Ath. so I am afraid of making you think that I am a great talker about a small matter, if I spin out a discourse of prodigious length about the small matter of drunkenness. But the fact is that the right ordering of this could never be treated adequately and clearly in our discourse apart from rightness in music, nor could music, apart from education as a whole; and these require lengthy discussions. Consider, then, what we are to do: suppose we leave these matters over for the present, and take up some other legal topic instead.
Meg. O Stranger of Athens, you are not, perhaps, aware that our family is, in fact, a proxenus
Footnote 1A proxenus
was a native who acted as official representative of a foreign State. of your State. It is probably true of all children that, when once they have been told that they are proxeni
of a certain State, they conceive an affection for that State even from infancy, and each of them regards it as a second mother-land, next after his own country. That is precisely the feeling I now experience. For through hearing mere children crying out—
whenever they, being the Lacedaemonians, were blaming the Athenians for anything or praising them—Your State, Megillus, has done us a bad turn or a good one,
—through hearing such remarks, I say, and constantly fighting your battles against those who were thus decrying your State, I acquired a deep affection for it; so that now not only do I delight in your accent, but I regard as absolutely true the common saying that good Athenians are always incomparably good,
for they alone are good
not by outward compulsion but by inner disposition. Thus, so far as I am concerned, you may speak without fear and say all you please.
Clin. My story, too, Stranger, when you hear it, will show you that you may boldly say all you wish. You have probably heard how that inspired man Epimenides, who was a family connection of ours, was born in Crete; and how ten years Footnote 2Epimenides really lived about 600 B.C. before the Persian War, in obedience to the oracle of the god, he went to Athens and offered certain sacrifices which the god had ordained; and how, moreover, when the Athenians were alarmed at the Persians’ expeditionary force,
he made this prophecy—They will not come for ten years, and when they do come, they will return back again with all their hopes frustrated, and after suffering more woes than they inflict.