9
€posit his body in the earth which nurtured him: and may share the graves of his fathers. He thinks it a calamity to be guilty of being an alien even after death, through lying buried in a strange land.
10
How much affection real, true citizens have for their native land can be learned only among a people sprung from the soil. Newcomers, being but bastard children, as it were, transfer their allegiance easily, since they neither know nor love the name of native land, but expect to be well provided with the necessities of life wherever they may be,1 measuring happiness by their appetites! On the other hand, those who have a real mother-country love the soil on which they were born and bred, even if they own but little of it, and that be rough and thin. Though they be hard put to it to praise the soil, they will not lack words to extol their country. Indeed, when they see others priding themselves on their open plains and prairies diversified with all manner of growing things, they themselves do not forget the Cf. Thucydides 1, 1. merits of their own country, and pass over its fitness for breeding horses to praise its fitness for breeding men.
11
One hastens to his native land though he be an islander, and though he could lead a life of ease elsewhere. If immortality be offered him he will not accept it, preferring a grave in his native land, and the smoke thereof is brighter to his eyes than fire elsewhere. This passage is full of allusions to the Odyssey. Ithaca, “rough, but good for breeding men” (9, 27), is not fit for horses (4, 601). Odysseus, the islander, who might have been happy, even immortal, with Circe (5, 135; 2U8), will not accept immortality, for his native land is dearer than all else to him (9, 27 ff.) and he longs to see the very smoke arising from it (1, 57).
