquence would once again have its ancient vigor? Or should those who are to celebrate the rites of Justice and of Right (Themis) be initiated by you every day and in every season of the year, as you [readily] address them and make your disclosures to them, while the spokesmen of Hermes and of the Muses have access to you only after a long and difficult wait? When would we have leaped about in the Muses’ precinct during the winter with more pleasure than after having received the nod from you, whom it would not be a mistake to call the king of our art? When would we have given a more flowery and noble display of eloquence than with you as a witness to our efforts?

§ 48.7  Or do you think that Satyrs and Bacchae in Lydia refuse to shout out in honor of Dionysus or to become frenzied until spring comes and the god appears and signals to them that the frenzy may commence, whereas we did not greatly yearn for the one who has made the season more manifest to us? How brash are they who have dared to practice the art of eloquence during the winter before your visit! Whom did they put in charge of cultural affairs before engaging in their art? Even the swan by the river Cayster is silent if any wind other than the Zephyr has blown. Even if other birds sing frequently, the swan waits for the Zephyr, wishing to make its music only under that wind.

§ 48.8  But now it is time for me to dismiss my charge. I know what was in the mind of the leader of the Muses [i.e., Hermogenes] and why he preferred this season for his visit. Poetry recently taught me [to withdraw my charge], and so, having taken up the following story, I want to sing a palinode and speak on behalf of the leader of the Muses before all of you. The Egyptians always long for the Egyptian river Nile, and, thanks to those who revealed religious truths to them, they pray that the river’s waters will come to them from Ethiopia. Now the Nile also longs for Egypt in all seasons of the year, because Egypt is a wise and divinely inspired land; and the river is gladly receptive to the Egyptians’ prayers. But when the Egyptians, having made sacrifice in honor of Demeter, work at the threshing- floor, then the Nile comes pouring down from Ethiopia with full waters and suddenly turns the whole of Egypt into a sea.

§ 48.9  When that happens, you can see, yes, you can really see great wonders in that land. On a single plot of land you will see the same man playing the part of sailor and farmer; you will see cattle taken to pasture and, soon after, boats; you will suddenly see an island that was previously a city surrounded by dry land. It is then, they say, then that the whole of Egypt enjoys itself in dance and song. The usual vessels sail the Nile not merely on business, as they were just recently doing, but as if in procession in honor of the river because of the sea of water [they have been given]. The sailors on those vessels are extremely delighted, and they all dance. They carry cymbals instead of naval weapons. Even a very large ship can finally sail, one that was on dry land for a long time because it could not find a waterway big enough for it to loosen its cables. When the Nile’s waters are at their peak, a ship of that size emerges from a marshy inlet and, with sails filled with every kind of wind, is borne on high over the waves.

§ 48.10  How does this sound to you, my boys? Doesn’t it sound good because (among other reasons) it very suitably fits the present situation. Now I also want to tell you a story from Alcaeus, one that he sang in his lyric poetry when he composed a paean in honor of Apollo. I shall not tell you the story in Lesbian verse, since I am not a poet, but by breaking up the meter of the lyric poetry into prose. When Apollo was born, Zeus outfitted him with a gold headband and lyre. He also gave him a chariot to drive—it was pulled by swans— and sent him to Delphi to the Castalian waters to expound justice and law to the Greeks from there. But Apollo got on his chariot and ordered the swans to fly to the Hyperboreans. When Delphi heard of this, its people composed a paean and song [in Apollo’s honor] and stationed choruses of unmarried youths around the tripod. Then the city summoned the god to leave the Hyperboreans and come to Delphi. But Apollo delivered oracles among those people for a whole year. When he ordained that it was now time also for the Delphic tripods to resound, he again issued an order to the swans, this time to fly away from the Hyperboreans.

§ 48.11  It was summer, the very middle of summer, when Alcaeus led Apollo away from the Hyperboreans. So, with summer beaming forth and Apollo arriving in Delphi, the poet’s lyrics about the god took on something of the lushness of summer. Nightingales sing to the god, as birds are likely to sing in Alcaeus. Also swallows and cicadas sing, not reporting the fortune that was theirs among human beings, but making the god the subject of all their songs. The Castalian spring flows, as poetry puts it, with silvery waters, and the great Cephisus River surges up, swelling with its waves, in imitation of Homer’s Enipeus River. For, in the manner of Homer, Alcaeus uses every effort to portray even water as capable of sensing the arrival of gods. But don’t you think that my charge [against Hermogenes] has been adequately dismissed? I myself am certainly ready to cast my vote and to ask you all to vote as I do on the present matter.

§ 48.12  I shall now address the leader of the Muses after first saying a few words about his soul, in order that you may see the man contained, as if in a mirror, in what I say about a divine and blessed soul. This is the nature of his divine and newly initiated soul: it always aims for the best and greatest pursuits. Once it attended on God, often beholding the plain of truth in heaven’s revolution and being filled with the spectacle of heaven’s wonders. Then it encountered misfortune: its wings fell off, and, clothed in a body, it had to accept life in this earthly zone. Yet even though it has descended for a while to a fortune quite the opposite of that which it had previously enjoyed, and despite having forgotten the wonders of heaven, it does not remain completely wingless here, nor does it spend its life here in ignorance. When it sees something good and beautiful on earth, it is stirred up and carried in memory to the things it once saw when it was at large in heaven itself with the gods. When moved by something here, it turns its attention to heavenly things, seeks after that region, and focuses on what [truly] exists.

§ 48.13  To those who make trial of it, it displays the gentleness of a truly divine nature. It wants to exercise legal and political authority and never harms anyone, for it is never right for a divine nature to be the cause of any evil to human beings. This soul overcomes fears, has mastery over pleasures, and appears to be free of passion. It shapes its body, bringing it into conformity with its nature; what it seeks for it are dark eyes, a dignified face, and true symmetry of limbs, which wise men call beauty, so that, having put together a body that is beautiful and noble on both sides, it may let that body show itself forth to the human race as the image of a god.

§ 48.14  See how my oration depicts the man for all of you; this image that it forms on its own is more accurate than one made from any wax and colors. If all the plastic arts that sought to replicate the human body were still in high repute today, I would have proposed that those artisans use their hands to compete in representing you, [Hermogenes]. Didn’t the Alexander fashioned by Lysippus bring the latter fame and reputation, so much so that even poetry expressed great admiration for his handiwork? Don’t you hear the epigram about the statue of Alexander, “Lysippus, sculptor of Sicyon, skillful hand” [cf. Anth. Plan. 119.1], and all the rest that the poet wrote about that craftsman?

§ 48.15  Wouldn’t someone who had depicted you [in stone] for the Greeks have understandably felt superior to other artisans, because he would have portrayed a person who is a philosopher as well as a strategos? But such an artisan would not have had any poetry capable of honoring his work. Not true, for wouldn’t all poetry, both lyric and other poetry, have made your image its subject? I would have erected such a statue in Attic precincts next to the maiden goddess [Athena] if all the Greeks agreed to this, for you have honored wisdom and temperance. But if they disagreed about the erection of the statue, I would have taken you to Delphi and set you up beside the tripod of the Seven Sages, because your mind belongs with theirs and it would have been appropriate for your statue to be seen in the Pythian god’s dwelling place by those who come there during public festivals.

§ 48.16  But now that there is no Lysippus nor any other living person who can display the skill worthy of the model before us, new arts busy themselves with you, and select individuals from all parts of the world minister to those arts. These individuals judge that their offerings are suitable to Attic audiences and therefore decide to dedicate them there. I myself have been eager to portray you verbally, with my own paints, and no passage of time will ever insolently obliterate that portrait.

§ 48.17  All right, then, I shall speak, going through each one of your qualities separately. I don’t want some quibbler to accuse me, because of my failure to cite a sufficient number of true grounds for praise, of pushing my oration beyond what the facts allow. On the other hand, I shall limit my remarks in accordance with what time and proportionality allow. Of course I wanted free rein in speaking, like a horse that has been let loose and got onto a low-lying plain—the free rein that is reasonably required by one who is eager to sing to the human race the praises of a man such as this one. But guarding against another charge that I would incur if I indulged this urge, I shall once again postpone speaking at length; on this occasion I shall allow my oration to address only those matters it initially set out to address.

§ 48.18  When it was in the hands of others to guide him and to direct his pursuits, [Hermogenes] learned to study and to behave in accordance with his guides’ wishes and with what seemed best [to them], for his philosophical nature was compliant. Finding himself in the imperial court at an early age, he was deemed worthy of so much trust that he alone was regarded as a worthy keeper of secrets. He both consulted the gods about those secret matters and conveyed their utterances to the person who had sent him [to them]. He was an expounder of the best laws and customs, always wishing to mollify the mind of the ruler, as they say that Pythagoras of Samos did when he was with Phalaris in Sicily.

§ 48.19  For it is said that, as his tyranny got stronger, Phalaris desired to associate with Pythagoras. The latter was summoned and came, thinking that, if he was with Phalaris, he might make him a better ruler of his subjects in the future. But Phalaris’s character was incorrigible and could not be changed. So when none of his proposals was acted on, Pythagoras quickly left Sicily. He gave up before either making the tyrant more benevolent or persuading him to make peace with his subjects. In contrast, this man of ours kept talking and reasoning so much that, as he told the ruler ancient stories and called his attention to passages from poetry and prose, he made the regime milder. For he was already fond of learning before becoming versed in philosophy.

§ 48.20  When he became a man and reached full adulthood—at a time when wisdom shows us, by the kind of life men choose, who are possessed of it—he said good-bye to and walked away from those offices and positions of power. He became a lover of the virtue and knowledge by which the soul is nurtured and, thus fostered and lifted up, goes lightly on its upward journey. He was so distinguished in virtue and learning that, if anyone who still inhabits a body has ever investigated the upper region and latched on to the wonders there through the helmsman of the soul, I am quite convinced that it is he.

§ 48.21  I hear that Plato, the follower of Socrates, trained in wrestling and bestowed care upon his body early in life. Then, as he got older and heard Socrates conversing with young men, he became so enamored of philosophy that he turned away from his early pursuits and, after associating with Socrates, became a font and source of philosophy for subsequent generations. Precisely such a love of philosophy also has hold of this man [whom we are praising]; for, possessed by some god, and like someone who has touched the flower of the greatest mysteries, no amount of initiation in them has been able to fill him up.

§ 48.22  The first thing he did was to give his fullest attention to his instruments, just like a good craftsman who feels that he is best executing each of his undertakings when none of the instruments required for the completion of a proposed piece of workmanship is missing. Then he learned how to argue, to overpower the sophistical, and to prevail over mere babblers. He combined skillful arrangement with noble words, and it is only the person with an accurate knowledge of how to arrange words who is naturally disposed and said to be a skilled rhetor or an inspired poet. In a word, having acquired all these skills, he entrusted them to his mind.

§ 48.23  With his instruments gathered together, he now proceeded to consider substantive issues. The whole of philosophy is divided into three parts, one concerned with [human] actions, one with nature, and one that investigates and studies supercelestial reality. Our man did not consider one part, ignore another, and slight another as useless to the individual [who wants to be] happy. Rather he gave himself to and mastered all the parts of philosophy more thoroughly than anyone who had ever put a very high value on mastering only one part. He gave special honor to the views of Plato and Aristotle and worked hard on their philosophies, going directly to their writings. He knows the philosophy of Stoics like Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and all those who, having put order into irrational human behavior through reason, passed their philosophy on from one person to another.

§ 48.24  He also knows the views held in common by Epicurus and Democritus and how those men visualized nature. He understands all the Academies as well as the school of thought that traveled from the Lyceum to Libya and Cyrene. He also investigated the tropes of Pyrrho (and the strife that arose from them among all men), although he regarded them not as an important subject of study, but as a side dish of the rest of philosophy.

§ 48.25  Having become skilled in astronomy and geography, he knows what others have written [on these subjects]. But he wished to learn about these matters through personal experience and precisely; he wanted to understand what is asserted in books by seeing for himself the phenomena they discuss. So this man traveled around most of the earth, imitating Plato. For Plato, after being admonished by Socrates, went to Egypt and to the expounders of the gods’ will there. He wanted to track down among them more than what he had learned in Attica. He even went to Sicily and to those among whom Pythagoras’s philosophy was still being kept alive after his death.

§ 48.26  And I hear the following story about Dionysus. The myths say that, before becoming a god, when he was offering sacrifices but desired to extend his knowledge beyond the realm of sacrifice, Dionysus rushed off to Egypt and the Nile and then to the Indians, Ethiopians, and all other men in his curiosity about the workings of nature. He then came to the Greeks, all of whom were pleased to see him, and received honors from them. Wanting the Athenians to be the first to receive his gifts and wares, he came to Athens. The Athenians, who happened to be celebrating a festival at that time, held a public festival in Dionysus’s honor and voted henceforth to organize a procession in honor of Dionysus as a god.

§ 48.27  Such was the intention of [Hermogenes’] travels; and if you hear him telling about the peoples and cities he visited, you would marvel at how he remembers those travels and how much pleasure he got from them. The drops of honey, so to speak, that fall from his words truly fill all his hearers with sweet pleasure. I used to get such delight from the stories in Herodotus, but I have now come to regard Herodotus as a mere child when compared to this man’s charm. Writers like Hellanicus and Duris and the work of the man from Halicarnassus [i.e., Herodotus] and of all who exerted themselves to describe in words the inhabited earth are henceforth insignificant compared to those charms by which [Hermogenes] so enchants his listeners.

§ 48.28  Once he desired to be likened to God, and aware that the divine cares for human nature, he exercised political virtue, taking on the Greek and Latin languages as bodyguards, I think, to assist him in his state of mind. Now there is a city [Constantinople] at the mouth of the Euxine [Black] Sea, on the left as you sail into that sea and at the very end of Europe. It is a great and fortunate city, at which a small, narrow strait of the sea [i.e., the Bosporus] divides the continents by its flow, like a boundary stone set midway between them. Going there, [Hermogenes] gave himself to a most lawful emperor with a noble nature, at whose side he could make use of his arsenal of knowledge.

§ 48.29  The emperor gladly welcomed him and immediately made him a partner in his work, just as Heracles did to Theseus, Cyrus to Clearchus, Hieron to Simonides, and Alcibiades to Socrates. He trusted him in everything, looked to him, and marveled at him, regarding him as a sort of helmsman of his rule. So the emperor provided the name for the regime, but [Hermogenes] did the work. This is how it was in the case of the all-wise Themistocles. He was appointed co-general with Eurybiades. When the Greek force set out against the Persians, he formally yielded the naval command to the Laconian, but in the engagement he showed that it was he who was actually commanding the fleet for the Greeks.

§ 48.30  What laws that were not humane were ventured through [Hermogenes’] agency? What people in [legal] trouble did not escape from their troubles through his agency? Who, worthy of office, did not obtain an office through his agency? Who in need of something did not flee to him? Standing as he did between the emperor and his subjects, he served the needs of the latter before their emperor and worked to implement the commands of the former among his subjects. So too the myths say that Hermes was a messenger of Zeus and learned and announced what was in Zeus’s mind to gods and men.

§ 48.31  But now that God and time have established this man as ruler in the greatest office on earth—for the belief is well established that the race of Greeks is the greatest and best under the sun—take part with me here, Greeks, in the panegyric from this point on yourselves. We, an Attic and ancient people, shall be first in putting together a panegyric jointly and in striking up together a harmonious dance, so to speak, around the seat of Justice. I shall give the sign to begin the dance.

§ 48.32  A calm has possession of all the subjects [of this province], as if they have gone from a mighty wave and a storm to a waveless haven. There is no act of arrogance here, no mention of the word. Reason guides everything and has no need of the sword. I know that shepherds who are excellent at tending sheep do not use the crook much, but shepherd their animals with the pipe. Now, though, we have really come to know that Homeric ruler whom Homer, in his desire to liken him to something in light of his love of human beings, has honored with the title “father”: “he was as gentle as a father,” he says [Od. 2.47]. It is good, it is good to address you this way too, you who alone work on behalf of all, you who alone, for the sake of the Greeks, strain your eyes and mind and give them no rest. You are like an excellent helmsman who allows all the sailors to travel on the ship without having to work, while he alone stands at the helm and guides the vessel so that it is not troubled by waves.

§ 48.33  The morning star has often led you to the shrine of Justice, and the evening star has often escorted you back from there, shining its pure light on your rites. Peoples and cities summon you, they beg you to come to them, and they congratulate the Athenians on their good fortune, but they are speechless before them in their victory. I myself have even persuaded Delian Apollo to leave his island and be with us, to be our ancestral god and tune his first lyre among all the Athenians. Because of you, eloquence is flourishing and is daring what it did not previously dare.

§ 48.34  O you who are worthy to be sung of in every hymn and utterance, especially by me and in my orations! For you loved my rhetorical talent even when it was being shaped in swaddling clothes. You often predicted that it was absolutely certain that, when my talent reached maturity, it would shine out widely and greatly through the human race in its wondrousness. See if it is fulfilling your prophecy. I shall command it to be confident and to leap up.

§ 48.35  Come now, eloquence of mine, take wing henceforth; abandon the lower regions and from now on aim for the skies! For the leader of the Muses [Apollo] gives you wings and shows you to the human race. He does not attach wings onto you as Daedalus did [to Icarus]. The story is that, when Icarus, the young man of Attica, was lifted up by those wings, he became confident that he would be able to fly over the ocean; but when he got near the sun, he was undone along with the wax and became, with his wings, nothing but a story for future generations. But your wings, [O eloquence of mine], were brought forth by the Muses in the gardens of Mnemosyne, and the Hours and Graces nourished them, drawing water for them from the springs of truth. Thus you rise up above the many and become weightless; you cannot be seen by unhallowed and wingless souls any more than they say that the Cimmerians could see the sun. So address your lover himself [i.e., Hermogenes] in accordance with your nature.

§ 48.36  You came to me, [Hermogenes], as a sweet and gentle light, just as the morning star shines its light on the human race as herald of a spring day, just as the noontime sun stands before those who are weary of winter. I yearned to see you while you were still dancing along with swans by the eddies of the Ister [i.e., the Danube] in honor of the leader of the Muses [Apollo]. I wanted to invent some device by which I could be lifted up on wings into the air and fly away from the Greeks and to the Ister. But you, my friend, anticipated my yearning; for you had to, you had to shine your light on all the Greeks, so great and beautiful a wonder you are. But I want to ask the gods themselves for a small favor on behalf of the Greeks. And first I call my own goddesses, the Muses, to my prayer.

§ 48.37  O children of Zeus, come, come, you gold-winged Muses—it occurs to me to address you in a poetic manner—whether you are dancing with Apollo on Mt. Helicon or in Pieria and playing a sweet and divine song on the lyre, or playing with Castalian nymphs at Delphi and [the spring of ] Castalia, or flying through Attic meadows and making crowns for your leader [Apollo]. Come and listen to this prayer, which I say on behalf of the Greeks, and grant that this man guide the bands of young men for a very long time, so that [my] eloquence may pour a libation to him from a second and third mixing-bowl.

§ 54.i  To Newly Arrived [Students]
[Himerius] delivered this [talk] extempore in his house in the presence of his pupils when welcoming some newly arrived [young men].77

§ 54.1  How sweet this lecture hall is to me again! How sweet is my chorus [of pupils]—which is to say the Muses’ chorus [of pupils]—as it rouses itself up to leap around my lyre again! Consider those individuals who have ever endured separation from my friendship and life apart from me even for one day. What an act of daring, what hearts they have! They are insolent and reckless and have little regard for love. If it were at all possible, how gladly would I ask them some questions: What sound is sweeter to them than my tongue? Whose bearing is more cheerful to behold than mine? What naturally musical birds of spring speak as sweetly and pleasantly as I do? What melodious and rhythmical chorus, resounding with the music of the aulos or the donax, ever touched their souls as much as the sound that comes from my lecture halls?

§ 54.2  So I find fault with those herdsmen who have refused to shepherd their flocks with song and the syrinx and, instead, threaten them with blows and whips. As for my flock and my creatures, may I never look angrily upon them. Let it be my words that lead them to the Muses’ meadows and waters, let them be led by song rather than by harsh blows so that, nurturing in this way our mutual love, I may, with music and harmony, keep my governance of them on the right path.

§ 54.3  Share these norms, my boys, with these newly arrived students as part of your hospitality toward them so that, after having tasted of the finest norms and principles at their first arrival, they may move from that point, as they become more fully initiated, toward the contemplation of our mysteries. For those who are experienced in the rite make good mystagogues for initiates. Those who have familiarized themselves with much of the great ocean are good at sailing and directing a sea voyage. Dogs practiced at controlling wild beasts are the ones who teach puppies who are just learning how to hunt. And birdcatchers say that eagles just ready to fly do not let themselves fall behind the older birds in flight but follow them until they have got above the clouds and are flying around the great sun itself.

§ 54.4  I also want to tell you a story about a king. They say that Alexander [the Great], son of Philip—Alexander is known to all Greeks, I think, from books; we hear that he had a noble nature and was reared in a manner that matched his nature, for in the midst of military trophies, victories, and glorious deeds—anyway, we hear that, whenever he learned that his father was marching off to war, his desire was not to lag behind the battle line, but to follow his father, despite the fact that he was still young and just at the beginning of his adolescence and not yet mature enough for battle. His father was anxious about his son and bid him stay home, but Alexander would have none of this. Instead, he offered his father the same object lesson that I just offered you about the puppies—namely, that noble bitches are trained right from the time they are puppies and when just on the verge of hunting. He persuaded his father to let him engage in battle; and so, with this military experience acquired in his youth, he went on to put all lands under the sun in the palm of his own hand.

§ 54.5  They say, then, that Alexander offered these remarks [about puppies on that occasion]. Homer too, I think, would give us advice on the same matter. In Homer Antilochus is a young soldier and fond of war, and he imitates Achilles and is immortalized by his Asian victories. In other poets Iolaus imitates Heracles, and Theseus imitates Pirithous. In this way the whole band of noble youths achieves glory.

§ 54.6  Come, then, teach these things yourselves so that these [newly arrived students], reared on these principles, may become prominent in Attic meadows and then, after taking the beautiful wares [of rhetoric] from here, practice it in their own locales.

§ 59.1  To Those Who Came [to Athens] from Ionia
These guests are Ionians, of Attic ancestry. Come, let me show them their mother-city, not by putting on a cicada brooch, but by giving them a verbal tour. When they left Attica, the bee led them to Ionia; but now that they are returning from there to Athens, it is eloquence that will guide them.

§ 59.2  I shall direct you to the great sights that keep the knowledge of your ancestors alive. I shall show you, in pictorial form, the battle of Marathon and your ancestors checking the onslaught of Persians, as they ran toward and hacked at those barbarians. I shall also show you my soldiers, one of whom, even in the painting, is fighting against nature; for you will think that this Callimachus, even though merely depicted, is fighting rather than dead. The other soldier [Cynegirus] is trying to sink the Persian fleet with his bare hands and meting out his bodily strength to meet the demands of [the] elements.

§ 59.3  After you have seen the Painted Stoa, I shall lead you up to the hill, to Athena’s workshop [i.e., the Acropolis]. There you will be able to fill yourselves with innumerable stories, just like people who search a document for evidence of their ancestors. You will see the olive sprout, the triumphal monument of the armed goddess [Athena]. You will see an ocean wave high up on the hill, still making a crashing sound, as if shaken up along with the god [Poseidon] as he contends for his beloved [city]. I shall also lead you in my oration to the tribunal of the gods and show you the Areopagus. I shall tell you mythic tales as you look around and shall make what you see even sweeter by providing a narrative.

§ 59.4  Perhaps you will accuse me of slowness. Perhaps you will borrow the law that our ancestors passed on idleness and bring against me a charge and accusation that, in my words to you, I have not yet brought you to Ion’s father [Apollo]. Well, then, I shall verbally portray him too for you and shall provide a feast for your ears before your eyes are feasted.

§ 59.5  His golden hair is parted on his forehead. On both sides his locks hang down over his neck and fall like waves onto his divine chest. His robe falls over his feet, he has a lyre but no bow. The god is smiling. It is as though he is prophesying to the Ionians that they will be colonizers.

§ 59.6  He is a musical god, boys. So let me too pluck the lyre in my soul so that, by sounding forth strongly in speech, I may join colonists to their mother-city.

§ 60.i  To the Ionian Guests On the previous day [Himerius] was in their presence just long enough to deliver a discourse [Διάλεξις], but on this day he spoke on a topic extempore.

§ 60.1  Yesterday we addressed Ionia in a pleasant little piece [Orat. 59], playfully taking a verbal sightseeing tour of the city with its [mythic] tales. But now let us sing for the Ionians the orthios nomos. For the mark of their land is not only linen tunics, that fancy knot of hair, or a gourmet’s table; it is also a land known for its seriousness, its eloquence, its arms, and its battles. One could more or less say that the Ionian race prides itself on the very things its ancestors took pride in. Those men of old traversed the Aegean, purging it of Persian arrogance; they sailed the Ionian Sea to colonize Sicily; and they caused the name Greece to be extended to the peoples of Italy through Pythagoras’s tongue.

§ 60.2  In those days, the art that I practice was modest and unsophisticated; it did not extend beyond the courtroom. But those Ionians lifted it on high and made it resound more loudly than tragic poetry. They made many contributions to stringed music, medicine, and poetry. These [Ionians here before us] are fellow citizens and kin of the wise Heraclitus, because of whom Plato’s genius took wing and contemplated the knowledge that surpasses eloquence. And in Ionia rivers are said to bring forth poets; all the Ionians give credit to [the river] Meles for the genius of Homer.

§ 60.3  In line with all this, [Apollo], leader of the Muses, in portioning out the whole earth [and giving part of it] to his sister [Artemis], chose to dwell among the Greeks himself but made [Ionian] Ephesus Artemis’s allotment. Actually, Apollo himself puts his arms around Ephesus, to the south and to the north, causing his tripods to resound from Branchidae and from Colophon. I make this salute to Ionia through you, dear guests. Tell the Ionians that they have their just verbal deserts from my tongue.

§ 60.4  I shall now tell you a story that is both Attic and Ionic. Once, during the festival of Dionysus, Pindar with his lyre had the full attention of his audience, as usual. Now some Ionian visitors, very prominent Ionians from the families that trace their ancestry back to Codrus and Neleus, came to Athens. They desired the mystic fire and initiation at Eleusis. Well, when they arrived, they found Pindar just beginning to win over a pair of young men. He delighted in the Muses, but on that occasion, since he was not feeling well, he acknowledged the arrival of the Ionians as best as he could, with only a short melody. But he told them that he would appear before an audience on the next day, and he retuned his lyre for them in preparation for the orthios nomos.

§ 61.1  As Studies Began
Let us honor the season for eloquence with an oration, so that, as if under the auspices of a lyre of the Muses, we may open Hermes’ doors with a song. For if the pipe opens the doors of a bedchamber, if trumpets go in procession before agonothetes, and if pastoral melodies escort a flock of sheep, then surely, as the season for eloquence begins, it will bid eloquent words honor it.

§ 61.2  Besides, I have often heard from other craftsmen, those who use their hands as well as literary craftsmen, that, before beginning instruction, they create examples of their art for those who come to learn it from them, so that the young may thereby learn the arts more easily. The painter is equipped with a tablet that has just been prepared and is ready to be sketched on. The sculptor displays wax figures and small statues as an introduction to his art.

§ 61.3  The piper teaches the student of piping by playing a tune on the reed instrument first himself, and the lyre-player teaches the student of the lyre by sounding the instrument himself before the students do. A boy holds onto the rudder with the aid of an old man, and the youth who is learning how to shoot fingers the arrow with the aid of an Indian archer. When birds lead their young out of the nest, don’t they teach them to venture on flying by spreading their own wings. The teacher of eloquence does the same thing so that he may teach the young to venture on speaking by lifting up their souls, just as people get nonswimmers to swim by supporting them with their hands.

§ 61.4  What I am saying is not inappropriate to our present situation. For we have two foreigners in our midst. One of them was a comrade of eloquence long ago and now comes here as an ambassador and agonothete; he came to us from the region where the Hellespont runs between Asia and Europe, splitting and separating them with its waves. The other individual is still young; he came here from abroad because he wished to taste of our rites.

§ 61.5  Come, then, let us tell him a story concerning his own country. Before Cimon, the Pamphylians were not genuinely Greeks; they still sided with the Medes and were followers of Xerxes and the Persians. But when Cimon defeated Pamphylia in a double victory, not only was the Eurymedon celebrated more than the Nile, but the Pamphylians also sided with the Athenians, and our city’s name was extolled even among them.

§ 62.1  The [Talk] He Published for a Constantinopolitan Student
I hear that the Ethiopian stone [statue] wondrously makes music when the light of day appears. (The Ethiopians themselves call this stone statue Memnon, saying that it is named after Memnon the son of Day.) According to the Ethiopians, when the statue first sees dawn smiling, it suddenly breaks its silence and makes music, producing melodies for its mother. Now is it right, my friends, for me to seem musically inferior to Memnon? Is it right for me to behold this city [Constantinople] in silence, without mobilizing every piece of music and every Siren for it?

§ 62.2  I think that I shall take up Pindar’s lyre and, with it, make music for this city. It will not be enough to call the city the support of Greece, the phrase that Pindar used with reference to Athens; rather it is the sweetest glory of every land that the sun shines on. Poseidon, king of the sea, surrounds you with his bluish waves, as if you were a Naiad nymph; he embraces you on every side and rejoices in you. Choruses of sea-purple Nereids, leaping on the surface of the waves, dance around the whole of you in a circle. Your lover is not some alien river, like those boasted of in certain poetic utterances about cities. No, it is divinely possessed emperors who love you; it is they who put the golden diadem [of walls] around you and added a kind of heavenly beauty to your earthly features.

§ 62.3  It would not be a lie to call you the apex of all Europe, for Europe begins from you and stretches to the very ocean and to the shores of the Atlantic. Every kind of sea displays itself around you. On one side, the Aegean comes up onto your beaches right through the middle of the Hellespont; on the other side, a narrow strait [the Bosporus] assumes the form of a river, as if contracted so that, through its agency, it can bring close to you, as a gift, the continent [of Asia]. And, in another part of the region, the Cyanean [rocks], which tragedy has called the Symplegades, close off the Propontis and send forth the great [Euxine (Black)] Sea from where they are located.

§ 62.4  So I find fault with Homer because, when wishing to write about Poseidon’s marriage, he makes a river’s wave his bridal chamber. He should have put the god’s bedroom on your shores, where he would have been able to have not a small amount of water, but the whole sea all around him—not a wave mimicking the sea, but the whole surging ocean around his bedroom.

§ 62.5  You alone have outdone the city of Romulus in the wonder you instill; you have combined such beauty with your size that the inhabitants of [Rome] have nothing to match with your beauty. Merchantmen sail to you from everywhere and from all harbors, in need of no Tiber to get to your fortifications; they put in immediately from the sea and tie their cables right to your walls.

§ 62.6  Since the Muses too must honor this city along with the other gods, they all gather here from everywhere, not only from Helicon and Pieria, and not only the ones who inhabit Pangaeum, but also those whom Attic meadows rear. They seem to me always to love this city and gladly to establish their choruses here, but to be delighted to dance here much more now because it happens that a man who takes his name from them and has rejoiced in their rites is governing the city.

§ 62.7  Thus I believe what Simonides has proclaimed about the Muses in his songs. This is what he says. The Muses always dance, and these goddesses love to be engaged in music and song. But whenever they see Apollo beginning to lead the dance, then they prolong their melody more than before and broadcast from Helicon an elaborately harmonious sound. One can see this happening now in the city under you, for everything everywhere is brimming with the Muses’ arts (mousikh¸ˇ) and has been adorned because of them. It was your great yearning [for me] that caused my eloquence to travel before its hair turned gray in Attic meadows and that brought it here and now persuades it to display its youthful beauty in public.

§ 62.8  But accept the first-fruits [of my oratory] with a tranquil countenance, O most excellent creature of the Muses [i.e., the “man who . . . is governing the city”]—for it is good to use such language of you. Please look upon my eloquence in this way, just as it expected when it undertook the present contest.

§ 63.i  A Discourse [Διάλεξις] in the Presence of His Students after His Return from His Homeland
[Himerius] delivered this [discourse] at home in the presence of his students after returning from his homeland [i.e., Bithynian Prusias] and before announcing a public oratorical display. Here he maintained that exercise in all skills is very useful before undertaking a more ambitious [display of them].

§ 63.1  Let us first sacrifice to the Muses at home—the sacrifice we offer them is, of course, a verbal one—and let the domestic hearth be the place where our offerings begin. For it is an Attic custom to conciliate the gods through domestic sacrifices before moving on to the mysteries outside of the home. Even in other matters it is our habit to go on and attempt something bigger only after beginning with something smaller. No sailor goes out into the vast ocean before he has got his ship going inside of the harbor. When the seaman sees that his ship is watertight in a contained part of the ocean, then he confidently lets it sail out onto the open sea.

§ 63.2  An athlete may be a first-class Olympic victor and have been grandly proclaimed as such by the Eleans; but if he sees that his bodily strength has not been put to use for some time, he does not enter the stadium until he has stripped for exercise in the palaestra. I know that serious musicians do not rush into public theaters without having first exercised their hands at home. The piper does not dare to go on stage unless he first warms up on his instrument in private. The lyre-player does not come before the public until he plays the lyre at leisure.

§ 63.3  And of course we see that those musical birds make their music in the air and up on tall trees only after they have practiced their melodies in this manner. So it is with the cicada sounding his melodies. So it is with the swan readying his wings to hymn Apollo. If a charioteer has been training a foal for a long time to run in a race, he does not immediately yoke the horse to the chariot; he first lets the foal exercise itself free of the yoke the wheels and only then mounts the chariot and guides the animal against its rivals.

§ 63.4  I want to tell all of you a story about this very point that I am making. The Ethiopians who live in the east are nomads and archers. The whole race keeps itself alive through archery—for they get their food by hunting—and those very same arrows are their weapons in war. To be precise, they ride around high up on elephants, just as if on horses, and shoot at their enemies from there. Now in the course of traversing much of the earth, Alexander [the Great] came to the land of these Ethiopians. When he made an inquiry and learned which Ethiopian was the best archer, he summoned that individual and asked for a demonstration of his skill. The man paused briefly and became quietly thoughtful. Then he said that he needed some practice, for he had not used the bow for a whole day. This is what the Ethiopian said.

§ 63.5  It seems to me that Homer also wishes to allude to this same principle in his poetry. He does not arm the man of Ithaca [Odysseus] against Antinoos, the [really] wicked one among the suitors, immediately after the former has ended his sea voyage and disembarked from the Phaeacians’ ship. Instead, Homer first gives Odysseus axes for practice, and only after the poet shows him successfully shooting at these axes does he present him bending his great bow against Antinoos.

§ 63.6  Well, then, boys, since I am returning to oratory after a considerable lapse of time, let me take it inside my own precincts and train it before stripping it [for a contest] on the public stage. Perhaps it will be very daring and utterly proud. Perhaps it wishes to be untiring and in full bloom, patterning itself on its divine founder [Apollo], whom poets, painters, and sculptors always depict as vigorous and young. For their art does not profess to be a cosmetic one; it always represents that god just as his father [Zeus] engendered him when he lay with the goddess [Leto].

§ 63.7  But since the custom is well-established that in declamation (εις ταῖς μελέταις) one practices before entering contests, let me sport [with oratory] in the privacy of my own home and reserve the contests themselves for the great theater.

§ 64.1  An Extempore Talk (Λαλιά) Delivered at His Modest School
On this island of Delos the inhabitants say that people are shown a temple that is modest [but regarded as great] in what is said and narrated about it. There a story prevails that, when Leto gave birth to the deities [Artemis and Apollo], her travails were ended, and Apollo, honored by the land, set up the sacred tripods there in the midst of the branches; from there he issued oracles to the Greeks. For the place where a person takes his first steps is sweet and highly prized, even if it seems small.

§ 64.2  The sailor delights in the harbor from which he began his first sea voyage, the soldier delights in the field where he first erected a trophy, and the farmer is fond of the land from which he cut his first stalks of grain. I have noticed that this same inclination obtained among the ancients. Odysseus prefers small Ithaca to Ogygia itself and to Calypso, Nestor prefers Pylos to Troy, and Aeacus prefers Aegina to Corinth. They say that, when Democedes of Croton was spending time with the king of the Persians and had access to all the very beautiful things available to him, he never preferred any of those things to Croton but regarded Susa, Bactra, the waters of the Choaspes, and the king’s golden table itself as inferior to the life he had in Croton.

§ 64.3  Come, then, since I have met with you here again for rhetorical purposes after having contended in many great auditoria, let me address this small one. O precinct of the Muses and of Hermes! O sacred and most lovely place, which first welcomed the fruits of my eloquence. Longing for you and welcoming you, I greeted your gold-roofed halls, I greeted your riches and those distinctions of yours that the masses embrace. The reputation I have acquired from you I regard as loftier than everything else. I think that people often experience a greater sense of wonder from smaller things than from things that seem large. What stranger who comes to Athens is more inquisitive about the great house of Hipponicus than about Demosthenes’ dwelling or Socrates’ abode? Who has ever gone to Thebes and desired to see Timagenides’ house and those of other rich men there instead of Pindar’s? Of the sites to see in their land, the Lacedaemonians especially show foreigners who come to Sparta the house of Lycurgus.

§ 64.4  So let us not be ashamed of this place, my boys, if we study eloquence here. Phidias’s workshop was small, but he sculpted his Zeus and his [Athena] Parthenos there; Praxiteles’ workshop was small, but everyone sailed to Cnidus. The nightingale’s thicket is small, yet everyone hears its melody at a distance; the swan’s meadow is small, yet there is nothing that does not wish to resound with its song.

§ 64.5  But please, O Muses’ Apollo—for you too delight, I think, in being called upon in the hymns of poets—please, you chorus of Muses who dwell on Helicon, do not abandon us as we speak. Be our fellow workers in letters (την μουσικήν) everywhere, whether we gather in small or large auditoria.

§ 65.1  To Those Involved a Conflict and Absent from a Lecture
At one point Homer gathers together an assembly, even though Achilles is absent from it; but it is small and sullen, as though, it seems to me, the poet wants to show that he convenes this meeting reluctantly and unwillingly. Consider that spectacle and what the poet thought about it. The king [Agamemnon] was depressed about the current situation and blamed fortune for having caused his whole army to be wounded. Of his soldiers and generals, one showed the effects of a blow to the forehead, another had been struck on the head, one had an injured hand, another had a missile lodged in his leg. So the sight of his army was painful to the king. For the poem shows us that he loved his soldiers very much. He was grieved and made sadder by the fact that the very leader of the Greeks [Achilles] had been forced by a serious wound to remain absent from battle.

§ 65.2  Let us approve of this attitude of the king, my boys; for I do think that, if a person rejoices with soldiers when they are winning and grieves with them when they are not doing well, we can take this as an indication that he has the mind of a general. For a person who accepts an unpleasant performance from dancers is certainly not skilled in [directing] a dance; no one who tolerates ineptness in sailors is skilled in seamanship. The lyre does not sound its song if even one string is not properly tuned. We enjoy listening to cicadas, but only when all of them produce their summer song together.

§ 65.3  But perhaps this is not the time to continue in a sullen vein. Fortune demands a recantation from me. Come, then, let us put this gloomy talk aside and hymn the gods’ victory. Let us pray that victory may attend [my oration] here. O golden-winged Victory, Victory, daughter of great Zeus, child of a noble father, and lover of laughter—for these are the epithets by which poetry exalts you—be propitious and grant that we may sacrifice to you again, as we have in the past, in celebration of a victory over barbarians.

§ 66.1  An Extempore Speech to Some Students Who Seemed to Be Rebellious
Again I shall use story with reference to the present situation. Again I shall call upon Aesop to come and help me. I have found for you, not a Libyan or an Egyptian tale, but one that comes right from the midst of the excellent Phrygians, among whom story first appeared—I found it among the very delights of Aesop—and I want to narrate this tale to all of you.

§ 66.2  When Apollo was tuning his lyre for a song—and it is my belief that he is always tuning his lyre, because he is nothing but lyre and word— the Muses came from all directions and stood around him, forming a chorus for the lyre. But another group also showed up as an audience for the song, some Dryad and Hamadryad nymphs. They were mountain spirits, and they may have been utterly wicked. When they expressed a desire to dance with the Muses, they seemed to be goddesses and were regarded as Muses. But when they leaped to the sound of the music in a boorish and sorry way and in disaccord with Apollo’s lyre, he got angry. Why shouldn’t he have got angry when he saw a most unrefined chorus prancing around. Yet he did not immediately resort to his arrows and quiver.

§ 66.3  Aesop, you see, does not tell the kinds of story about Apollo that Homer dared to tell in the Iliad. Homer often tells lies about the gods in his desire to curry favor with his audience. Consequently, I shall not readily believe that the gods have the characteristics that Homer assigns to them. I shall beg the Homerids to forgive me if I do accept such assertions about the gods. For how would it be possible for me to believe that Apollo, a god and leader of the Muses, always gets as angry as Homer wants him to get, or that he changes his looks in conformity with night, or that he takes hold of his arrows even to shoot a Greek subject [Il. 1.44–52]? Let us refuse to accept such assertions from Homerids and from any other poet who wishes so loosely to tell lies about the gods. Let us believe Aesop instead.

§ 66.4  Aesop does summon the gods to his tale and lets his reproach ascend to the heavens; but, unlike poets, the Phrygian [Aesop] has no desire to speak arrogantly against the gods. Although he fashions tales, all his remarks and utterances about the gods are such that they have some bit of wisdom cloaked in them.

§ 66.5  So what does that fashioner of tales do in his story when the chorus gets disorderly? He makes Apollo retune his lyre and change from a gentle to a harsh melody, and he has the god sound the strings with a plectrum rather than with his fingers. The mountains, glens, rivers, and birds in Aesop get angry along with Apollo when he is wronged by the nymphs. Helicon itself, as a result of its anguish, is now transformed into a human being, begins to speak, and protests against the nymphs. And let us not consider this feature of the story to be audacious. For if Helicon knows how to make poets out of shepherds—and we certainly believe Hesiod in this—then it is not right for us to be annoyed at the Phrygian [Aesop] for making a mountain speak.

§ 66.6  What, then, does Helicon say to the nymphs in the story? “Nymphs, where are you going? What is this grievous sting that has driven you mad. Why, having turned your backs on Helicon, the Muses’ workplace, do you hasten to Cithaeron? There are misfortunes and troubles on Cithaeron, and the praises of Cithaeron are a source of tragedy. I make poets out of shepherds, but Cithaeron turns those who are sound of mind into crazed beings. There a mother rages against her child, and family wages war on family; but here one finds offspring of the Muses and gardens of Mnemosyne and nourishment for [Mnemosyne’s] progeny. So they dance and sport with Apollo now, and of course they always accompany him as he sings. But as for your ailment, I fear that it may become part of theatrical repertoire and the preface to a sad tragedy for you.

§ 66.7  “But why all this talk? The nymphs are quickly anticipating the end of my speech. One of them there is right next to the god, another will soon be so, and yet another will become a devotee of this chorus before long. For the spell of Apollo’s lyre is overwhelming, and in its delightfulness it outdoes every charm of Aphrodite.. This is what Helicon says in Aesop. Whether this story has any bearing on the present situation is for all of you to surmise.

§ 68.i  A Protreptic [Talk] on the Need to Be Favorably Disposed to Variety in One’s Orations
[Himerius] delivered this [talk] before the oration that has the title “On the Derisive Remark”

§ 68.1  When I saw the theaters of Attic eloquence so parched, I hastened to relieve the drought with my eloquence, as if with a sudden burst of rain. Each land, you know, produces its distinctive fruits and offspring. Horses point to the Thessalian, long hair to the Celt, a lavish table to the Mede, the laurel to the Delphian, and war to the Spartiate. But the word and man are the fruits of this city [Athens].

§ 68.2  When any of those fruits is in decline, we say that the land that produces it is in bad condition. So when eloquence is thriving, it lifts Athens up to the heavens; but when it ceases to be heard, it casts the city back down. One can see that this is true from past times. The stage once flourished, and so did the city along with [dramatic] eloquence. The speaker’s platform blossomed with its rhetors, and so did the people’s thinking along with them. The Lyceum abounded in wise men at that time, and all majestic houses everywhere were filled with wisdom. But once the public voice became silent, speaking was almost [entirely] removed to [the private world of ] sailors and slaves.

§ 68.3  Come, then, boys, let us kindle the whole of eloquence, like an inextinguishable fire, and in this fire let us ensure the city’s preservation. This fire would shoot up and illuminate everything, if those who give shape to words would refuse always to be satisfied with the ancient models and instead would keep coming up with new works of art to fashion.

§ 68.4  For the conception of new works in a sense strengthened the talent of Phidias and the artistry of the other craftsmen whose hands we admire for their skill. Phidias did not always sculpture Zeus. He did not always make bronze statues of Athena armed. He applied his craft to other gods too; and he adorned the maiden [Athena] by letting a blush cover her cheeks, so that he might hide the goddess’s beauty under that blush rather than under a helmet.

§ 68.5  Isn’t art’s purpose the same in the case of Dionysus, whose form the theologians’ sons change into that of a young man? The god lets hair grow on his cheeks, and the golden down of a beard spreads over them. For this, I think, is the way in which the beautiful Dionysus had to be adorned; he had to have a beauty whose flowers would blossom together with the beauty of spring.

§ 68.6  And, with regard to other things, what has the plan of the great craftsman in heaven been? At one time he conceals the sun with clouds and whitens the whole earth and sea with snow. [By this wintry weather] he frightens the sailor and ships on the sea, he drives the cattleman and his animals from the meadows, he makes peace for the hoplite and hides his sword, and he makes the soldier unwarlike. At another time he gives humans spring, the clouds and sent the golden sun. He crowns the earth with flowers, the sky with choruses of stars, and the sea with calm and stillness. After this come ears and sheaves of grain, after ears of grain come fruits and grapes, the bounding winepresser, and the gleaming kindness of autumn.

§ 68.7  Look, if you wish, at that beautiful Homeric meadow that has everything in it, the meadow that the poets call “the shield of Achilles.. Examine the endless banquet on that shield, how many things it offers. One person does battle on it, another sails, one person’s thoughts are fixed on marriage, another’s on the tending of his cattle, someone is busy playing the lyre, someone else makes music flow from his pipe, here a person cuts grain with his sickle, and there someone else works the earth with a golden plough, behind which the soil seems to split open and blackens.

§ 68.8  Let us also, my boys, imitate Apollo’s most clever lyre. How did he tune it? Well, Colophon has his lyre, but his tripods [at Delphi] resound [with his oracular utterances] as well. Furthermore, you will see the waters of the Branchidae helping him issue his oracle; and you will also see the god prophesying in the midst of the Delians’ trees. At one time we honor Apollo as the sun, when, after bathing himself, he drives his horses up out of the ocean and above the earth with his falling hair and blazing fire; at another time we honor him as Dionysus with beautiful hair, when, having put the [sun’s] flame out, he delights in song and dance.

§ 68.9  It seems to me that Proteus was also a sophist, one skilled at eloquence. When a Momus with his censure-loving tongue verbally harassed him, he used many qualities of style in his response, so that he could thus prove that that Momus’s derisive remarks about him were false. But when Proteus encountered a more skillful sophist [i.e., Homer], he found himself being represented in that sophist’s tale as having the same multiformity that he had managed to achieve stylistically in his response to that Momus. Hence the Homeric Proteus [Od. 4.417–18, 456–58] kindles like a fire, flows like water, roars like a lion, grows tall and flourishes like a tree.

§ 68.10  I want to tell you one of Protagoras’s stories. When nature made human beings and the other animals, almost predisposed as it was to one pattern, it imposed a single shape on the appearance of all creatures. Upon becoming aware of this absence of embellishment, Zeus agreed to send the two heavenly beings—I mean Prometheus and Epimetheus—to help nature. They brought with them, from [the god] who had sent them, mind and perception, also strength and speed. Thus they introduced variety into nature’s pattern, altering it by this diversification of the appearance of what nature had fashioned. Reason received humankind; and the remaining faculties, in a fitting manner, received each of the other kinds of animal, making nature’s beauty motley now by the multiformity of its creatures.

§ 68.11  So, my boys, you, no less than I, have Protagoras’s story to prepare you through its myth to introduce variety into your orations. Actually, you opt for variety even before Protagoras and I do, for yesterday I saw you acting as workmen for your orator [i.e., Himerius], when you tossed your books aside and built this makeshift auditorium for the Muses, an auditorium that is much better than the wall erected against the Lacedaemonians by Demosthenes and the Athenians in Pylos. That wall was built because of the winter, but this auditorium was built because of the desire and yearning of your ears, which longed for a new declamation.

§ 68.12  But turn your gaze away from the walls [of the auditorium] to the tongue, and imitate Amphion, if you will. He applied his hands partly to the wall [of Thebes] and partly to his lyre and spread his country’s fame abroad because he walled Thebes so harmoniously.

§ 69.i  The Discourse (Διάλεξις) Delivered after His Wound Healed
[Himerius] delivered these remarks after his wound healed, when studies were [re]commencing and he was about to speak for the first time in the very same auditorium.

§ 69.1  It is time to open the lecture hall, my boys, since the Muses are giving eloquence its season. We must do what they say Hesiod did when he threw away his little pipe in his desire to attend on the Muses with his lyre. And let me first offer hospitality here to those who have come to my school from other lands, so that I may finally pay an old debt. I have not willingly let my tardiness in paying this debt reach this point in time. It is not a pleasant thing when eloquence takes time off, like those collectors of money who customarily seek to retreat from the crowd so that, when they encounter them [later], they will seem more impressive to those who behold them.

§ 69.2  But envy is good at abusing lofty tongues as well as lofty fortunes, and envy’s fight against eloquence is much more intense than its fight against material prosperity. For the lesser boon of material prosperity, although it has often incurred envy, does not provoke it very much; but a lofty and great tongue, I think, shoots at the very center of envy’s heart.

§ 69.3  So no human being in the whole world envied Sardanapalus, even though he ruled over countless people and, because of the way in which he decked himself out, was almost thought to be made of pure gold. But insolent envy did not let Palamedes and Orpheus go until it made them victims of an accuser and of madness respectively.

§ 69.4  And I know that on Homer’s plains many demigods became the playthings and sport of envy: “the son of Tydeus, strong Diomedes, has been hit; Odysseus, famous for his spear, has been hit, and also Agamemnon” [cf. Hom. Il. 11.660–61]. Envy chases the whole phalanx of heroes away from battle through the wounds they suffer. Poetry struck down even the gods themselves, as if it sought to console mortal heroes by pointing out that envy shoots its arrows as far as heaven. Thersites is the only one in Homer who is not injured, for he had nothing by which to annoy envy. “But endure, my heart,” said the wise man [Odysseus] after the Cyclopes, the Laestrygonians, and the ocean [Hom. Od. 20.18].

§ 69.5  Yet why do I need Odysseus? Why do I need Homer and the Cyclops? Come, in our fight against reproach let us rather seek consolation from the Muses and lyric poetry. Anacreon tuned his lyre after an illness and once again greeted his dear loves in song. Stesichorus also tuned his lyre after his suffering. There is a widespread story that Ibycus fell off his chariot as he was riding from Catana to Himera. Having broken his hand, he did not sing for quite some time but made his lyre a votive gift to Apollo.

§ 69.6  But enough of woes! Enough of pain and disease! Perhaps we cannot say “enough of envy,” though, so long as eloquence soars with its golden wings. Let us speak again, let us lead our chorus again in the midst of envy. Surely the Muses will do what they can to blunt envy’s arrows, for it is they who, like shepherds, tend to eloquence. Now the Muses’trumpets are sounding, the calls of sailors have come to an end, cicadas are breaking off their songs and giving way to the eloquence [of sophists], and nightingales are refraining from their melodious sounds and yielding to sophists. The Nile’s flow is abating, and what for a time was a sea is becoming a river [again]; it is the Muses’ rivers and streams whose waters are rising.

§ 69.7  Come, then, before proceeding to the rites and the shrine, let me tell you what it is right to do and to refrain from doing. Let all initiates and those entering the higher degree of initiation listen. Throw the balls out of your hands. Put all your energy into using your styluses. Put the palaestra’s games behind locked doors, and let the Muses’ workshops be opened. Say good-bye to the streets, and stay at home more and write. Hate the vulgar theater, and give your attention to the better theater [of the school of rhetoric]. Let luxury and the pursuit of pleasure be removed from your labors; show me that you can be austere and can overcome luxury. This is my pronouncement and law—a great deal contained in a few words. Whoever of you listens and obeys will let Iacchus’s song sound to the full; if any of you disobeys and has taken no heed of what I say, I shall conceal from him the [sacred] fire and lock him out of the shrines of eloquence.

§ 69.8  This pronouncement is for everybody, but it is especially directed, my young men, at those of you who are newly initiated and have recently come to me. Of these new students, [Mt.] Argaeus sent one—a mountain at whose foot sprout golden saplings of my family. The peoples and cities of the Galatians sent another, and this is the first “colony” they have dispatched to learn rhetoric [under me]. Some come to the mysteries who live close to the river Caicus; and when this pair leaves us and returns to that river, I think that it will swell with golden waters.

§ 69.9  Of course, among the initiates there is also a chorus from the Nile. When I have bedecked them with the Muses’ garlands, I shall send them from the Ilissus [River] to Egypt with a lyre, so that, with Attic frenzy, they may hymn the Nile’s sea. This is my proclamation, and it has been given by way of a preface. Let me now reveal the sacred [rites] to the initiates both in my actions and in my speech.

§ 74.i  The Theme [of This Talk] Is That One Must Always Be in Training
[Himerius] delivered this [talk] extempore in the summer.

§ 74.1  “Practice makes an endeavor succeed” [Hes. Op. 412]. These are the words of an emulous poet. But suppose that something other than this poet can urge us on, and that I call your attention to it and divulge it.Well, so that in this matter we do not put our trust just in the poets, I shall tell you a story about the topic under consideration.

§ 74.2  Once, during the Pythian Games, Timagenidas announced that he would play the pipe. But before he entered into competition with his fellow pipers, he quietly took leave of the crowd to practice solely in the company of his friends. First he practiced a melody on a single pipe, then, blowing more forcefully, on two instruments together. For a while he played a melody, restricting his practice to a prenomic tune; then he played what they call the nome of Athena’s contest [the Panathenaea].9. For practice, you see, cannot fail to spur on and keep improving people’s skills.

§ 74.3  Thus, a horse is swift at racing, not when he goes from the manger directly to the racecourse, but when he beholds the racecourse after a period of training. An athlete is quickly proclaimed the victor when he willingly subjects himself to training before going to the table. If a person is a soldier, I urge him not to wait for battles to occur, but to practice using his weapons in peacetime, before war breaks out. We see those devoted to agriculture attending to the plow before the setting of the Pleiades and sharpening the sickle before the rising of those goddesses so that, when summer comes, they will be ready to harvest the crops.

§ 74.4  As for those who are devoted to the spoken word, is there anything they should do except constantly to practice composing orations. I once heard a wise man—he was wise, that is, in the art that we pursue— expressing the opinion about the matter under discussion that “speech always comes from speech.”99

§ 74.5  The reason why the Attic myth deprives the nightingale of its tongue is that it does not speak incessantly but spends some of its time in silence and some in song. Myth thus calls its melody a lament, berating it, I think, because, although it is of Attic origin, it does not devote itself to singing incessantly. On the other hand, myth says that swans are sacred to Apollo and marvels at their song because they never stop fashioning a hymn of praise to their god through their singing.