Lucian Patriae encomium 10

[10] How much affection real, true citizens have for their native land can be learned only among a people sprung from the soil. Newcomers, being but bastard children, as it were, transfer their allegiance easily, since they neither know nor love the name of native land, but expect to be well provided with the necessities of life wherever they may be,1 measuring happiness by their appetites! On the other hand, those who have a real mother-country love the soil on which they were born and bred, even if they own but little of it, and that be rough and thin. Though they be hard put to it to praise the soil, they will not lack words to extol their country. Indeed, when they see others priding themselves on their open plains and prairies diversified with all manner of growing things, they themselves do not forget the ¹ merits of their own country, and pass over its fitness for breeding horses to praise its fitness for breeding men.

[10] But if you would know the true man’s feeling for his country, it is in the born citizen that you must study it. The merely naturalized are a sort of bastards ever ready for another change; they know not nor love the name of country, but think they may find what they need in one place as well as another; their standard of happiness is the pleasures of the belly. Those whose country is their true mother love the land whereon they were born and bred, though it be narrow and rough and poor of soil. If they cannot vaunt the goodness of the land, they are still at no loss for praises of their country; if they see others making much of bounteous plains and meadows variegated with all plants that grow, they too can call up their country’s praise; another may breed good horses; what matter? theirs breeds good men.