Page:1888 Cicero's Tusculan Disputations.djvu/405

 to corrupt influences, and revolutions of manners. Their civilization is more or less adulterated by new languages and customs, and they import not only foreign merchandise, but foreign fashions, to such a degree that nothing can continue unalloyed in the national institutions. Those who inhabit these maritime towns do not remain in their native place, but are urged afar from their homes by winged hope and speculation. And even when they do not desert their country in person, still their minds are always expatiating and voyaging round the world. Nor, indeed, was there any cause which more deeply undermined Corinth and Carthage, and at last overthrew them both, than this wandering and dispersion of their citizens, whom the passion of commerce and navigation had induced to abandon the cultivation of their lands and their attention to military pursuits. The proximity of the sea likewise administers to maritime cities a multitude of pernicious incentives to luxury, which are either acquired by victory or imported by commerce; and the very agreeableness of their position nourishes many expensive and deceitful gratifications of the passions. And what I have spoken of Corinth may be applied, for aught I know, without incorrectness to the whole of Greece. For the Peloponnesus itself is almost wholly on the sea-coast; nor, besides the Phliasians, are there any whose lands do not touch the sea; and beyond the Peloponnesus, the Ænianes, the Dorians, and the Dolopes are the only inland people. Why should I speak of the Grecian islands, which, girded by the waves, seem all afloat, as it were, together with the institutions and manners of their cities? And these things, I have before noticed, do not respect ancient Greece only; for which of all those colonies which have been led from Greece into Asia, Thracia, Italy, Sicily, and Africa, with the single exception of Magnesia, is there that is not washed by the sea? Thus it seems as if a sort of Grecian coast had been annexed to territories of the barbarians. For among the barbarians themselves none were heretofore a maritime people, if we except the Carthaginians and Etruscans; one for the sake of commerce, the other of pillage. And this is one evident reason of the calamities and revolutions of Greece,