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On Revenues by Xenophon
page 4 of 37 (10%)
fruit-bearing. And as with the soil so with the sea indenting our
coasts, the varied productivity of which is exceptionally great. Again
with regard to those kindly fruits of earth[3] which Providence
bestows on man season by season, one and all they commence earlier and
end later in this land. Nor is the supremacy of Attica shown only in
those products which year after year flourish and grow old, but the
land contains treasures of a more perennial kind. Within its folds
lies imbedded by nature an unstinted store of marble, out of which are
chiselled[4] temples and altars of rarest beauty and the glittering
splendour of images sacred to the gods. This marble, moreover, is an
obejct of desire to many foreigners, Hellenes and barbarians alike.
Then there is land which, although it yields no fruit to the sower,
needs only to be quarried in order to feed many times more mouths than
it could as corn-land. Doubtless we owe it to a divine dispensation
that our land is veined with silver; if we consider how many
neighbouring states lie round us by land and sea and yet into none of
them does a single thinnest vein of silver penetrate.

[3] Lit. "those good things which the gods afford in their seasons."

[4] Or, "arise," or "are fashioned."

Indeed it would be scarcely irrational to maintain that the city of
Athens lies at the navel, not of Hellas merely, but of the habitable
world. So true is it, that the farther we remove from Athens the
greater the extreme of heat or cold to be encountered; or to use
another illustration, the traveller who desires to traverse the
confines of Hellas from end to end will find that, whether he voyages
by sea or by land, he is describing a circle, the centre of which is
Athens.[5]
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