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(Oratio XIII.167c-168c)
For the city of Constantine and of the son of Constantine, with whose blood you have been mixed and the race of founders is already immortal and secure for us through the blood that you share with them, this city was in a certain sense beautiful even before and did not shame the love of the founders but with all their zeal and eagerness both lovers ended up seeing it beautiful rather than making it so. It was as if somebody fell in love with a beautiful and noble woman and took care of rouge and makeup and cosmetics and other things (so that very many of them appeared on her) and by Jove also of precious bracelets and earrings and purple and gilded dresses, and dressed her up once with these and then again with others and applied makeup to her and brought things together from every land and sea, but saw her afflicted by thirst and drought and not far from vanishing together with the gold and together with the purple. Form such a love the beloved has indeed great profit! But your uncle who as I believe divined that you would wed the city, instead of making a mere sketch strove to inscribe the name of Constantine on an adamantine pillar and he made her the mother of imperial rank and soon gave the city clouds, which he took from Zeus out of heaven, having gathered as maidservants in one place these, which were situated here and there far apart from each other and which squatted unpleasant and useless haunts. And they, faster than wings and thought, either fly high up through the air or run underneath steep jutting hills, in the earth and in the air, resembling a bunch of grapes as regards their backs, more than a thousand stadia uphill and downhill, neither running upwards nor downwards, and neither being held down nor being held in. And roofed over they come together and they have arrived here before the gates and they camp in the open waiting for the originator in order that with him as host they might settle in their temple, in which dance together Hephaestus and Asclepius and Panacea.
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