[80,0] THE EIGHTIETH DISCOURSE : ON FREEDOM.
(1) You perhaps are surprised and consider it past all 
belief and a mark of one who is by no means of sound 
judgement if a person abandons all that most men 
view with serious regard and, as one might say, permits 
riches and fame and pleasures to drift downstream 
but goes about as neither farmer nor trader nor 
soldier nor general, nor as shoemaker or builder or 
physician or orator, nor as one engaged in any other 
customary occupation, but, on the other hand, comes 
and goes in this strange fashion and puts in an 
appearance in places where he has no business at all 
but rather where chance and impulse may lead him. 
Council chambers and theatres and assemblies he has 
held in light esteem, and yet he conducts a popular 
assembly all by himself ; the spectacles which attract 
his gaze are not dancers or singers or boxers or 
wrestlers, but buyers and strollers and talkers and 
fighters ; sometimes all these receive his very strict 
attention, and he derives from them much more 
enjoyment than do boys at athletic contests and 
theatrical performances, although he does not come 
ahead of time or keep awake all night to get a seat 
or get crushed by the crowd ; at other times, on the 
contrary, he neither hears nor sees any single one 
of them, but ignores their existence, thinking of anything 
that suits his fancy and acting without fear.
(3) As for myself, however, I regard it as a splendid 
and blessed state of being, if in the midst of slaves 
one can be a free man and in the midst of subjects 
be independent. To attain this state many wars 
were waged by the Lydians against the Phrygians 
and by the Phrygians against the Lydians, and 
many, too, by both Ionians and Dorians and, in fact, 
by all peoples, fools that they were to be enamoured 
of a counterfeit of freedom ! Yet none of them has 
undertaken to use his own personal laws ; instead 
they all wrangle over the laws of Solon and Draco 
and Numa and Zaleucus, bent on following the one 
code but not the other, though, on the other hand, 
not even one of these law-givers had framed the sort 
of laws he should. Why, Solon himself, according 
to report, declared that he was proposing for the 
Athenians, not what satisfied himself, but rather 
what he assumed they would accept.
(4) Evidently, therefore, he composed bad laws, if 
indeed he composed the laws which would satisfy 
bad men ; but, for all that, even Solon himself used 
these laws, bad as they were and not satisfactory 
to himself. Clearly, then, not one of these law-givers 
had any claim to independence, nor did they 
exert themselves or wage war for the purpose of
being free ; on the contrary, after they had gathered 
within the compass of their city walls slavery without 
bound or limit, thereupon with ramparts and towers 
and missiles they tried to protect themselves against 
the chance that freedom might make its entry among 
them from without, just as if, when a ship's seams 
have opened up and the hold is already taking water, 
one were to take measures of prevention and be 
concerned lest perchance the sea might sweep over 
from above. Accordingly, just as it is said that the 
Trojans for Helen's sake endured siege and death, 
although she was not at Troy but in Egypt, just 
so has it been with these men—in behalf of their 
freedom they fought and struggled, when all the 
while they had no freedom.

[80,5] Yet not only did these men of old profess to be 
enduring all things in defence of the laws, but even 
now men say that justice resides in whatever laws 
they themselves, luckless creatures that they are, 
may frame or else inherit from others like themselves. 
But the law which is true and binding and plain to 
behold they neither see nor make a guide for their 
life. So at noon, as it were, beneath the blazing sun, 
they go about with torches and flambeaux in their 
hands, ignoring the light of heaven but following 
smoke if it shows even a slight glint of fire. Thus, 
while the law of nature is abandoned and eclipsed 
with you, poor unfortunates that you are, tablets 
and statute books and slabs of stone with their fruitless 
symbols are treasured by you.
(6) Again, while the ordinance of Zeus you transgressed
long ago, the ordinance of this man or of that you 
make it your aim that no man shall transgress. 
Moreover, the curse which the Athenians established 
in connexion with Solon's laws against all who should 
attempt to destroy them  you fail to see is more 
valid touching the laws of Zeus, for it is wholly inevitable 
that he who attempts to nullify the ordinance 
of Zeus shall be an outlaw—except that in this 
instance children and kinsmen of the guilty are not 
included in the punishment, as they were at Athens ; 
instead, each is held accountable for his own misfortune. 
Whoever, therefore, tries to rescue this 
ordinance as best he can and to guard his own conduct 
I for my part would never say is lacking in judgement.
(7) But much more do I marvel at and pity you  for 
the grievous and unlawful slavery under whose yoke 
you have placed your necks, for you have thrown 
about you not merely one set of fetters or two but 
thousands, fetters by which you are throttled and 
oppressed much more than are those who drag themselves 
along in chains and halters and shackles. For 
they have the chance of release or of breaking their 
bonds and fleeing, but you are always strengthening 
your bonds and making them more numerous and 
stronger. Moreover, merely because you do not see 
your bonds, do not think that these words of mine 
are false and untrustworthy ; nay, consider Homer —
who in your estimation is wisest of all—and what 
kind of bonds he says made Ares captive,
"Although the fleetest of the gods who hold 
Olympus, bonds like filmy spider-webs, 
Which no man e'en could see."
(8) Then, think not that Ares, god that he was and 
mighty, was made captive by bonds so delicate and 
invisible withal, and yet that you yourselves, of all 
creatures the weakest, could never be made captive 
by means of bonds that are invisible but only by such 
as have been well made of steel and brass. Your 
bodies, to be sure, being solid and for the most part 
composed of earth, require bonds of that kind to 
master them ; but since soul is invisible and delicate 
by nature, why might it not get bonds of like description ? 
But you have made for yourselves stubborn, 
adamantine bonds, contriving them by any and 
every means, surpassing even Daedalus himself in 
your craft and in your eagerness to insure that every 
particle of your soul shall have been fettered and 
none of it be free or independent. For what were 
the dungeon of the Cnossians and the crooked windings 
of the Labyrinth compared to the crookedness 
and the intricacy of folly ? What was the Sicilian 
prison of the Athenian captives, who were cast into 
a sort of rocky pit ? What was the Ceadas of the 
Spartans, or the ash-filled room that the Persians
had, or, by Zeus, what were the cruel fathers of certain 
maidens, who, as the poets tell us,
"Immured them in prison tells of encircling bronze ?"
But, methinks, I too am no longer acting sensibly 
in giving more space in my remarks to the misfortunes 
of mankind than to the disgraceful, odious 
slavery in which you all have been enslaved, a 
slavery from which men cannot escape by providing 
themselves with fine threads by the aid of a foolish 
maiden, as the farnous Theseus is said to have escaped 
in safety from Crete —at least, I fancy, not unless 
Athena herself were to lend her aid and join in the 
rescue. 

[80,10] For if I should wish to name all the prisons 
and the bonds of witless, wretched human beings by 
means of which you have made yourselves prisoners, 
possibly you would think me an exceedingly disagreeable 
and sorry poet for composing tragedies 
on your own misfortunes. For it is not merely 
with bonds such as confine those whom you consider 
criminals—bonds about neck and arms and legs—but 
with a special bond for the belly and for each of the 
other parts that they have been made captive, and 
with a constraint which is both varied and complex ;
rnoreover, I believe that any one who had seen the 
spectacle would have been delighted by it and would 
exceedingly admire the conceit.
(11) For first, I fancy, there comes to each a mistress 
who is in other respects harsh and ill-disposed and 
treacherous, but in appearance cheerful and with a 
smile for all, "A smile of portent grim,"
and in her hands she bears fetters to match her 
nature, flowery and soft at first glance, such as those 
with which one might expect that kings or tyrants 
and all who have been called "sons of the Blest " 
have been bound ; yet nothing is more grievous than 
these bonds, nothing clings more closely and exerts 
more pressure. After her there comes a second, 
bearing a sort of collar of gold or silver. Having 
put this about their necks, she drags men in private 
station around every land and sea, yes, and kings as 
well, according to Hesiod, and she drags generals of 
cities to the gates, so as to open them and act the 
traitor. And yet she professes to be solicitous for 
these whom she destroys, and to be making them 
happy—just as once upon a time Cyrus bound 
Astyages with golden fetters, as being, evidently, 
solicitous for his grandfather ! 
(13) But it would be a huge undertaking to enumerate
all the varieties of the fetters. Still, one variety 
deserves not to be overlooked, the most amazing of 
them all and the most complicated, one carried by 
the harshest mistress, a combination of gold and 
silver and all sorts of stones and pebbles and horns 
and tusks and shells of animals and, furthermore, 
purple dyes and countless other things, a sort of 
costly, marvellous necklace which she had contrived, 
imitating in it many patterns and forms—crowns and 
sceptres and diadems and lofty thrones—just as the 
over-subtle craftsmen in fashioning certain couches 
or doors or ceilings of houses contrive to make them 
appear something different from what they are ; I 
mean, for example, making bosses on doors resemble 
heads of animals, and likewise with bosses on columns. 
And, furthermore, in this collar are found noise and 
sound of every kind, both of clapping hands and of 
clucking tongues. So this collar, in turn, is placed 
about the necks of both demagogues and kings. But 
let us not ourselves be carried along too far by our 
simile, as if actually following a word-phantom, as 
Homer caused Achilles to go a long way off in 
following the phantom of Agenor. This will suffice.