- Location
- his hidden lair
And yet you would open a gate we can not close. If noble Kymai must live on lest it all to be worthless- what of others who seek the prosperity and safety of magnificent Epulia? Our ways are not the ways of barbaroi, there are far too many poli to know them all by name. To know how the Akarnians are distributed amongst their fair poli, to know that any would be colonists don't come in their motley thousands and claim that their polis, not matter how small or unknown to us is sacrosanct. That they do not come to start a new life for themselves in fair Epulia, but to start their existing life anew? Can we deny them knowing we could not bring ourselves to deny the Kymaians? Can we decry them for the audacity to have such civic virtue as to seek the continuation of their polis? A thousand possibilities, and a dozen poli neither I nor you can name- can we embrace hypocrisy and refuse them, or can we indulge them at our magnificence and see the league of brotherhood we have fought and died for wither in the face of their 'rights' to maintain the continuity of their polis. No kindness, no matter how grand or impressive ought ignore the precedent it sets, doubly so when the kindness is one brought over the abrogation of law.
Does not the farmer have fears that the barbaroi might steal away with his crops? No matter how banal these concerns are today the memory lingers. The memory of the menace beyond our walls we have now yoked can be a frightful thing. How frightful the memories of barbaroi, xenos from hinterlands beyond the sight of the polis, descending on grand and beautiful Kymai and driving her to the brink. To see one's fellow citizens starve and waste away as the chattering horde lurks beyond the gates. How might that memory remain once one is whisked to a strange land and a strange people? How might those strange people remain strange, if one lets the memory poison one against them? How might the opportunity for well wishes and good feeling might fall on deaf ears because the cries of battle and desperation ring all the louder still.
Ah, but any virtuous Eretrian knows that the Tarantines were quick to war against us, their former brothers, that they were too blinded by emotion and our percieved betrayal to understand how circumstance forced our hand and in doing so wounded us. A Tarantine is by no means one deserving of contempt, but so too are they a stranger among us, and will remain a stranger because their ways are not our ways and will always remain that way. Because the fleeting meetings of the years is by no means enough to impress on one another our virtues and our vices.
I find it too cruel to save the Kymaians and then to abandon them on the coast of a strange land for their betterment. Nay, I would walk Nea Kymai among them, aid in the raising of their houses, the cutting of their palisade, and the building of their fishing boats. As a neighbor, and one who seeks to embrace them in brotherly love and see that the Nea Kymaians learn of us, and that we learn of them. I must remind this most honored assembly that the work in regaining the glory and magnificence of Kymai does not stop on arrival, just as the arrival of Eretria Eskhata heralded more challenges to come. That we of this great Ekklesia should know better than most that it is in it's people that a polis' meaning lies, it's institutions given weight and meaning by their will and the gods. That more hands will make light of the work before the Nea Kymaians, for you have raised the point of Athenian aid and unwanted intrusion by the Great Owl- but was it not in those heady days that any man who would break ground with you, raise houses with you, and lay the seed of your city's survival was a man most fitting to be embraced as a fellow citizen? How can we spite this tradition, as passed down to our colonies through the Linean Laws in the name of Kymai's traditions and call it good?
So says Philometer, boat builder and son of Nikolaos.
