3.  Now we have no more meetings, no more debates, no more gatherings of wise men in the Forum, nothing more of all that made our city famous.  In our Forum nowadays it would be stranger for a learned or eloquent man to put in an appearance, than it would for men, shewing a brand of iniquity or unclean hands, to have presented themselves in Athens of old.  Instead of them we have the imported boorishness of Massagetæ and Scythians.  And only one noise is heard of drivers of bargains, and losers of bargains, and of fellows under the lash.  On either hand the porticoes resound with doleful echoes, as though they were uttering a natural and proper sound in groaning at what is going on.  Our distress prevents our paying any attention to locked gymnasia and nights when no torch is lighted.  There is no small danger lest, our magistrates being removed, everything crash down together as with fallen props.  What words can adequately describe our calamities?  Some have fled into exile, a considerable portion of our senate, and that not the least valuable, prefering perpetual banishment to Podandus. Now Podando, in Southern Cappadocia, made by Valens the chief town of the new division of the province.  When I mention Podandus, suppose me to mean the Spartan Ceadas So the Spartans named the pit into which condemned criminals were thrown.  Pausanias, Book IV. 18, 4.  Thucyd., i. 134.  Strabo, viii. 367. or any natural pit that you may have seen, spots breathing a noxious vapour, to which some have involuntarily given the name Charonian.  Picture to yourself that the evils of Podandus are a match for such a place.  So, of three parts, some have left their homes and are in exile, wives and hearth and all; some are being led away like captives, the majority of the best men in the city, a piteous spectacle to their friends, fulfilling their enemies’ prayers; if, that is, any one has ever been found to call down so dire a curse upon our heads.  A third division yet remains:  these, unable to endure abandonment by their old companions, and at the same time unable to provide for themselves, have to hate their very lives.