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for bloody war. He is analogous to an isolated counter in a game of draughts.
    Aristotle, it seems, was incapable of conceiving an acceptable alternative to a polis-centered life. And since the polis was a civilized and indeed civilizing force, the exile, having to fight for his survival on a daily basis, was in his view reduced to the condition of a brute animal. To make matters worse, such a person threatened the security of the polis to which he formerly belonged by yearning for “bloody civil war,” since only as the result of an overthrow of the governing faction could he eventually hope to return to his homeland.
    In his Encomium of Helen , probably dated 370, Isocrates chastised the sophists “for daring to assert that the life of beggars and refugees is more enviable than that of the rest of us.” He continued, “They use this as proof that if they can speak to good effect on a worthless subject, then they’ll have plenty to say about a subject which has real merit” (10.8). In other words, if sophists have the skill to refute what is blindingly obvious—that the life of the refugee is the most wretched condition imaginable—then there is no argument under the sun that they cannot prove or disprove. His comments make clear that the philosophical genre of consolation was already well-established by the first half of the fourth century, even though no extended example has survived from this period. It was to last for well over half a millennium.
    The lot of those Greeks who were driven into exile was compounded of uncertainty, danger, hardship, and privation. All this, however, wasnothing to a man of solid moral fiber. “Cheer up and get a grip of yourself. It isn’t such a bad thing being an exile, especially if you put on a brave face. You might even see it as a welcome challenge to the fortitude you’ve developed all your life.” That is because exile is primarily a state of mind, rather than a physical state of being. The evils that it visits upon an individual are therefore surmountable, partly by other attendant goods that one may possess to offset them and partly by a positive mental attitude. The first surviving treatise of this kind is by a Cynic philosopher called Teles, who flourished in ca. 235 BCE (pp. 21.2–30.1, Hense 1909). Though its composition lies outside the period covered by this survey, the arguments are likely to have been well-rehearsed, since, as we have just noted, the genre was already a century and a half old. Teles first sets up the proposition that exile, far from harming a man’s soul or his body or even his possessions, actually gives him the opportunity to improve his material circumstances, as the lives of the mythical Phoenix and the historical Themistocles demonstrate. He then refutes a number of objections that might be raised to his proposition. For instance, in response to the claim that exiles are deprived of freedom of speech, Teles argues that many of them do indeed enjoy influence with foreign potentates; to the objection that exiles are not permitted to return home, he replies that no one alive has complete freedom of movement; and to the argument that exiles must suffer the disgrace of being buried abroad, he points out that this is the fate of many of the best men. He then ridicules Polyneices’ request to be buried in his native Thebes, given the fact that his body will either rot or be scavenged wherever it lies (Eur. Phoen . 1447–50).
    The longest surviving example in the genre is Plutarch’s treatise On Exile . We do not know the addressee’s identity for certain, but it is likely that his name was Menemachus, a native of Sardis in Lydia, who passed a portion of his exile in Athens at the end of the first century CE. Rather in the manner of a preacher delivering a sermon, Plutarch takes his cue from Euripides’s Phoenician Women (l. 388–89):
    What’s it like to be deprived of