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Transcriber’s Notes: Words in italics in the original are surrounded
with _underscores_. In the main body of the text, words in mixed case
and all cap small caps are in capital letters.
A Table of Contents has been added by the transcriber.
Synopsis.
Introduction.
Plutarch on the Delay of the Divine Justice.
Index.
A complete list of corrections as well as other notes follows the text.
PLUTARCH
ON THE
DELAY OF THE DIVINE JUSTICE.
TRANSLATED
WITH
AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES.
BY
ANDREW P. PEABODY.
BOSTON:
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
1885.
_Copyright, 1885_,
By Andrew P. Peabody.
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
SYNOPSIS.
§ 1. The dialogue opens with comments on the cavils against
the Divine Providence by a person who is supposed to have
just departed.
2. The alleged encouragement to the guilty by the delay of
punishment, while the sufferers by the guilt of others
are disheartened by failing to see the wrong-doers duly
punished.
3. The guilty themselves, it is said, do not recognize
punishment when it comes late, but think it mere misfortune.
4. Plutarch answers the objections to the course of
Providence. In the first place, man must not be too
confident of his ability to pass judgment on things divine.
There are many things in human legislation undoubtedly
reasonable, yet with no obvious reason. How much more in
the administration of the universe by the Supreme Being!
5. God by the delay of punishment gives man the example of
forbearance, and rebukes his yielding to the first impulses
of anger and of a vindictive temper.
6. God has reference, in the delay of punishment, to the
possible reformation of the guilty, and to the services
which, when reformed, they may render to their country or
their race. Instances cited.
7. The wicked often have their punishment postponed till after
they have rendered some important service in which they
are essential agents, and sometimes that, before their own
punishment, they may serve as executioners for other guilty
persons or communities.
8. There is frequently a peculiar timeliness and
appropriateness in delayed punishment.
9. Punishment is delayed only in appearance, but commences
when the guilt is incurred, so that it seems slow because
it is long.
10. Instances of punishment in visions, apprehensions, and
inward wretchedness, while there was no outward infliction
of penalty.
11. There is really no need that punishment be inflicted; guilt
is in the consciousness of the guilty its own adequate
punishment.
12. Objection is made by one of the interlocutors to the
justice of punishing children or posterity for the guilt
of fathers or ancestors, and he heaps up an incongruous
collection of cases in which he mingles confusedly the
action of the Divine Providence and that of human caprice
or malignity.
13. In answer to the objection, Plutarch first adduces as a
precisely parallel order of things, with which no one finds
fault, that by which children or posterity derive enduring
benefit and honor from a parent’s or ancestor’s virtues and
services.
14. There are alike in outward and in human nature occult and
subtle transmissions of qualities and properties, both in
time and in space. Those in space are so familiar that they
excite no wonder; those in time, though less liable to
attract notice, are no more wonderful.
15. A city has a continuous life, a definite and permanent
character, and an individual unity, so that its moral
responsibility may long outlast the lives of those who
first contracted a specific form of guilt.
16. The same is to be said of a family or a race; and,
moreover, the punishment for inherited guilt may often have
a curative, or even a preventive efficacy, so that children
or posterity may refrain from guilt because the ancestral
penalty falls upon them before they become guilty.
17. The immortality of the soul asserted, on the ground that
God would not have deemed a race doomed to perish after a
brief earthly life worth rewarding or punishing.
18. Punishments in a future state of being are out of sight,
and are liable to be disbelieved. Therefore it is
necessary, in order to deter men from guilt, that there
should be visible punishments in this life.
19. The remedial efficacy of the penal consequences of parental
or ancestral guilt reaffirmed, and illustrated by analogies
in the treatment of disease.
20. God often punishes latent and potential vice, visible only
to Omniscience.
21. If a child has no taint of a father’s vices, he remains
unpunished. But moral qualities, equally with physical
traits, often lapse in the first generation, and reappear
in the second or third, and even later.
22. The story of Thespesius, who—apparently killed, but really
in a trance, in consequence of a fall—went into the
infernal regions, beheld the punishments there inflicted,
and came back to the body and its life, converted from a
profligate into a man of pre-eminent virtue and excellence.
INTRODUCTION.[vii:1]
Plutarch[vii:2] was born, about the middle of the first Christian
century, at Cheroneia in Boeotia, where he spent the greater part
of his life, and where he probably died. The precise dates of his
birth and death are unknown; but he can hardly have been born earlier
than A. D. 45, and he must have lived nearly or quite till
A. D. 120, as some of his works contain references to events
that cannot have taken place earlier than the second decade of the
second century. We know little of him from other sources, much from
his own writings. There may have been many such men in his time; but
antiquity has transmitted to us no record like his. He reminds one
of such men as were to be found half a century ago in many of our
American country towns. Those potentially like them have now, for the
most part, emigrated to the large cities, and have become very unlike
their prototypes. Cheroneia, with its great memories, was a small and
insignificant town, and Plutarch was a country gentleman, superior, as
in culture so in serviceableness, to all his fellow citizens, holding
the foremost place in municipal affairs, liberal, generous, chosen to
all local offices of honor, and especially of trust and responsibility,
associating on the most pleasant terms with the common people, always
ready to give them his advice and aid, and evidently respected and
beloved by all. He belonged to an old and distinguished family, and
seems always to have possessed a competency for an affluent, though
sober, domestic establishment and style of living, and for an unstinted
hospitality. He was probably the richest man in his native city; for
he assigns as a reason for not leaving it and living at some centre
of intellectual activity, that Cheroneia could not afford to lose the
property which he would take with him in case of his removal.
He had what corresponds to our university education, at Athens, under
the Peripatetic philosopher Ammonius. He also visited Alexandria, then
a renowned seat of learning; but how long he stayed there, or whether
he extended his Egyptian travel beyond that city, we have no means of
knowing. There is no proof of his having been in Rome or in Italy more
than once, and that was when he was about forty years of age. He went
to Rome on public business, probably in behalf of his native city,
and remained there long enough to become acquainted with some eminent
men, to make himself known as a scholar and an ethical philosopher,
and to deliver lectures that attracted no little public notice. This
visit seems to have been the great event of his life, as a winter spent
in Boston or New York used to be in the life of one of our country
gentlemen before the time of railways.
He had a wife, who appears to have been of a character kindred to his
own; at least five children, of whom two sons, if not more, lived to
be themselves substantial citizens and worthy members of society;
and two brothers, who seem to have possessed his full confidence and
warm affection. He was singularly happy in his relations to a large
circle of friends, especially in Athens, for which he had the lifelong
love that students in our time acquire for a university town. He was
archon, or mayor, of Cheroneia, probably more than once,—the office
having doubtless been annual and elective,—and in this capacity he
entered, like a veritable country magistrate, into material details of
the public service, superintending, as he says, the measuring of tiles
and the delivery of stone and mortar for municipal uses. He officiated
for many years as priest of Apollo at Delphi, and as such gave several
sumptuous entertainments. Indeed, hospitality of this sort appears, so
far as we can see, to have been the sole or chief duty of his priestly
office. As an adopted citizen of one of the Athenian tribes, he was not
infrequently a guest at civic banquets and semi-civic festivals.
As regards Plutarch’s philosophy, it is easier to say to which of
the great schools he did not belong than to determine by what name
he would have preferred to be called. He probably would have termed
himself a Platonist, but not, like Cicero, of the New Academy, which
had incorporated Pyrrhonism with the provisional acceptance of the
Platonic philosophy. At the same time, he was a closer follower and
a more literal interpreter of Plato than were the Neo-Platonists of
Alexandria, who had not yet become a distinctly recognized sect, and
who in many respects were the precursors of the mysticism of the
Reformation era. Plutarch, with Plato, recognized two eternities: that
of the Divine Being, supremely good and purely spiritual; and that of
matter, as, if not intrinsically evil, the cause, condition, and seat
of all evil, and as at least opposing such obstacles to its own best
ideal manipulation that the Divine Being could not embody his pure and
perfect goodness, unalloyed by evil, in any material form. Herein the
Platonists were at variance with both the Stoics and the Epicureans.
The Stoics regarded matter as virtually an emanation from the Supreme
Being, who is not only the universal soul and reason, but the creative
fire, which, transformed into air and water,—part of the water becoming
earth,—is the source of the material universe, which must at the end of
a certain cosmical cycle be re-absorbed into the divine essence, whence
will emanate in endless succession new universes to replace those that
pass away. The Epicureans, on the other hand, believed in the existence
of matter only, and regarded mind and soul as the ultimate product of
material organization.
In one respect Plutarch transcends Plato, and, so far as I know, all
pre-Christian philosophers. Plato’s theism bears a close kindred
to pantheism. His God, if I may be permitted the phrase, is only
semi-detached. He becomes the creator rather by blending his essence
with eternal matter, than by shaping that matter to his will. He is
rather in all things than above all things, rather the Soul of the
universe than its sovereign Lord. But in Plutarch’s writings the
Supreme Being is regarded as existing independently of material things;
they, as subject to his will, not as a part of his essence.
Plutarch was, like Plato, a realist. He regarded the ideas or patterns
of material things, that is, _genera_, or kinds of objects, as having
an actual existence (where or how it is hard to say), as projected from
the Divine Mind, floating somewhere in ethereal spaces between the
Deity and the material universe,—the models by which all things in the
universe are made.
As to Plutarch’s theology, he was certainly a monotheist. He probably
had some vague belief in inferior deities (_daemons_ he would have
called them), as holding a place like that filled by angels and by
evil spirits in the creed of most Christians; yet it is entirely
conceivable that his occasional references to these deities are due
merely to the conventional rhetoric of his age. His priesthood of the
Delphian Apollo can hardly be said to have been a religious office.
It was rather a post of dignity and honor, which a gentleman of
respectable standing, courteous manners, and hospitable habits might
creditably fill, even though he had no faith in Apollo. But that
Plutarch had a serious, earnest, and efficient faith in the one Supreme
God, in the wise and eternal Providence, and in the Divine wisdom,
purity, and holiness, we have in his writings an absolute certainty.
Nor can we find, even in Christian literature, the record of a firmer
belief than his in human immortality, and in a righteous retribution
beginning in this world and reaching on into the world beyond death.
But Plutarch was, most of all, an ethical philosopher. Yet here again
he cannot be classed as belonging to any school. For Epicureanism he
has an intense abhorrence, and regards the doctrines of that sect
as theoretically absurd and practically demoralizing. He maintains
that the disciples of Epicurus, as such, utterly fail in the quest
of pleasure, or what according to their master is still better,
painlessness: for the condition of those who, as he says, “swill the
mind with the pleasures of the body, as hogherds do their swine,”
cannot entirely smother the sense of vacuity and need; nor is it
possible by any appliances of luxury to cut off even sources of bodily
disquietude, which are only the more fatal to the happiness of him
who seeks bodily well-being alone; while the prospect of annihilation
at death deprives those necessarily unhappy in this life of their
only solace, and gives those who live happily here the discomfort of
anticipating the speedy and entire loss of all that has ministered to
their enjoyment.
In Plutarch’s moderation, his avoidance of extreme views, and his
just estimate of happiness as an end, though not the supreme end, of
being, he is in harmony with the Peripatetics, among whom his Athenian
preceptor was the shining light of his age; but his ethical system was
much more strict and uncompromising than theirs, and I cannot find that
he quotes them or refers to them as a distinct school of philosophy.
In matters appertaining to physical science he indeed often cites
Aristotle, but not, I think, in a single instance, as to any question
in morals.
As regards the Stoics, Plutarch writes against them, but chiefly
against dogmas which in his time had become nearly obsolete,—namely,
that all acts not in accordance with the absolute right are equally
bad; that all virtuous acts are equally good; that there is no
intermediate moral condition between that of the wise or perfectly good
man and that of the utterly vicious; and that outward circumstances
neither enhance nor diminish the happiness of the truly wise man.
These extravagances do not appear in the writings of Seneca, nor in
Epictetus as reported by Arrian, and Plutarch in reasoning against them
is controverting Zeno rather than his later disciples. He is in full
sympathy with the Stoics as to their elevated moral standard, though
without the sternness and rigidness which had often characterized
their professed beliefs and their public teaching, yet of which there
remained few vestiges among his contemporaries. With the utmost
mildness and gentleness, he manifests everywhere an inflexibility
of principle and a settled conviction as to the rightfulness or
wrongfulness of specific acts which might satisfy the most rigid
Stoic, and in which he plants himself as firmly on the ground of the
eternal Right as if his philosophy had been founded on a distinctively
Christian basis.
Indeed, Plutarch is so often decidedly Christian in spirit, and in many
passages of his writings there is such an almost manifest transcript
of the thought of the Divine Founder of our religion, that it has been
frequently maintained that he drew from Christian sources. This, I
must believe, is utterly false in the sense in which it is commonly
asserted, yet in a more recondite sense true. If Plutarch had known
anything about Christians or the Christian Scriptures, he could not
have failed to refer to them; for he is constantly making references
to contemporary persons and objects, sects and opinions. We know
of no Christian church at Cheroneia in that age, and indeed it is
exceedingly improbable that there should have been one in so small a
town. The circulation of thought, and consequently the diffusion of a
new religion from the great centres of population to outlying districts
or villages, was infinitesimally slow. Our word _pagan_ is an enduring
witness of this tardiness of transmission. It had its birth (in its
present sense) after Christianity had become the legally established
religion of the Empire, and had supplanted heathen temples and rites
in the cities, while in the _pagi_, or villages, the old gods were
still in the ascendant. There were indeed Christian churches in Athens
and in Rome; but they would most probably have eluded the curiosity
and escaped the knowledge of a temporary resident, especially as most
of their chief members were either Jews or slaves. Yet I cannot doubt
that an infusion of Christianity had somehow infiltrated itself into
Plutarch’s ethical opinions and sentiments, as into those of Seneca,
who has been represented as an acquaintance and correspondent of St.
Paul, though it is historically almost impossible that the two men ever
saw or heard of each other.
In one respect, the metaphor by which we call the Author of our
religion the Sun of Righteousness has a special aptness. The sun,
unlike lesser luminaries, lights up sheltered groves and grottos that
are completely dark under the full moon, and sends its rays through
every chink and cranny of roof or wall. In like manner there seems to
have been an indirect and tortuous transmission of Christian thought
into regions where its source was wholly unknown. In the ethical
writings of the post-Christian philosophers, of Plutarch, Seneca,
Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, there may be traced a loftiness,
precision, delicacy, tenderness, breadth of human sympathy, and
recognition of holiness in the Divine Being as the archetype of human
purity, transcending all that is most admirable in pre-Christian
moralists. Thus, while I cannot but regard Cicero’s “De Officiis” as in
many respects the world’s master-work in ethical philosophy, containing
fewer unchristian sentences than I could number on the fingers of one
hand, there is nothing in it that reminds me of the Gospels; while
these others often shape their thoughts in what seem to be evangelic
moulds.
Now I think that we may account for the large diffusion of Christian
thought and sentiment among persons who knew not Christianity even
by name. The new religion was very extensively embraced among slaves
in all parts of the Roman Empire, and _slave_ then meant something
very different from what it means now. It is an open question whether
there was not, at least out of Greece, more of learning, culture, and
refinement in the slave than in the free population of the Empire.
We must remember how many illustrious names in Greek and Roman
literature—such names as those of Aesop, Terence, Epictetus—belonged to
slaves. Tiro, Cicero’s slave, was not only one of his dearest friends,
but foremost among his literary confidants and advisers. Most of the
rich men who had any love of literature owned their librarians and
their copyists, and the teachers of the children were generally the
property of the father. Among Christian slaves there were undoubtedly
many who felt no call to martyrdom, (which can have been incumbent
on them only when the alternative was apostasy and denial of their
faith,) who therefore made no open profession of their religion,
while in precept, conversation, and life they were imbued with its
spirit,—a spirit as subtile in its penetrating power as it is refining
and purifying in its influence. From the lips of Christian slaves
many children, no doubt, received in classic forms moral precepts
redolent of the aroma breathed from the Sermon on the Mount. If the
social medium which Plutarch represents is a fair specimen of the
best rural society of the Empire in his time, there must have been a
ready receptivity for the highest style of ethical teaching,—a genial
soil for the germination of a truly evangelic righteousness of moral
conception, maxim, and principle.
Probably no book except the Bible has had more readers than Plutarch’s
Lives. These biographies have been translated into every language
of the civilized world; they have been among the earliest and
most fascinating books for children and youth of many successive
generations; and down to the present time, when fiction seems to
have almost superseded history and biography, and to have destroyed
the once universal appetency for them among young people, they have
exercised to a marvellous degree a shaping power over character. They
are, indeed, underrated by the exact historian, because modern research
has discovered here and there some mistake in the details of events.
But such mistakes were in that age inevitable. Historical criticism was
then an unknown science. Documents and traditions covering the same
ground were deemed of equal value when they were in harmony, and when
they differed an author followed the one which best suited his taste,
or his purpose for the time being. Thus Cicero, in one case, in the
same treatise gives three different versions of the same story. Thus,
too, there were several stories afloat about the fate of Regulus; but
Roman writers took that which Niebuhr thinks farthest from the truth,
yet which threw the greatest odium on the hated name of Carthage. Now
I have no doubt that, whenever there were two or more versions of the
same act or event, Plutarch chose that which would best point his
moral. But it is only in few and unimportant particulars that he has
been proved to be inaccurate.
It has been also objected to Plutarch, that he attaches less importance
to the achievements of his heroes in war and in civic life, than to
traits and anecdotes illustrative of their characters. This seems to me
a feature which adds not only to the charm of these Lives, but even
more to their historical value. The events of history are at once the
outcome and the procreant cradle of character, and we know nothing of
any period or portion of history except as we know the men who made
it and the men whom it made. Biography is the soul; history the body,
which it tenants and animates, and which, when not thus tenanted, is a
heap of very dry bones. The most thorough knowledge of the topography
of Julius Caesar’s battles in Gaul, the minutest description of the
campaign that terminated in Pharsalia, the official journal of the
Senate during his dictatorship, would tell us very little about him
and his time. But a vivid sketch of his character, with well-chosen
characteristic anecdotes, would give us a very distinct and realizing
conception of the antecedent condition of things that made a life like
his possible, and of his actual influence for good and for evil on his
country and his age.
Nor is the value of such a biography affected in the least by any
doubts that we may entertain as to the authenticity of incidents,
trivial except as illustrative of character, which occupy a large
space in Plutarch’s Lives. Indeed, the least authentic may be of the
greatest historical value. An anecdote may be literally true, and yet
some peculiar combination of circumstances may have led him of whom it
is told to speak or act out of character. But a mythical anecdote of
a man, coming down from his own time and people, must needs owe its
origin and complexion to his known character.
It is perfectly easy to see throughout these biographies the author’s
didactic aim. If I may use sacred words, here by no means misapplied,
his prime object was “reproof, correction, and instruction in
righteousness.” He evidently felt and mourned the degeneracy of his
age, was profoundly aware of the worth of teaching by example, and
was solicitous to bring from the past such elements of ethical wisdom
as the records of illustrious men could be made to render up. True to
this purpose, he measures the moral character of such transactions as
he relates by the highest standard of right which he knows, and there
is not a person or deed that fails to bear the stamp, clear-cut, yet
seldom obtrusive, of his approval or censure.
The Lives, though the best known of Plutarch’s writings, are but a
small part of them, and hardly half of those still extant. His other
works are generally grouped under the title of “Moralia,”[xx:1] or
Morals, though among them there are many treatises that belong to the
department of history or biography, some to that of physics. Most of
these works are short; a few, of considerable length. Some of them
may have been lectures; some are letters of advice or of consolation;
some are in a narrative form; many are in the form of dialogue, which,
sanctioned by the prestige of Plato’s pre-eminence, was very largely
employed by philosophers of later times, possessing, as it does, the
great advantage of putting opposite and diverse opinions in the mouths
of interlocutors, and thus giving to the treatise the vivacity and
the dramatic interest of oral discussion. Some of these dialogues
have a _symposium_, or supper party, for their scene, and introduce a
numerous corps of speakers. In these Plutarch himself commonly sustains
a prominent part, and the members of his family often have their share
in the conversation, or are the subjects of kindly mention. In several
instances the occasion, circumstances, and conversation are described
so naturally as to make it almost certain that the author simply wrote
out from memory what was actually said. At any rate, these festive
dialogues present very clearly his idea of what a _symposium_ ought
to be, and in its entire freedom from excess and extravagance of any
kind it would bear the strictest ordeal with all modern moralists, the
extreme ascetics alone excepted.
Had not the Lives been written, I am inclined to believe that the
Moralia alone would have given Plutarch as high a place as he now
holds, not only in the esteem of scholars, but in the interest and
delight of all readers of good books; and I am sure that there is
no loving reader of the Lives who will not be thankful to have his
attention drawn to the Moralia. They exhibit throughout the same
moral traits which their author shows as a biographer. He treats,
indeed, incidentally, of some subjects which a purer ethical taste
in the public mind might have excluded. He recognizes the existence
of immoralities, which, not discreditable in the best society of
unevangelized Greece and Rome, have almost lost their place and name in
Christendom. Some of his dialogues have among the interlocutors those
with whom as good a man as he would in our time associate only in the
hope of converting them. But his own opinion and feeling on all moral
questions are uniformly and explicitly in behalf of all that is pure,
and true, and right, and reverent.
Many of these Moralia are on what are commonly, yet wrongly, called
the minor morals, that is, on the evils that most of all infest and
destroy the happiness of families and the peace of society, and on the
opposite virtues,—on such subjects, for instance, as “Idle Talking,”
“Curiosity,” “Self-Praise,” and the like. Others are on such grave
topics as “The Benefits that a Man may derive from his Enemies,” and
“The Best Means of Self-Knowledge.” There is in all these treatises a
large amount of blended common sense and keen ethical insight; and so
little does human nature change with its surroundings that the greater
part of Plutarch’s cautions, counsels, and precepts are as closely
applicable to our own time as if they had been written yesterday.
One of the most remarkable writings in this collection is Plutarch’s
letter to his wife on the death of a daughter two years old, during
his absence from home. It not only expresses sweetly and lovingly the
topics of consolation which would most readily occur to a Christian
father; it gives us also a charming picture of a household united by
ties of spiritual affinity, and living in a purer, higher medium than
that of affluence and luxury. A few sentences may convey something
of the tone and spirit of this epistle. “Since our little daughter
afforded us the sweetest and most charming pleasure, so ought we to
cherish her memory, which will conduce in many ways, or rather many
fold, more to our joy than our grief.” “They who were present at the
funeral report this with admiration, that you neither put on mourning,
nor disfigured yourself or any of your maids, neither were there any
costly preparations nor magnificent pomp; but all things were managed
with silence and moderation, in the presence of our relatives alone.”
“So long as she is gone to a place where she feels no pain, why should
we grieve for her?” “This is the most troublesome thing in old age,
that it makes the soul weak in its remembrance of divine things, and
too earnest for things relating to the body.” “But that which is
taken away in youth, being more soft and tractable, soon returns to
its native vigor and beauty.” “It is good to pass the gates of death
before too great a love of bodily and earthly things be engendered in
the soul.” “It is an impious thing to lament for those whose souls
pass immediately into a better and more divine state.” “Wherefore let
us comply with custom in our outward and public behavior, and let our
interior be more unpolluted, pure and holy.”
Now, when I remember that in the pre-Christian Greek and Roman world
the strongest utterances about immortality had been by Socrates, if
Plato reported him aright, when he expressed strong hope of life beyond
death, yet warned his friends not to be too confident about a matter
so wrapped in uncertainty,—and by Cicero, who, when his daughter died,
confessed that his reasonings had left no conviction in his own mind,—I
cannot doubt that some Easter morning rays had pierced the dense
Boeotian atmosphere, and that the risen Saviour had in that lovely
Cheroneian household those whom he designates as “other sheep, not of
this fold.”
There is among the Moralia another letter of consolation, to Apollonius
on the death of his son, longer, more elaborate, and evidently intended
as a literary composition, to be preserved with the author’s other
works, which breathes the same spirit of submission and trust.
Another of the Moralia, which has a special interest as regards the
author’s own family, is on the “Training of Children,”—a series of
counsels—including the careful heed of the parents to their own moral
condition and habits—to which the experience of these intervening
centuries has little to add, while it could find nothing to take away.
In one sense, the miscellanies brought together under the name
of “Moralia” bear that title not inappropriately; for, as I have
intimated, Plutarch could not but be didactic in whatever he wrote,
and the ethical feeling, spirit, and purpose are perpetually, yet
never ostentatiously or inappropriately, coming to the surface on all
kinds of subjects. But there is a great deal in the collection not
professedly or directly ethical. There are many scraps of history
and biography, and a very large number and variety of characteristic
anecdotes, both of well-known personages, and of others who are made
known to us almost as vividly by a single trait, deed, or saying as
if we had their entire life-record. There is an invaluable series of
“Apophthegms”[xxv:1] of kings and great commanders,[xxv:2] and another
of “Laconic [or Spartan] Apophthegms,” which are much more than their
name implies, some of them being condensed memoirs. There are, also,
several papers that give us more definite notions than can be found
anywhere else of the science and natural history of the author’s time.
Withal, we have here so many references to manners, customs, and
habits, such pictures of home with all that could give it the sweetness
and grace that belong to it, such views of society, both in city and
in country, in ordinary intercourse and on festive occasions, that
one can learn more of life in that age in the Roman Empire from these
volumes than from any other single author; and the writer of a book
like Becker’s “Gallus” might find here almost all the materials that
he would need, except for the delineation of the night-side of Roman
extravagance, gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, and depravity, which
came not within Plutarch’s experience.
The most remarkable of all Plutarch’s writings, the most valuable
equally in a philosophical and an ethical point of view, and the most
redolent of what we almost involuntarily call Christian sentiment, is
that “On the Delay of the Divine Justice,” or, to give a more literal
translation of the original title, “Concerning those who are punished
slowly by the Divine [Being].”[xxvi:1] It treats of what from the
earliest time has been a mystery to serious minds, and has been urged
equally by malignant irreligion and by honest scepticism against the
supremacy of the Divine justice in the government of the world; namely,
the postponement of the penal consequences of guilt, sometimes till
there are no witnesses of the crime left to behold the punishment,
sometimes till the offender himself has lost the thread between the
evil that he did and its retribution, sometimes till the sinner has
gone to the grave in peace, and left innocent posterity to suffer for
his sins. Plutarch, with his unquestioning faith in immortality,
doubts not that guilt, unpunished in this life, will be overtaken by
just retribution in the life to come. But, as he says, retribution,
though it may be consummated only in the future life, is not delayed
till then. It seems late, because it lasts long. The sentence is passed
upon the guilt when it is committed; and, however its visible execution
may be postponed, the sinner is from that moment a prisoner of the
Divine justice, awaiting execution. He may give splendid suppers, and
live luxuriously; yet still he is within prison walls from which there
is no escape.
This is undoubtedly true, and yet there are many cases, and those of
the worst kind, in which it seems to be not true. A moderately bad man,
in most instances, feels profoundly the shame and misery that he has
brought upon himself. But a thoroughly wicked man takes contentedly
a position which we may fitly term sub-human. If we suppose a man
possessed of a magnificent house, luxuriously and tastefully furnished,
who yet chooses never to ascend a stair, and lives in the basement
shabbily and meanly, with the coarsest appliances of physical comfort,
we might take him as the type of not a few bad men who seem entirely
at their ease. They live in the basement. They have thrown away the
key to the upper rooms. They have lost all appreciation of the higher,
better modes of human living, and they are contented and satisfied
as a well-fed beast is, in the absence of all spiritual cravings and
ambitions. But this life, poor and mean as it is at the best, becomes
still more narrow and sordid with the lapse of time. Many have looked
with envy on prosperous guilt early or midway in its career; none
can have witnessed its lengthened age without pity and loathing.
Especially is this the case with the several forms of sensual vice. As
age advances, the power of enjoyment wanes, while the morbid craving
grows, even under the consciousness of added misery with its continued
indulgence. The body becomes the soul’s dungeon, and its walls thicken
inward and close up the wonted entrances of enjoyment. The senses,
deadened on the side of pleasure, no longer avenues of beauty or of
harmony, seem to serve only as means of prolonging a death in life, and
as open inlets of discomfort and pain.
But the suspense of sentence has in not a few cases, according to
Plutarch, a directly merciful purpose. As the most fertile soil may
before tillage produce the rankest weeds, so in the soul most capable
of good there may be, prior to culture, a noisome crop of evil, and
yet God may spare the sinner for the good that is in him, and for
the signal service which, when reclaimed, he may render to mankind.
Then, too, by the delay of visible judgment God gives men in his own
example the lesson of long-suffering, and rebukes their promptness in
resentment and revenge. Still further, when penalty appears to fall
on the posterity or successors of the guilty, and a race, a people, a
city, or a family seems punished for the iniquity of its progenitors,
Plutarch brings out very fully and clearly the absolutely essential
and necessary solidarity of the family or the community, which can
hardly fail so to inherit of its ancestors in disposition and character
as to invite upon itself, to merit for itself, or at best to need as
preventive or cure, the penal consequences of ancestral guilt.
This essay is all the more valuable because not written by a Christian.
It shows that the intense stress laid by Christian teaching on a
righteous retribution lasting on beyond the death-change is not a mere
dogma of the sacred records of our religion, but equally the postulate
of the unsophisticated reason and conscience of developed humanity.
* * * * *
My translation is not literal, in the common meaning of that term. If
it were so, it would be unintelligible; for Plutarch’s style lacks
simplicity, and his sentences, though seldom obscure, are often
involved and intricate, sometimes elliptical. I have, however, given a
faithful transcript in English of what I understand Plutarch to have
written, omitting no thought or shade of thought that I suppose to be
his, and inserting none of my own.
* * * * *
I have used Wyttenbach’s edition of the Moralia, departing from his
text in but a single instance, and that, one in which he pronounces
the reading in the text impossible, and suggests a conjectural reading
as necessary to the sense of the passage. I have also made constant
reference to the late Professor Hackett’s edition of this treatise,
which it is superfluous to commend where he was known; for not only
was he confessedly among the foremost scholars of his time, but his
exacting conscientiousness would not suffer him to put less than his
best and most thorough work into whatever came from his hands.
FOOTNOTES:
[vii:1] A large part of this Introduction is reprinted, by permission
of the editors, from an article of mine on “Plutarch and his Times,” in
the Andover Review, November, 1884.
[vii:2] Πλούταρχος.
[xx:1] Τὰ ἠθικά.
[xxv:1] Ἀποφθέγματα.
[xxv:2] The genuineness of this series has been called in question; but
the internal evidence seems decisive in its favor. It is, throughout,
so entirely in Plutarch’s vein, that one is tempted to ask, Who else
could have written it?
[xxvi:1] Περὶ τῶν ὑπὸ τοῦ θεῖου βραδέως τιμορουμένων.
PLUTARCH
ON THE DELAY OF THE DIVINE JUSTICE.
1. EPICURUS,[1:1] having said such things, O Cinius,[1:2]
before any one could reply, while we were at the farther end of
the porch, went hastily away. But we, somewhat amazed at the man’s
rudeness, stood still, looking at one another without speaking, and
then turned and resumed our walk.
Then PATROCLEAS[2:1] commenced the conversation, saying,—What
then? Do you see fit to drop the discussion? or will you answer his
argument as if he were present, though he has taken himself away?
TIMON[2:2] then said,—If he threw a javelin[2:3] at us as he
went away, it certainly would not be well for us to take no notice of
the weapon still sticking in our sides. Brasidas,[2:4] indeed, as we
are told, drew out the spear from his own body, and killed with it the
man who had hurled it at him. But it is no concern of ours to retaliate
on those who fling at us misplaced and false reasoning; it is enough
for them if we reject their arguments before they affect our belief.
Then I said,—Which of the arguments that he urged moved you the most?
For the man, as if inspired both by wrath and by scorn, brought
together against the Divine Providence many things heaped up in
confusion, yet no well-ordered reasons, but such miscellaneous cavils
as could be gathered here and there.
2. PATROCLEAS then said,—The slowness and procrastination
of the Deity in the punishment of the wicked seem to me the most
mysterious of all things; and now, under these arguments, I find myself
a new and fresh adherent to the doctrine in behalf of which they are
urged. Indeed, I used a long time ago to be vexed by that saying of
Euripides:—
“He lingers; such the nature of the gods.”[3:1]
While in no respect, least of all toward wicked men, is it fitting
that God should be dilatory; for they are in no wise dilatory or
slow in ill-doing, but are hurried on to evil by their passions with
the utmost impetuosity. Indeed, as Thucydides says,[3:2] punishment
close at hand bars the way to those who most hope to gain by guilt.
Moreover, no debt overdue, equally with the delay of due punishment,
renders the person wronged utterly hopeless and depressed, while it
confirms the evil-doer in boldness and audacity. On the other hand,
punishments directly inflicted on those who are bold in evil are at
once preventive of future crimes, and a source of great consolation to
those who have suffered wrong. I am therefore troubled by the saying
of Bias,[4:1] which often recurs to me, when he told a man of bad
character that he had no fear that he would go unpunished, but feared
that he himself might not live to see him punished. What good, indeed,
did the punishment of Aristocrates[4:2] do to the Messenians who were
slain before it came upon him? He betrayed them in the battle of
Taphrus, yet, not being found out for twenty years, he reigned over the
Arcadians all that time, till at length his treachery was discovered
and met with its due penalty; but the victims of his crime had ceased
to be. Again, what comfort did any of the Orchomenians[4:3] who lost
children, friends, and kindred by the treachery of Lyciscus derive
from the disease that many years afterward seized him and consumed his
body, while he, when he dipped and washed his feet in the river, always
prayed, with oaths and curses, that his limbs might rot if he had ever
been guilty of treason and injustice? Indeed, not even the children’s
children of those who were then murdered could have witnessed at
Athens the snatching of the contaminated bodies of the murderers from
their graves, and their transportation beyond the boundaries of the
state.[5:1] Hence, Euripides is absurd, when, to dissuade from crime,
he says:—
“No haste has Justice; dread not her approach;
She strikes no mortal heart with sudden blow;
But noiseless, with slow step, she glides along,
To smite the guilty when their hour has come.”[5:2]
It seems to me that it is no other considerations than these that lead
bad men to encourage themselves, and to give themselves free scope for
guilty enterprise, inasmuch as the fruit of wrong-doing is quickly ripe
and in full sight, while punishment is late, and lingers far behind the
enjoyment derived from the guilt.
3. When Patrocleas had thus spoken, OLYMPICUS,[6:1] taking
up the thread of his discourse, said,—It should also be observed,
Patrocleas, how exceedingly great is the mischief resulting from the
delay and procrastination of the Deity about these matters, since the
tardiness of retribution takes away faith in Providence; and because
chastisement for the wicked does not ensue immediately upon the
performance of an evil deed, but comes upon them afterward, they place
it to the account of misfortune, call it ill-luck and not punishment,
and so are in no wise profited by it,—being grieved indeed for what
befalls them, but not led to repentance for their ill-doing. For as the
punishment of the whip and the spur immediately on a horse’s stumbling
or shying corrects him and puts him on right behavior, while beating
and twitching of the reins and shouting at him at a later period seem
to him for some other purpose than discipline, and thus annoy him
without teaching him, so guilt rebuked and checked by punishment after
each of its wrong-doings and transgressions might gradually become
conscience-stricken, and be brought to the fear of God, as presiding
over the affairs and experiences of men with a justice that does not
linger; but justice hesitating and slow-paced, as Euripides describes
it, and falling upon the wicked as if by chance, being vague, untimely,
and out of due order, seems like a merely fortuitous event rather than
ordained by Providence. Thus, I do not see what use there is in those
mills of the gods said to grind so late[7:1] as to render punishment
hard to be recognized, and to make wickedness fearless.
4. These things having been uttered, and I being wrapped in thought,
TIMON said,—Shall I now put the climax to this reasoning on
the side of scepticism, or shall I rather suffer Plutarch[7:2] to argue
against what has already been brought forward?