6
The reason, I take it, for which men amass education and learning is that they may thereby make themselves more useful to their native land, and they likewise acquire riches out of ambition to contribute to its common funds. With reason, I think: for men should not be ungrateful when they have received the greatest favours. On the contrary, if a man returns thanks to individuals, as is right, when he has been well treated by them, much more should he requite his country with its due. To wrong one’s parents is against the law of the different states; but counting our native land the common mother of us all, we should give her thank-offerings for our nurture and for our knowledge of the law itself.
7
No one was ever known to be so forgetful of his country as to care nothing for it when he was in another state. No, those who get on badly in foreign parts continually cry out that one’s own country is the greatest of all blessings, while those who get on well, however successful they may be in all else, think that they lack one thing at least, a thing of the greatest importance, in that they do not live in their own country but sojourn in a strange land; for thus to sojourn is a reproach! And men who during their years abroad have, become illustrious through acquirement of wealth, through renown from office- holding, through testimony to their culture, or through praise of their bravery, can be seen hurrying one and all to their native land, as if they thought they could not anywhere else find better people before whom to display the evidences of their success. The more a man is esteemed elsewhere, the more eager is he to regain his own country.
8
Even the young love their native land; but aged men, being wiser, love it more. In fact, every aged man yearns and prays to end his life in it, that there in the place where he began to live he may
