Eumolpus, who migrated from Thrace, and taught the Greeks (as he still teaches them) the mysteries? And who was the father of Codrus that reigned at Athens? Was it not Melanthus, an exile from Messene? And do you not praise the answer of Antisthenes to the person who told him that his mother was a Phrygian, "So also is the mother of the gods." If you are twitted then with exile, why do you not answer, "The father of the glorious victor Hercules was an exile." And Cadmus, the grandfather of Dionysus, when he was sent from home to find Europa, and never came back, "though a Phœnician born he changed his country,"18 and migrated to Thebes, and became19 the grandfather of "Dionysus, who rejoices in the cry of Evoe, the exciter of women, who delights in frantic honours." As for what Æschylus obscurely hints at in the line,
let me keep a religious silence, as Herodotus20 says. And Empedocles commences his system of philosophy as follows, "It is an ordinance of necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, when anyone stains his hands with crime and murder, the long-lived demons get hold of him, so that he wanders away from the gods for thirty thousand years. Such is my condition now, that of an exile and wanderer from the gods." In these words he not only speaks of himself, but points out that all of us men similarly are strangers and foreigners and exiles in this world. For he says, "O men, it is not blood or a compounded spirit that made the being or beginning of the soul, but it is your earth-born and mortal body that is made up of these." He calls speciously by the mildest of names the birth of the soul that has come from elsewhere a living in a strange country. But the truth is the soul is an exile and wanderer, being driven about by the divine decrees and laws, and then, as in some sea-girt island, gets joined to the body like an oyster to its shell, as Plato says, because it cannot call to mind or remember from what honour and greatness of happiness it migrated, not from Sardis to Athens, nor from Corinth to Lemnos or Scyros, but exchanging heaven and the moon for earth and life upon earth, if it shifts from place to place for ever so short a time it is put out and feels strange, and fades away like a dying plant. But although