PATROCLEAS, Plutarch’s son-in-law.
PLUTARCH.
TIMON, Plutarch’s brother.
OLYMPICUS, a friend (see _Sympos._ 3, 6).
I. Having spoken to this effect, Quintus, before any one [Sidenote: 548
B] replied—we had just reached the far end of the colonnade—Epicurus
took himself off. We stopped our walk for a while, in silent surprise at
the oddness of the man, then glanced at one another, turned back, and
resumed it. Patrocleas was the first to speak: ‘Which is it to be,’ he
said, ‘are you for dropping the inquiry, or shall we answer the argument
as though the speaker of it were present, though he is not present?’
Timon interposed: ‘Well, suppose he had thrown a spear and gone away, it
would not do quietly to let it lie. Brasidas,[201] we are [Sidenote: C]
given to believe, drew the spear out of his wound, and with it struck
and slew the thrower. Now perhaps it is no business of ours to punish
those who have discharged a monstrous or a false argument at us; enough
if we eject it from ourselves before it has taken hold.’ ‘Then what is
it’, I asked, ‘which has moved you most, in what he said? for there were
a number of things, a disorderly mass, which the man drew from all
quarters, to let them off against Divine Providence in his rage and
fury.’
II. Then Patrocleas: ‘The slowness and procrastination of Divine Justice
in the punishment of wicked men appears to [Sidenote: D] me especially
terrible. At the present moment, after what we have just heard, I seem
to come “all fresh and new” to this (Epicurean) view; but long ago I
used to feel indignant when I heard Euripides[202] telling how
_The Gods delay, the Gods are ever slow._
Yet it does not become the God to be slack in anything, least of all in
dealing with wicked men; they are never slack or procrastinating in
evil-doing, but are borne on by the passions at racing speed into their
iniquities. Again, “Vengeance, when [Sidenote: E] it follows most
closely upon the wrongs,” to use the words of Thucydides,[203] at once
blocks the road against those who are in the fullest enjoyment of
successful vice. No debt so surely as the debt of justice, if left
unpaid till the morrow, at once depresses the person wronged by
enfeebling his hopes, and enhances the boldness and self-trust of the
miscreant; whereas the punishments which meet audacious acts promptly
are checks against future offences, and have a sovereign virtue to
encourage the sufferers. Thus I often feel distressed when I recall the
saying [Sidenote: F] of Bias. It appears that he told a certain wicked
man that he had no fear of his escaping retribution, he did fear that he
himself might not be there to see. What did the Messenians gain by the
punishment of Aristocrates, when they had been already slain? He had
lost the battle at the Trench[204] by treachery, reigned over the
Arcadians for more than twenty years undiscovered, and was at last found
out and punished, but the Messenians were no more. What consolation to
the Orchomenians, who had lost children, friends, and kinsmen through
the treason of Lyciscus, was the disease which fastened upon him long
years afterwards, and devoured his body? He had once and again dipped
both feet into the river, with prayers and imprecations [Sidenote: 549]
as he wetted them, that they might rot away if he had done any wrong or
treachery. At Athens, when the corpses of the “Accursed” were thrown
out, and set beyond the frontier, it was not possible even for the
children’s children of the victims to see it done. Hence it is strange
that Euripides[205] should have used such thoughts as these to deter men
from wickedness:
_Justice shall never strike thee to the heart—
Fear not her footfall—no, nor any man
That does the wrong; with silent foot and slow,
When the day comes, she’ll stalk the sinners down._
[Sidenote: B] The very phrases—are they not?—which bad men might use to
give themselves encouragement and assurance to set hand to lawless acts,
since they show injustice yielding her harvest ripe and ready, and
punishment lagging late and far behind the enjoyment.’
III. When Patrocleas had done, Olympicus spoke next: ‘Take another
point, Patrocleas; what a grave absurdity these delays and hesitations
on the part of Heaven involve! The slowness takes away all assurance of
a Providence; and when misfortune comes to bad men, not on the heels of
each wicked [Sidenote: C] deed, but later on, they set it down to
mischance, and call it a calamity, not a punishment; they do not profit
by it, they are annoyed at the things which befall them, but do not
repent of the things which they have done. It is so with a horse; the
touch of whip or spur which follows immediately on a stumble or blunder
sets him up and brings him to his duty; whereas tugs and checks and
ratings later on, after an interval, seem to him to have some purpose
which is not education, they irritate, but do not school him. And so
with vice; if punishment [Sidenote: D] from switch or rein follow every
trip and tumble, vice will have the best chance of becoming thoughtful
and lowly, and getting the fear of God, as of a Judge who stands over
men in their acts and their passions, and does not wait till the day
after to-morrow. Whereas, the Justice which moves calmly, “with a slow
foot”, as Euripides put it, and falls upon the wicked “when the day
comes”, resembles an automaton rather than a Providence, in her vague,
procrastinating, unmethodical procedure. Thus I do not see what use
there is in those “mills of the Gods” which [Sidenote: E] “grind
slowly”, we are told,[206] for they make the form of Justice dim, and
the fears of the wicked evanescent.’
IV. When all this had been said, and while I was deep in thought, Timon
said: ‘Shall I intervene and with my own hand add the crowning stone of
difficulty to our argument, or shall I allow it first to win through for
itself against what we have already heard?’ ‘What need’, I said, ‘to let
in the “third wave” and sluice the argument anew, if it prove unable to
force aside the first objections and escape them? In the first place,
then, we will start from our own ancestral hearth, from the [Sidenote:
F] reserve, I mean, which the philosophers of the Academy show in
speaking of what is divine; and reverently clear ourself from any claim
to speak with knowledge about these matters. It is a graver mistake than
for unmusical persons to discuss music, or civilians a campaign, if we
mere men are to scrutinize the things which belong to Gods and daemons;
the inartistic trying to track the inner thought of the artist, by
fanciful and random conjecture. If it is hard for a layman to guess at
the reasoning which led a doctor to use the knife later and not sooner,
or to apply a lotion to-day and not yesterday, surely it is not easy for
a mortal to speak with any certainty about God, more than this—that
[Sidenote: 530] he best knows the proper time for the curative treatment
of vice, and applies the due punishment, as a medicine, to each man
accordingly; for vice admits of no measure common to all, the proper
time is not the same for every case. That the medical treatment of the
soul which we call “Right” and “Justice” is of all arts the greatest, we
have the testimony of thousands of witnesses, Pindar[207] among them. He
acclaims the sovereign ruler of all the Gods as “in art most excellent”,
because Justice is of his workmanship, and to her it pertains to
determine the “when” and the “how” and the degree of punishment for
every offender. And Plato[208] tells us that Minos, who is a son of
Zeus, has become a learner of this art; showing that it is not possible
for one who has not learnt, and acquired [Sidenote: B] the knowledge, to
go straight in questions of right, or to apprehend the guiding
principle. Even the laws which men frame are not everywhere, and on the
face of them, reasonable; some enactments appear simply ludicrous. In
Lacedaemon, for instance, the Ephors, when they first enter office, make
proclamation that no one is to grow a moustache, and that “men should
obey the laws, that the laws may not be hard upon them”. The Romans,
when they release slaves “into freedom” give them a tap with a light
reed. When they draw a will, they make one set of persons “heirs” and
“sell” the property to others, which appears strange. Strangest of all
is the enactment [Sidenote: C] of Solon, that the man who takes neither
side in a party contest, but stands out, should lose the franchise. One
might go on to mention many legal absurdities, where the intention of
the lawyers and the reason of the provisions are out of our knowledge.
Then, if human codes are so inscrutable, what wonder that, in speaking
of the Gods, we cannot lightly lay down the principle upon which they
punish some offenders later, some sooner?
V. ‘All this is no pretext for evading the issue; but it is a plea for
indulgence; that the argument, having its harbour of refuge in sight,
may rear itself confidently from the depths to meet the difficulty. Now
first consider that, as Plato[209] shows, [Sidenote: D] God sets himself
before us for a pattern of all good things, and implants in those who
are able to follow God that human virtue which is, in a sort, likeness
to himself. For Universal Nature, while yet unorganized, found the
beginning of its change to a world of order in assimilation to the idea
and excellence of God, and in a measure of participation therein. The
same Plato[210] tells us that Nature kindled in us the sense of sight,
in order that the soul, by gazing in wonder at the bodies which move
through heaven, may become accustomed to welcome what is shapely and
well ordered, to abhor ill-regulated and [Sidenote: E] roving passions,
and to eschew, as the origin of all vice and naughtiness, whatever is
random and fortuitous. For man has no greater natural enjoyment of God
than to imitate and pursue all that in him is fair and good, and so to
attain to virtue. Therefore is God slow and leisurely in inflicting
punishment on the bad, not that he fears mistake on his own part if he
punish quickly, or any repentance; rather he is putting away from us all
brutish vehemence in the punishments we inflict, and teaching [Sidenote:
F] us not to choose the moment of heat and agitation, when
_High over reason temper leaps supreme_,[211]
to spring upon those who have vexed us, as though glutting a thirst or a
hunger; but to copy his own gentleness and long-suffering, to be orderly
and staid when we set our hand to punishment, taking Time for a
counsellor who will never have Repentance for his consort. For it is a
smaller evil, as Socrates [Sidenote: 551] used to say, to drink turbid
water in our greediness, when we find it by the way, than with the
reason still muddied, full of wrath and frenzy, before it has settled
down and run clear, to glut ourselves in the punishment of a body which
is of one race and tribe with our own. It is not, as Thucydides would
tell us, the retribution following most closely on the injury received,
but that most remote from it, which really exacts what is its due. For
as temper, according to Melanthius,[212]
_Does dreadful deeds, and banishes good sense_,
so reason, on the contrary, employs justice and moderation, setting
passion and temper afar. So it is that even human examples make men
gentle, as when we hear that Plato stood long over his servant with rod
uplifted, correcting, as he said [Sidenote: B] himself, his own temper;
or, again, as Archytas, informed of some disorderly behaviour of his
workmen in the field, and feeling himself unusually irritated and harsh,
did nothing, but just said, as he went away, “Well for you that I am
feeling angry.” If sayings like these and anecdotes about men drain away
what is rough and violent in our anger, much more when we see God, in
whom is no fear nor any sort of repentance, yet reserving punishment and
abiding his time, may we well become [Sidenote: C] cautious in such
matters, and deem the gentleness and lofty patience which he exhibits a
god-like part of virtue. By his punishment he corrects a few, by the
slowness of his punishment he helps and admonishes many.
VI. ‘Let us now turn our attention to a second point, which is this: All
kinds of human retribution deal out pain for pain and stop there.
“Suffering for the doer”[213] is their principle, and beyond it they do
not go. So they follow sin like a howling pack which hunts on the heels
of the offences. Whereas God, we may suppose, when he sets his hand to
punish a soul that is sick, [Sidenote: D] scrutinizes its passions, if
perhaps they may be bent aside, and a way opened to repentance; he fixes
a time, in cases where the wickedness seated within is not absolute or
inflexible. He knows how large a portion of virtue, proceeding from
himself, souls carry with them when they pass to birth, how powerful
within the noble principle naturally is, and how ineffaceable; that it
may flower into vice contrary to nature, when nurture and company are
bad and corrupting, yet is afterwards cured in some persons and recovers
its own proper state. And so he [Sidenote: E] does not bring down
punishment equally upon all. What is incurable he at once removes out of
the life and prunes away, because, happen what may, it is injurious to
others, most injurious of all to a man’s self, to consort with
wickedness all his time. Where the sinful principle may be supposed to
exist through ignorance of the good rather than from deliberate
preference for the base, he gives them time for reformation; but if they
persist, they, too, receive punishment in full; for he has no fear, we
may be sure, lest they escape him at the last. Now consider how many
changes take place in human character and life. And this is why that in
them which changes is called “tropos” (turning) and “ethos” (_ēthos_),
because habit (_ĕthos_) finds its way in so often, and masters them so
mightily. I think [Sidenote: F] myself that the ancients called Cecrops
“double-shaped”, not, as some say, because from a good king he became a
very dragon of a tyrant, but, on the contrary, because he was, to begin
with, perverse and terrible, and afterwards became a mild and humane
ruler. This instance may be an uncertain one, but we know of Gelon at
any rate, and Hiero in Sicily, and Pisistratus son of Hippocrates, how
they won power by wickedness, but all used [Sidenote: 552] it
virtuously; came to rule through unlawful ways, but turned out fair and
patriotic rulers; introduced the reign of law and of careful
agriculture, found their subjects men of jest and gossip, and made them
sober and industrious. Gelon, moreover, fought nobly at the head of his
people, won a great battle against the Carthaginians, and refused them a
peace when they sued for one, until he had bound them in a covenant to
give up the practice of sacrificing their children to Cronus. Then, in
Megalopolis, there was a tyrant Lydiadas, who changed [Sidenote: B] his
ways in the actual course of his reign, and in disgust with his own
injustice restored to the citizens their laws, and fell gloriously
fighting for the country against its enemies. Suppose some one had slain
Miltiades while tyrant in the Chersonese, as he first was, or had got a
conviction for incest against Cimon, or had robbed Athens of
Themistocles by a prosecution for his riotous passage through the
market-place, as was done with Alcibiades later on, where would be our
Marathons, our Eurymedons, that noble Artemisium, [Sidenote: C]
_where Athens’ sons
Set firm the shining base of Liberty?_[214]
For great natures produce nothing petty; their vehemence and energy
cannot rest for very intensity, they toss about on the surge before they
settle into their solid and abiding character. As then one ignorant of
husbandry would not welcome the prospect of a piece of land full of
thick undergrowth and weeds, with many wild creatures on it, and streams
of water, and deep mud; whereas, to one who has learned to use his
senses and to discriminate, those very things suggest strength and
fatness and everything that is good in the soil, so it is with great
natures. They break out early into many strange bad growths, [Sidenote:
D] out of which we, in our intolerance, think it our duty to cut away
and stunt all that is rough and prickly; but the Judge who is better
than we and who sees the good and generous crop to come, waits for Time,
the fellow-worker with Reason and Virtue, and that ripeness whereby
Nature yields the proper fruit.
VII. ‘So much for this. Now do you not think that some of the Greeks are
right in copying the Egyptian law which enacts that a pregnant woman who
has been condemned to death should be kept in custody until she has
borne a child?’ ‘Certainly’, they said. I went on: ‘Next, suppose a
person not pregnant with children, but able, if time be given, to bring
into [Sidenote: E] the light of the sun some secret action or design,
either by denouncing a hidden evil, or by becoming the promoter of a
salutary policy or the inventor of some needful expedient, is it not the
better course to let punishment wait on convenience rather than to
inflict it too soon? It seems to me to be so.’ ‘And to us’, said
Patrocleas. ‘And rightly,’ said I, ‘for consider that if Dionysius had
paid the penalty at the beginning of his reign, no Greek settler would
have been left in Sicily, because the Carthaginians would have
devastated it. So neither Apollonia, nor Anactorium, nor the Leucadian
peninsula would have been occupied by Greeks if Periander had [Sidenote:
F] been punished without such a long interval. I think that Cassander
also had a respite in order that Thebes might be re-established. Most of
the foreigners who helped to seize this temple crossed over with
Timoleon into Sicily; and when they had conquered the Carthaginians, and
put an end to the tyrannies, met deservedly miserable deaths themselves.
Surely Heaven uses some bad men to punish others, like executioners, and
afterwards crushes them, and this has been the case, I think, [Sidenote:
553] with most tyrants. For as the gall of the hyaena, the refuse of the
seal, and other products of disgusting animals, have their specific use
in disease, so there are some who need the sharp tooth of chastisement;
on whom the God inflicts a bitter and implacable tyrant, or a harsh
rough ruler, and only removes this torment when he has relieved and
purged their ailment. Such a medicine was Phalaris to the Agrigentines,
and Marius to the Romans. To the Sicyonians the God declared in plain
terms that their state needed beadles with whips, because they had taken
by force from the men of Cleonae a boy named Teletias, who was to be
crowned at the Pythian games, as being their own citizen, and torn him
in pieces. The Sicyonians got [Sidenote: B] Orthagoras for a tyrant, and
after him Myron and Cleisthenes, who put an end to their bad ways, while
the Cleonaeans, who never found such a remedy, have come to nothing.
Listen to Homer,[215] who says somewhere
_So sprung from meaner sire a nobler son,
Skilled in all art and excellence._
Yet that son of Copreus has left us no brilliant or signal achievement,
while the posterity of Sisyphus and Autolycus and Phlegyas burst into
flower of glory and virtue in the persons of great kings. Pericles at
Athens came of a house which was under a curse. Pompey the Great, at
Rome, was the son of Strabo, whose corpse the Romans cast out and
trampled [Sidenote: C] in their hatred. What is there strange then if
God acts like the farmer, who does not cut down the thistle till he has
picked the asparagus, or like the Libyans who do not burn the dry stalks
before they have collected the gum; who spares to destroy a bad and
rough-grown root of a noble race of kings till the due fruit has issued
from it? For it were better for the Phocians that Iphitus should lose
tens of thousands of cattle and horses, or that even more gold should
leave Delphi, and silver too, than that Ulysses should never have been
born, or Asclepius, or [Sidenote: D] the other brave men and mighty
benefactors who have come of bad and vicious lines.
VIII. ‘But do you not all think it better that punishments should fall
in the fitting time and manner than hastily and at once? There is the
case of Callippus, who was slain by his friends with the very dagger
which he had used to slay Dion in the guise of a friend. Again, there is
Mitys[216] of Argos, killed in a party quarrel, whose brazen statue in
the market-place fell on the murderer during a public performance and
killed him. And I think you know all about Bessus the Paeonian,
Patrocleas, and Ariston of Oeta, the commander of foreign troops?’
[Sidenote: E] ‘Indeed I do not,’ he replied, ‘but I want to hear.’
‘Ariston,’ I said, ‘with the consent of the tyrants, took down the
ornaments of Eriphyle, deposited here, and carried them off to his wife
for a present. Then his son, enraged with his mother for some reason,
set fire to the house, and burnt up all who were within it. Bessus, it
appears, slew his own father, and for a long time escaped detection.
Afterwards, having come to some friends for supper, he put his spear
through a swallows’ nest and brought it down, and destroyed the young
birds. All present exclaimed, as well they might: “Man, what has
[Sidenote: F] possessed you to do such a monstrous thing?” To which he
replied: “Have they not been telling lies against me this long time,
shrieking that I have killed my father?” Astonished at such a speech,
they informed the king, an inquiry was held, and Bessus suffered.
IX. ‘So far’, I said, ‘we have been speaking, as was agreed, upon the
assumption that some respite is really granted to wicked men. For what
remains, you must suppose that you are listening to Hesiod,[217] laying
down, not with Plato[218] that punishment is [Sidenote: 554] “suffering
which waits on wrongdoing”, but that it is a contemporary growth,
springing up with sin, from the same place and the same root,
_Bad counsel to the counsellor is worst_,
and
_Who plots ’gainst others, plots his heart away._
The corn-beetle is said to carry in herself an antidote compounded on a
principle of opposites, but wickedness as it grows breeds its own pain
and punishment, and suffers the penalty, not by and by, but in the very
moment of insolence. In the body, every criminal who is punished[219]
carries forth his own [Sidenote: B] cross; but vice fabricates for
herself, out of herself, all the instruments of her chastisement; she
manufactures a terrible life, piteous and shameful, with terrors and
cruel pains, with regrets and troubles unceasing. But there are persons
just like children, who see evildoers on the stage crowned and
caparisoned, as often happens, in gold and purple, and dancing heartily;
and gape and gaze, as though these men were happy indeed; until they are
seen goaded and lashed, and fire issuing out of those gay and costly
robes. Most bad men are wrapped as in a vesture [Sidenote: C] of great
houses, and eminent offices and powers; and so it is unperceived that
they are being punished, until, before you can think, they are stabbed
or hurled down a rock, which is not to be called punishment, but the end
or consummation of punishment. For as Herodicus of Selymbria, who fell
into a hopeless decline, and, for the first time in human history,
combined gymnastics with medicine, made death, in Plato’s[220] words, “a
long affair for himself”, and for similar invalids, so has it been with
bad men. They thought to escape the blow at the time; the penalty comes,
not after more time, but over more time, and is lengthened, not
retarded. They were not punished after they [Sidenote: D] came to old
age, but became old under punishment. I speak of length of time in a
sense relative to ourselves, since to the Gods any span of human life is
as nothing. “Now”, instead of “thirty years ago”, for the torture or
hanging of a criminal, is as though we were to speak of “afternoon” not
“morning”; the rather that he is confined in life, a prison where is no
change of place, no escape, yet many feastings the while, and business
affairs, and gifts, and bounties, and amusements, just as men play dice
or draughts in jail, with the rope hanging over their heads.
X. ‘Yet where are we to stop? Are we to say that prisoners [Sidenote: E]
awaiting execution are not under punishment until the axe shall fall?
Nor he who has drunk the hemlock, and is walking about while he waits to
feel the heaviness in the legs which precedes the chill and stiffness of
approaching insensibility? Yet we must say so, if we think that the last
moment of the punishment is the punishment, and leave out of account the
sufferings of the intervening time, the fears, and forebodings, and
movements of [Sidenote: F] remorse, in which every sinner is involved.
This would be like saying that a fish when he has swallowed the hook has
not been caught until he has been roasted by the cook, or at least
sliced up, before our eyes. Every man is in the grasp of Justice when he
has done a wrong, he has nibbled away the sweets of Injustice which are
the bait; but he has the hook of conscience sticking there and, as it
pays him out,[221]
_Like spear-struck thunny makes the ocean boil._
For the forwardness and the audacity of vice of which we hear [Sidenote:
555] are strong and ready till the crimes are committed, then passion
fails them like a dying breeze, and leaves them weak and abject, a prey
to every fear and superstition. Thus the dream of Clytaemnestra in
Stesichorus[222] is fashioned true to the reality of what happens. It
was like this:
_She thought a serpent came on her, his crest
Dabbled with gore, and, lo, from out it peered,
Child of the race of Pleisthenes, the King._
For phantoms of dreams, and visions of midday, and oracles, and
thunderbolts, and whatever has the appearance of being caused by a God,
bring storms and terrors upon those who are in such a mood. So it is
told that Apollodorus, in his sleep, saw [Sidenote: B] himself being
flayed by Scythians and then boiled, and that his heart murmured out of
the cauldron the words, “I am the cause of this to thee.” And, again, he
saw his daughters all on fire, and running around him with their bodies
burning. Then Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, a little before his death,
saw Aphrodite throwing blood at his face out of a sort of bowl. The
friends of Ptolemy “Thunderbolt”[223] beheld him called to justice by
Seleucus before a jury of vultures and wolves, and [Sidenote: C] dealing
out large helpings of flesh to his enemies. Pausanias had wickedly sent
for Cleonice at Byzantium, a maiden of free birth, that he might enjoy
her person in the night, then, as she approached, he killed her out of
some panic or suspicion; and he would often see her in his dreams,
saying to him:
_To judgement go; man’s lust works woe to man._
When the phantom never ceased to trouble him, he sailed, as it appears,
to Heracleia, where is the Place of Summons of Souls, and with soothing
rites and libations set himself to call up the soul of the girl; she
appeared to him and told him that he “will cease from his troubles when
he reaches Lacedaemon”; and, directly he got there, he died.[224]
XI. ‘Then, if nothing remains for the soul after death, but [Sidenote:
D] death is a limit beyond which is neither grace nor punishment, we
should rather say that bad men who are punished quickly, and who die
off, are used gently and indulgently by Heaven. For if it could be held
that there is no other evil for the bad while life and time last, yet
even so, when injustice is tried and proved an unfruitful, thankless
business, which yields no return for many and great struggles, the mere
sense of these upsets the soul. You will remember the story of
Lysimachus, how, under [Sidenote: E] great stress of thirst, he
surrendered himself and his power to the Getae, and, when now their
prisoner, said as he drank: “Wretch that I am, for so brief a pleasure
to have lost so great a kingdom!” And yet to resist the physical
compulsion of appetite is very hard. But when a man, by grasping at
money, or in envy of political reputation and power, or for the pleasure
of some union, has wrought a lawless dreadful deed, and afterwards, when
the thirst or frenzy of passion has left him, sees, as [Sidenote: F]
time goes on, the disgrace and terror of iniquity becoming permanent,
with nothing useful, or necessary, or delightful gained, then is it not
natural that he should often reckon up and feel how hollow is the glory,
how ignoble and thankless the pleasure, for which he has upset all that
is greatest and noblest in human codes of right, and filled his own life
with shame and confusion? Simonides[225] used to say in jest that he
found the chest of silver always full, but that of gratitude empty; and
so bad men, when they look into the wickedness within them, find that,
through the pleasure which has a short-lived return, it is [Sidenote:
556] left void of hope, but filled to the brim with fears and pains and
joyless memory, with suspicion of the future, and distrust of the
present. So Ino on the stage,[226] when she is repenting of what she has
done:
_Say, maidens, how may I start clear, and dwell
Here in the house of Athamas, as though
I had done nothing of the deeds I did?_
Such thoughts we may suppose that the soul of every bad man rakes up
within itself, while it calculates how it may escape [Sidenote: B] from
the memory of its misdoings, and cast out conscience, and become pure,
and lead another life as from the beginning. There is no confidence,
nothing free from caprice, nothing permanent or solid, in the designs of
wickedness, unless, save the mark! we are to call wicked-doers
philosophers of a sort! But where love of wealth or pleasure, as of
great prizes, and envy undiluted, are lodged by the side of hate and
ill-temper, there, if you look deep, you will find superstition seated,
and softness to meet toil, and cowardice to meet death, and a rapid
shifting of impulses, and a vain-gloriousness which comes of arrogance.
They fear those who censure them, and equally fear those who [Sidenote:
C] praise, as being victims whom they have deceived, and who are the
bitterest enemies of the bad, just because they praise so heartily those
whom they take to be good. For hardness in vice, as in bad steel, is
unsound, its rigidity is soon broken. Hence more and more, as time goes
on, they discover their own condition; they are vexed and discontented,
and spurn their own life away. We see that a bad man, when he has
restored a pledge, or gone bail for an acquaintance, or given a
patriotic subscription or a contribution which brings him glory and
credit, is immediately seized with repentance, and grieves at [Sidenote:
D] what he has done, so shifty and unsettled is his judgement. We see
others when applauded in the theatre at once groaning inwardly, as
ambition subsides into greed of money. And did not, think you, those who
sacrificed men to get a tyranny, or to advance a conspiracy, as
Apollodorus did, or who robbed their friends of money, as Glaucus the
son of Epicydes did, repent, and hate themselves, and suffer pain at
what had been done? For my own part, if I may be allowed to say so, I
think that the doers of unholy deeds need no God nor man to punish them;
their own life is sufficient, when ruined by vice, and thrown into all
disorder. [Sidenote: E]
XII. ‘But keep an eye on the discussion,’ I said, ‘for it may be running
out beyond our limits.’ ‘Perhaps it is,’ said Timon, ‘if we look on, and
consider the length of what remains to be said. For now I am going to
call up the final difficulty, as a champion who has been standing out,
since those which came forward first have pretty well had their round
out. Turn to the charge so boldly thrown at the Gods by Euripides,[227]
_The parents’ trips upon their offspring turned_,
and take it that we too who have so far been silent adopt his
arraignment. If, on the one hand, the doers paid the penalty [Sidenote:
F] themselves, then there is no need to punish those who did no wrong,
seeing that justice does not allow even the doers to be punished twice
for the same offences. If, on the other, the Gods, out of indolence,
have allowed the punishment to drop, as against the wicked, and then
exact it late in the day from the guiltless, the set-off of tardiness
against injustice is all wrong. You will remember the story of what
happened to Aesop in this place; how he came with gold from Croesus, to
sacrifice to the God magnificently, and make a distribution among the
Delphians, four minae apiece. There was some angry difference, it
appears, between him and the brotherhood; so he [Sidenote: 556]
performed the sacrifice, but sent the money back to Sardis, judging the
men unworthy of the bounty. They worked up a charge of sacrilege against
him, thrust him down from the rock called Hyampeia, and killed him.
Then, in his wrath at this, the God brought sterility on their land, and
every form of strange disease; so that they went round the Assemblies of
the Greeks asking by repeated proclamation that any who chose to come
forward should punish them on Aesop’s behalf. In the third generation,
Iadmon,[228] a Samian, came, no blood relation of Aesop, but a
descendant of those who had bought him at Samos; and to him they paid
certain penalties, and [Sidenote: B] were set free from their troubles.
From that time the punishment of sacrilegious criminals was transferred
to Nauplia from Hyampeia. Not even those most devoted to Alexander,
among whom we reckon ourselves, commend him for throwing the city of
Branchidae into ruins, and putting its inhabitants to the sword, because
of the treacherous surrender by their forefathers of the temple at
Miletus. Then Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, derided with open laughter
the Corcyraeans who asked “why he plundered their island?” “Because, of
course,” he said, “your fathers sheltered Ulysses.” And, in like manner,
when the Ithacans complained of his soldiers taking their sheep, “Why,
[Sidenote: C] your king”, he said, “came to us, and blinded the shepherd
too!”[229] Now is it not even more monstrous of Apollo to destroy the
Pheneatae[230] of the present day, by blocking the pit which took their
water, and deluging all their land, because, a thousand years ago, as
the story goes, Hercules snatched away the prophetic tripod and brought
it to Pheneus? And what of his promise to the Sybarites of release from
their troubles when they should have propitiated the wrath of the
Leucadian Hera “by three destructions”? Again, it is not long since the
[Sidenote: D] Locrians have ceased to send those maidens to Troy,
_Who with no trailing robes, feet bared, as slaves,
At early dawn must sweep Athene’s fane,
No veils, though grievous eld were drawing near_,[231]
because of the misbehaviour of Ajax. Where do you find the
reasonableness and justice here? Certainly we do not praise the
Thracians, because they still brand their own wives to avenge Orpheus,
or the Barbarians living about the Eridanus for wearing black, in
mourning for Phaethon as they say. It would have been still more
ridiculous, I think, if the men living when Phaethon perished thought
nothing about it, and then those [Sidenote: E] born five generations or
ten generations after the sad occurrence began to change into mourning
clothes for him! Yet there is nothing but stupidity in that, nothing
terrible or beyond cure; but the angers of the Gods pass underground at
the time, like certain rivers, then afterwards breakout to injure quite
different persons, and bring the direst ruin at the last. What reason is
there in that?’
XIII. At the first check, I, in terror lest he should go back to the
beginning and introduce more and greater cases of [Sidenote: F] anomaly,
at once proceeded to ask him: ‘Come,’ I said, ‘do you take all these
things for true?’ ‘Suppose that they are not all true, but that some
are, do you not think that the same perplexity comes in?’ ‘Perhaps’,
said I, ‘it is as with persons in a violent fever, who feel the same
heat, or nearly the same, whether they are wrapped in one cloak or in
many, yet we must give some relief by removing the excess. If you will
not allow this, drop the point (though to my thinking, most of the
instances look like myths and inventions); but call to mind the recent
Theoxenia, and that “fair portion” which is set aside and [Sidenote:
558] assigned by proclamation to the descendants of Pindar, and how
impressive that seemed and how pleasant. Who could fail to find pleasure
in that graceful honour, so Greek and so frankly of the old world,
unless he be one whose
_Black heart of adamant
Was wrought in chilly fire_,
in Pindar’s[232] own words? Then I pass over’, I said, ‘the similar
proclamation made at Sparta, in the words,
_After the Lesbian bard_,[233]
in honoured memory of old Terpander, for the case is the same. But I
appeal to you, who claim, as I understand, precedence among the
Boeotians as Opheltiadae, and among the Phocians [Sidenote: B] because
of Daiphantus; and who stood by me formerly, when, speaking in support
of the claim of the Lycormae and Satilaeans through their ancestor to
receive the honour and wear the crown due to the Heraclidae, I argued
that those sprung of Hercules had the strongest right to be confirmed in
the honours and prizes, because their ancestor received no worthy prize
or return for his good deeds to the Greeks.’ ‘And a noble contention it
was,’ he said, ‘and worthy indeed of Philosophy!’ ‘Then pray drop’, I
said, ‘that vehement tone in your arraignment, and do not make it any
grievance that some born of bad or vicious ancestors are punished; or
else never rejoice or applaud in the other case, when noble birth is
honoured. For [Sidenote: C] if the gratitude due to virtue is to be kept
active for the benefit of the family, it is logical and right also that
the punishment for crimes should never be exhausted or fail, but should
run a parallel course, so that payment should follow deserts under
either head. Any one who finds pleasure in seeing honour done to the
descendants of Cimon at Athens, but makes it a grievance that those of
Lachares or Ariston are banished, is too soft and too careless, or, as I
would rather say, is quarrelsome and captious in all his attitude to
Heaven. He challenges, if the children of an unjust and evil man appear
to prosper, and he challenges if the families of the bad are abased or
extinguished; he blames [Sidenote: D] the God equally if the children of
a good father are in trouble, or of a bad one.
XIV. ‘There,’ I said, ‘let all this serve for so many dykes or barriers
against those bitter and aggressive assailants! Now, let us go back, and
pick up the end of the thread in this dark place with its windings and
wanderings; I mean our argument about the God. Let us guide ourselves
with quiet caution towards what is likely and reasonable, since
certainty and truth are beyond us, even as to our own actions. For
instance, why do we order the children of persons who have died of
consumption [Sidenote: E] or dropsy to sit with both feet dipped into
water until the corpse is consumed? The idea seems to be that, if this
is done, the disease does not shift its seat or approach them. Or again,
why is it that, if one goat have taken the herb eryngium[234] into her
mouth, the whole flock halts until the goatherd comes and takes it out?
And there are other occult properties, with ways, whether of contact or
of dissemination, by which they pass, with incredible speed and over
incredible intervals, through one to another. Yet we find intervals of
time wonderful, but [Sidenote: F] not those of place; although it is
really more wonderful that a disease which began in Aethiopia[235]
infected Athens, where Pericles died and Thucydides took it, than that,
when Delphians and Sybarites had been wicked, the punishment circled
round to attack their children. There is correspondence of forces from
last to first, and there are connecting links, the cause of which,
unknown, it may be, to us, produces in silence its proper effect.[236]
XV. ‘Not but that the public visitations of cities by the wrath of
Heaven can be readily accounted for on the score of [Sidenote: 559]
justice. A city is a thing one and continuous, like an animal, which
does not cease to be itself in the changes due to growth, nor become, as
time goes on, different from what it was; it is always consentaneous and
at one with itself, and awaits all the consequences, whether censure or
gratitude, of what it does or did, so long as the association, which
makes it one and complex, preserves its unity. To divide it, according
to time, into many cities, or, rather, into an infinite number of them,
is like making many men out of one, because he is now elderly, was
formerly younger, and, still further back, was a boy. Or [Sidenote: B]
rather, the whole idea is like those tricks of Epicharmus out of which
the “Increasing Fallacy” of the Sophists sprang. The man who formerly
received the loan does not own it now, for he has become a different
person. The man who was asked to dinner yesterday, comes an unbidden
guest to-day, for he is some one else. Yet the stages of growth produce
greater variations in each one of ourselves than they do in cities as
wholes. Any one who had seen Athens thirty years ago would recognize it
to-day; manners, movements, amusements, business, popular gratitude, and
resentments, all quite as of old. Whereas a man would hardly be
recognized in figure by friend or relation who should meet him after an
interval, while the changes in character so easily produced by
anything—a word, an [Sidenote: C] exertion, a feeling, a law—produce an
effect of strangeness and novelty even to one always in his company. Yet
he is spoken of as one man from birth to the end; and we insist that a
city, which remains the same in exactly the same sense, is liable for
the reproaches incurred by ancestors, by the same title as it claims
their reputation and power. Otherwise we shall have everything, before
we know it, in the river of Heraclitus,[237] which he says a man cannot
enter twice, because Nature disturbs and alters all things in her own
changes.
XVI. ‘But if a city is a thing one and continuous, I take it that a
family also depends from a single origin which assures [Sidenote: D] a
certain pervading force of association. An offspring is never separated
from its begetter, as is a piece of man’s handicraft; it has been made
out of him, not by him; thus it has in itself some permanent portion of
him, and whether it be punished or honoured, receives what is its due.
If it were not that I might seem to trifle, I would say that graver
injustice was done to the statue of Cassander when it was melted down by
the Athenians, and to the corpse of Dionysius when it was thrust out
beyond the frontier by the Syracusans, than to the descendants of those
men in the punishments which they received. For there is nothing of the
nature of Cassander in the statue, and the soul [Sidenote: E] of
Dionysius has quitted the corpse; whereas in Nisaeus, and Apollocrates,
and Antipater and Philip, and similarly in the other sons of bad men,
the determining part of their parents is inborn in them, and is there;
it is not quiescent or inactive, since by it they live and are
nourished, are directed, and think. There is nothing strange or
remarkable if, being of them, they have what was theirs. In a word, as
in Medicine, what is [Sidenote: F] serviceable is also just. It is
ridiculous to talk of the injustice of cauterizing the thumb when the
pain is in the hip, or scarifying the region of the stomach for a tumour
inside the liver, or of oiling the ends of the horns of cattle, if there
is softening of the hoofs. So it is with punishments; to think that
there is any other justice than what heals the mischief, or to be
indignant if the treatment be applied to one set of persons through
another set (as in opening a vein to relieve weak eyes) is to see
nothing beyond the range of sense, to fail [Sidenote: 560] to remember
that a schoolmaster who chastises one boy teaches a lesson to many boys,
and that a general who executes one man in ten, brings all to their
duty. And thus not only one part through another part, but also soul
through soul receives certain dispositions, be they of deterioration or
amendment, in a truer sense than body through body. In the case of body,
the affection arising must be the same, and the alteration produced must
be the same; whereas soul is led by its own imaginings in the way of
assurance or fear, and so becomes permanently worse or else better.’
XVII. While I was still speaking, Olympicus broke in: ‘It seems to me’,
he said, ‘that your argument relies on a great [Sidenote: B] fundamental
assumption—the permanence of the soul.’ ‘Subject to your consent, it
does,’ I replied, ‘or rather to your consent already given; for, from
the initial supposition that God dispenses to us according to our
deserts, the discussion has proceeded to its present stage.’ ‘Then’, he
said, ‘you think that, because the Gods survey and administer all our
affairs, it follows that our souls are either wholly imperishable, or,
permanent for a certain time after death.’ ‘Oh no! good friend,’ I said,
‘but the God is so petty, so important a trifler, that, dealing with men
like us, who have nothing in us divine or like him in any way, or
persistent, or solid, but who wither away altogether “like leaves”, as
Homer[238] said, and [Sidenote: C] perish within a short span, he makes
us of so great account! That would be like the gardens of Adonis which
women nurse and tend in crockery pots; souls of a day springing up
within a pampered flesh wherein no strong living root finds room, and
then at once snuffed out on the first pretext. But, if you will, let the
other Gods be, and look at our own God here. Knowing that the souls of
those who die perish at once, like mists or smoke-wreaths exhaled from
the bodies, does he, think you, require men to bring so many
propitiations for the departed, [Sidenote: D] and such great honours to
the dead, deceiving and tricking his believers? For myself, I will never
give up the permanence of the soul, unless some one like Hercules shall
come, and remove the tripod of the Pythia, and lay waste the place of
the oracles. But in our own time so long as many such prophecies are
given as once were delivered to Corax the Naxian, it is nothing less
than impious to condemn the soul to death.’ Here Patrocleas asked: ‘But
what was the prophecy delivered, and who was this Corax? The fact and
the name are equally strange to [Sidenote: E] me.’ ‘Not at all,’ I said,
‘the fault is mine for using a by-name instead of the real one. The man
who killed Archilochus in battle was called Calondas, it appears; Corax
was a by-name given to him. Turned out, at first, by the Pythia, as
having slain a man sacred to the Muses, then, having put in a plea of
justification, accompanied by prayers and supplications, he was ordered
to go to the “dwelling of Tettix” and propitiate the soul of
Archilochus. This place was Taenarus; for thither, they say, Tettix the
Cretan went with an expedition, and there he founded a city, and dwelt
near the “Place of the [Sidenote: F] Passage of Souls”. So, when the
Spartans had been ordered to propitiate the soul of Pausanias, the
“Conductors of Souls” were sent for out of Italy, and, after having done
sacrifice, ousted the ghost from the temple.
XVIII. ‘Thus’, I continued, ‘the argument which assures the Providence
of God and also the permanence of the human soul, is one only; it is
impossible to remove either and to keep the other. But if the soul
exists after death, it becomes more probable that a requital is made to
it in full both of honours [Sidenote: 561] and of punishments. Like an
athlete, it is engaged in a contest during life; the contest done, it
then receives in its own self all its due. However, what rewards or what
chastisements it there receives in its own self, are nothing to us that
are alive, they are disbelieved or are unmarked. But those which pass
through children or family are manifest to those who are here, and turn
away many bad men and pull them up short. But to prove that there is no
more disgraceful and grievous punishment than for a man to see his own
descendants suffering on his account; and that when the soul of an
offender against piety or law looks after death, and sees, not the
overthrow of statues or [Sidenote: B] memorials effaced, but sons or
friends or kinsmen involved in great misfortunes, all because of itself,
and paying its penalties, it could not be content, no, not for all the
honours which are given to Zeus, to become a second time unjust and
profligate, I can tell you a story which I have lately heard; yet I
hesitate lest it may appear to you a myth, so I confine myself to
showing the probability.’ ‘On no account!’ said Olympicus, ‘give us the
whole of that story too.’ As the others made the same petition, ‘Let me
make good’, said I, ‘the probability of the view, then we will start the
myth, if myth indeed it be.
XIX. ‘Now Bion says that it would be more ridiculous [Sidenote: C] if
God were to punish the sons of wicked men, than for a doctor to drug a
descendant or a son for the disease of a grandfather or a father. But
the cases are dissimilar in one respect, though closely alike in
another. The treatment of one person does not relieve another from
disease; no patient with eye disease or fever was ever the better for
seeing an ointment or a plaster applied to another. The punishments of
the wicked are exhibited to all, because the effect of the reasonable
operation of justice is to restrain some through the punishment of
others. But the point of resemblance between the parallel adduced
[Sidenote: D] by Bion and our problem he failed to observe; it is this:
when a man has fallen into a sickness which is bad but not incurable,
and afterwards through intemperance and self-indulgence has surrendered
his body to the malady and has died of it, then, if there be a son, not
evidently diseased but only with a tendency to the same disease, a
physician, or relative, or trainer, or a kind master who has learnt the
state of the case, will put him upon a strict diet and remove made
dishes and drinks and women, and use regular courses of physic, and
harden his body by exercises, and will thus disperse and expel the
symptoms, and [Sidenote: E] not allow the little seed of a great trouble
to reach any size. Is not that the tone which we adopt, entreating sons
of fathers or mothers with a tendency to diseases to pay attention to
themselves, and to watch out, and not be careless, but to get rid at
once of the first beginnings in the system, taking them in time while
they are easy to move and loosely seated?’ ‘It is indeed’, they said.
‘Then we are doing nothing out of place, but a necessary act, one which
is useful and not ludicrous, when we introduce the sons of epileptic or
bilious or gouty sires to gymnastic exercise, diet, and drugs, not when
they are [Sidenote: F] suffering from a disease but in order that they
may not take it; for a body which proceeds out of a vitiated body
deserves no punishment but rather medical care and watching; if any one
in his cowardice and softness chooses to miscall that punishment,
because it removes pleasures and applies the sharp prick of pain and
trial, we have nothing more to say to him. Now then, does a body, the
issue of a faulty body, deserve treatment and care, and yet we must
endure to see the likeness of a kinsman’s [Sidenote: 562] vice springing
up within a young character, and making its growth there, and to wait
until it be spread over his system and manifest itself in his passions,
_And show the evil fruit
Of mind awry_,
as Pindar[239] says?
XX. ‘Or is the God in this to be less wise than Hesiod,[240] who exhorts
and charges:
_Ne’er after gloomy burial, of life
Sow thou the seed, but fresh from heavenly feasts_,
meaning that the act of generation admits not only of vice and virtue,
but also of grief and joy and the rest, and therefore he would bring men
cheerful and pleasant and open-hearted to the task? But the other matter
does not come out of Hesiod, nor is it the effect of human wisdom, but
of the God, [Sidenote: B] to see through likenesses and differences of
temperament, before they stand revealed by a plunge through the passions
into great crimes. For the cubs of bears while still tiny, and the young
of wolves and apes, show at once the character of their kind, there is
no disguise or pretence; but the nature of man is plunged at once into
customs and rules and laws, and often conceals the bad points and
imitates the good, so that the inborn stain of vice is entirely effaced
and removed, or else is undetected for a long time; it assumes a sheath
or cloke of [Sidenote: C] cleverness, which we fail to see through. We
perceive the wickedness with an effort each time that the blow or prick
of the several misdoings touches us. In a word, we think that men become
unjust when they commit an injustice, become intemperate when they do a
violence, become cowardly when they run away. It is as though we should
think that the scorpion grows a sting when he strikes, or vipers their
venom when they bite, which would be simple indeed! Take any single bad
man, he does not become bad when he appears bad; he has the vice from
the first, but it comes out as he gets opportunity and power, the thief,
of thieving, the born tyrant, of forcing the laws. But God, by his own
nature, apprehends [Sidenote: D] soul better than body; and we may be
sure that he is neither ignorant of the disposition and nature of each,
nor waits to punish violence of the hands, or insolence of the tongue,
or profligacy of the body. For he has himself suffered no wrong; is not
angry with the robber because he has met with violence, does not hate
the profligate because he has been assaulted; but, as a remedial
measure, he often chastises the man whose tendency is to adulterous
crime, or to greed, or to injustice, thus destroying vice before it has
taken hold, as he might an epilepsy.
XXI. ‘Yet we were indignant a little while ago, that the wicked are
punished so late and so slowly. And now we complain [Sidenote: E]
because God sometimes cuts short the habit and disposition before any
wrong is done, not knowing that the thing to come is often worse and
more alarming than the thing done, what is hidden than what is apparent,
and unable to calculate the reasons why it is better to leave some alone
even after they have committed an offence, and to be beforehand with
others who are still meditating one; exactly as drugs are of no use for
certain persons when sick, but are of service to others who are not
actually sick, but are in a state still more dangerous. [Sidenote: F] So
it is not always a case of
_The parents trip upon their offspring turned
By Heav’n’s high hand._[241]
If a good son be born of a bad sire, as a healthy child of a sickly
parent, he is relieved from the penalty of race, saved by adoption out
of vice. But the young man who throws back to the likeness of a tainted
race ought, surely, to take to the debts on his inheritance, that is, to
the punishment due to wickedness. Antigonus was not punished because of
Demetrius, nor—to go back to the heroes of old—Phyleus for Augeas, nor
Nestor [Sidenote: 563] for Neleus. These all came of bad sires, but were
good. But where natural disposition has embraced and adopted the family
failing, in those cases Justice pursues and visits to the uttermost the
likeness in vice. For as warts and spots and moles of parents disappear
in their children, but return on the persons of grandchildren; as again
a Greek woman had borne a black child, and when charged with adultery,
discovered that she was of Ethiopian parentage in the fourth degree; and
as, yet again, out of the sons of Nisibeus, lately dead, who was
reported to be related to the “Sown Men” of Thebes, one reproduced
[Sidenote: B] the mark of a spear on his body—family likeness
re-emerging from the depths, after such long intervals—, even so it is
often the case that characteristics and affections of the soul are
concealed and submerged in the early generations, but afterwards break
out again in later individuals, and Nature restores the familiar type,
for vice or for virtue.’
XXII. When I had spoken thus I remained silent. Olympicus laughed
quietly, and said: ‘We are not applauding you, lest we should seem to be
letting you off the myth, as though the demonstration of your view were
sufficient without it; when we have heard it, we will give judgement.’
So I went on to tell them: ‘Thespesius of Soli, a kinsman and friend of
that Protogenes who has been with us here, after an early life
[Sidenote: C] of great profligacy, quickly ran through his fortune,
changed his ways perforce, and took to the pursuit of wealth; when he
had the usual experience of the profligates who do not keep their wives
when they have them, but cast them away and try wrongfully to get their
favours when united to other men. He stopped at nothing disgraceful if
it led to enjoyment or gain, and in a short time got together an
inconsiderable fortune and a mighty reputation for evil. What hit him
hardest was an answer [Sidenote: D] delivered to him by the oracle of
Amphilochus. It appears that he had sent to ask the God “whether he will
do better the rest of his life?”[242] The answer was that he “will live
better when he has died”. And sure enough this, in a way, so fell out
not long afterwards. He fell over from a high place, upon his head;
there was no wound, but he appeared to die of the mere blow, and on the
third day, at the very time of the funeral, revived. He quickly
recovered his strength, and came to himself, and the change of life
which followed was incredible. For the Cilicians know of no man more
fair in all business relations, or more holy in religious duties, so
formidable a foe or so faithful a friend. [Sidenote: E] Hence those who
were brought into contact with him were very curious to hear the cause
of the difference, thinking that a character so completely remodelled
must have been the result of no trifling experience. And so it truly
was, according to the story related by him to Protogenes, and other
equally considerate friends. For, when sentience left his body, he felt
affected by a change, as a helmsman might do when first plunged
overboard into the depth of the sea; then, recovering a little, he
seemed to himself to breathe all over and to look around, while his soul
opened like one great eye. But he saw [Sidenote: F] nothing of what he
had been seeing before, only stars of vast size, at infinite distances
from one another, each emitting a ray of marvellous colour and of a
tonic force, so that the soul, riding smoothly on the light, as though
over a calm sea, was carried easily and quickly in every direction.
Passing over most of the sights he saw, he said that the souls of those
who die make a flame-like bubble where the air parts as they rise
[Sidenote: 564] from below, then the bubble quickly bursts, and they
emerge with human form but light in bulk, with a movement which is not
the same for all. Some bound forth with marvellous agility, and dart
upwards in a straight line, while others whirl round together like
spindles, now with an upward tendency, now a downward, borne on by a
mingled confused agitation, which after a very long time, and then with
difficulty, is reduced to calm. Most of them he did not recognize, but
seeing two or three persons of his acquaintance, he tried to approach
them and speak. They would not hear him, and [Sidenote: B] appeared not
to be themselves, but to be distraught and scared out of their senses,
shunning all sight or touch, while they roamed about, first by
themselves; then they would meet and embrace others in like case, and
whirl round in random indefinite figures of every sort, uttering
unmeaning sounds, like cries of battle mingled with those of lamentation
and terror. Others above, on the extremity of the firmament, were
cheerful to behold, often drawing near to one another in kindness, and
turning away from those other turbid souls; and they would signify, as
it seemed, their annoyance by [Sidenote: C] out drawing close together,
but joy and affability by opening and dispersing. There he saw, he said,
the soul of a kinsman, but not very certainly, for the man had died
while he was himself a child. However, the soul drew towards him, and
said, “Hail Thespesius!” He was surprised at this, and said that his
name was not Thespesius, but Aridaeus. “Formerly so,” was the reply,
“but from now Thespesius. For you are not really dead, but, by some
appointment of Heaven, have come hither with your sentient part, the
rest of your soul is left within the body, as a light anchor. Let this
be a sign to you now and hereafter; the souls of the dead make no
shadow, and their eyes do not [Sidenote: D] blink.”[243] When Thespesius
heard this, he drew himself together in deeper thought, and as he gazed,
he saw a sort of dim and shadowy line which wavered as he moved, while
the others were transparent within, all set around with brightness, yet
not all equally. Some were like the full moon at her purest, and emitted
one smooth, continuous, uniform colour; over others there ran scales, so
to call them, or slender weals; others were quite dappled and strange to
look upon, branded with black spots like those on serpents; others again
showed open blunted scars. Then [Sidenote: E] the kinsman of Thespesius
(for nothing forbids us to designate the souls in this way by the names
of men) began to explain it all to him, as thus: “Adrasteia, daughter of
Zeus and Necessity, has been appointed to punish all crimes in the
highest place; no criminal has there ever yet been, so small or so
great, as to pass unseen or to escape by his might. But there are three
modes of punishment, and each mode has its proper guardian minister.
Some men are punished, at once in the body and through their body, and
these swift Retribution handles; her [Sidenote: F] method is a gentle
one, and passes over many crimes which ask for expiation. Those whose
cure is a heavier matter are passed after death to Justice by the
daemon. The wholly incurable Justice rejects; and these the third, and
the fiercest, of the satellites of Adrasteia, whose name is Erinnys,
chases, as they wander and try to escape in all directions; and it is
pitiful and cruel how she brings them all to nothing and plunges them
into the gulf which is beyond speech or sight. As to the [Sidenote: 565]
other two modes of justification,” he went on, “that which is wrought by
Retribution during life resembles the usage of barbarian countries. For
as in Persia they pluck off and scourge the robes and the hats of men
under punishment, while their owners implore them to stop, so
punishments through money or upon the person get no close grip, they do
not fasten on the vice itself, but are mostly for appearance and appeal
to the senses. But whoever makes his way here from earth unchastened and
unpurged, Justice firmly seizes him, with his soul naked and manifest,
having no place into which to skulk, [Sidenote: B] that he may hide and
veil his wickedness, but eyed from all sides, and by all, and all over.
And first she shows him to good parents, if such he has, or to
ancestors, a contemptible and unworthy sight. If these are all bad, he
sees them punished and is seen by them, and so is justified during a
long time, while each of his passions is dislodged by pains and toils,
which as much exceed in greatness and intensity those which are through
the flesh, as a day dream may be clearer than that which comes in sleep.
Scars and weals left by particular passions[244] are more [Sidenote: C]
persistent in some men than in others. And look”, he said, “at those
motley colours upon the souls, which come from every source. There is
the dusky, dirty red, which is the smear made by meanness and greed; the
fiery blood-red of cruelty and harshness. Where you see the bluish grey,
there intemperance in pleasures has been rubbed away, and a heavy work
it was; malice and envying have been there to inject that violet beneath
the skin, as cuttle-fishes their ink. For down on earth vice brings out
the colours, while the soul is turned about by the passions and turns
the body, but here, when these have been smoothed away, the final result
of purgation, and chastisement is this, that the soul becomes radiant
all over [Sidenote: D] and of one hue. But as long as the colours are in
it, there are certain reversions to passion, with throbbings and a
pulsation which in some is faint and easily passes off, in others makes
vigorous resistance. Of these souls, some, being chastised again and
again, attain their fitting habit and disposition; others are
transferred into the bodies of beasts by masterful ignorance and the
passionate love of pleasure;[245] for ignorance, through weakness of the
reasoning part and inactivity of the speculative, inclines on its
practical side towards generation; while the love of pleasure, requiring
an instrument for intemperance, [Sidenote: E] craves to unite the
desires with their satisfaction, and to have share in corporeal
excitement, since here is nothing save a sort of ineffectual shadow, and
a dream of pleasure without its fulfilment.” Having said this, he began
to lead him on, moving rapidly yet covering, as it seemed, a space of
infinite extent with unfaltering ease, borne upwards on the rays of
light, as though by wings, until he reached a great chasm which yawned
downwards. There he was deserted by the supporting force, and saw the
other souls in the same case. Packing together, like birds, and borne
down and around, they [Sidenote: F] circled about the chasm, which they
did not venture to cross outright. You might see it within, resembling
the caves of Bacchus, dressed in wood and greenery, and gay with
blossoms of flowers of every sort; and it exhaled a mild and gentle
breeze which wafted odours of marvellous delight, and produced such an
atmosphere as wine throws off for its votaries; for the souls feasted on
the fragrant smells and were relaxed into mutual kindliness. All around
a bacchic humour prevailed, and laughter, and every joy which the Muses
can give where men sport and are merry. By this way, he said, Dionysus
went up to the Gods, and [Sidenote: 566] afterwards brought Semele; it
is called “the Place of Lethe”. Here he did not allow Thespesius to
linger, even though he would, but kept drawing him away by force,
explaining to him as he did so that the sentient mind becomes wasted and
sodden by pleasure, while the irrational and corporeal part is watered
and pampered and suggests recollection of the body, and, from that
recollection, a yearning and desire which makes for generation
(genesis), so named because it is a leaning towards earth
(Ge-neusis)[246] when the soul is weighed down by moisture. Having
travelled another journey as long as the first, he seemed to be gazing
into a mighty bowl, with rivers discharging into [Sidenote: B] it, one
whiter than foam of the sea, or snowflakes, another with the purple
flush of the rainbow, others tinged with different hues. From a distance
each showed its proper ray, but as he drew near the rim became
invisible, and the colouring was dulled, and the more brilliant hues
deserted the bowl, leaving only the whiteness. And there he saw three
daemons seated close together in a triangle, mingling the streams in
certain measures. Now the soul-conductor of Thespesius told him that
thus far Orpheus advanced, when he was questing [Sidenote: C] for the
soul of his wife, and, from not rightly remembering, put out an untrue
account among men, namely that “there was an oracle at Delphi, held by
Apollo and Night in common, whereas Night has nothing in common with
Apollo. Really,” he said, “this oracle is shared by Night and the moon,
having nowhere an earthly bound, or a single habitation, but roaming
over men everywhere in dreams and phantoms. From here it is that dreams,
which are mingled, as you see, with what is deceitful and embroidered,
get so much simplicity and truth as they scatter abroad. The oracle of
Apollo”, he continued, [Sidenote: D] “you have not seen, nor will you
ever be able to see it, for the earthly element of the soul does not
mount upwards or allow that; it is attached closely to the body and
bends downwards.” And as he spoke, he led him on, and he tried to show
him the light coming, as he said, from the tripod, resting on Parnassus
between the breasts of Themis. Earnestly desiring to see, he saw nothing
for the brightness. But he heard, as he passed, a woman’s shrill voice
chanting in verse many things, among them the time of his own death. The
daemon told him that the voice was that of the Sibyl,[247] who was
singing about things to be, as she was carried round on the face of the
moon. He [Sidenote: E] desired to hear more, but was thrust off by the
whirling of the moon to the opposite side, as though caught in the
eddies, and only heard scraps, one of which was about Mount Vesuvius and
the future destruction by fire of Dicaearcheia, and a fragment of song
about the emperor of that day, how that
_so good a man
Shall die upon his bed, and end his reign._[248]
After that, they turned to the sight of those under punishment. At first
they met only with repulsive and piteous spectacles. Afterwards, when
Thespesius found friends and relations and intimates, whom he could
never have conceived of as punished, enduring sore sufferings and
penalties both ignominious and [Sidenote: F] painful, and pitying
themselves to him and weeping aloud; and at last saw his own father
emerging from a certain pit, all over brands and scars, reaching out his
hand towards his son and not permitted to be silent, but compelled by
the warders to confess his infamous conduct to some strangers who had
come with gold—how he had poisoned them, and had escaped detection there
on earth, but had been convicted here, how he had already suffered part,
and was now led to suffer the remainder—, then he did not dare to
supplicate [Sidenote: 567] or to entreat for his father, so great was
his consternation and horror. Wishing to turn about and flee, he saw no
longer that gracious and familiar guide, but was thrust forward by
others of terrible visage, because it was necessary that he should go
through it all. There he beheld the shadows of those who had been
notoriously wicked, and who had been punished on the spot, not savagely
handled as were the former ones, because[249] their trouble was in the
irrational seat of the passions. [Sidenote: B] But those who had passed
through life under a veil or cloak of the appearance of virtue, were
compelled by others, who stood around, laboriously and painfully to turn
their soul inside out, writhing and bending themselves back unnaturally,
as the scolopendrae[250] of the sea, when they have gorged the hook,
turn themselves inside out. Others they would flay, and fold the skin
back, to show how scarred and mottled they were beneath it, because the
vice was seated in the rational and directing part. Other souls he said
that he saw intertwined like vipers, by twos or threes or more together,
gnawing one another out of spite and rancour for what they had suffered
[Sidenote: C] in life, or done. And there were lakes lying side by side,
one of boiling gold, one of lead, exceeding cold, and one of iron, which
was rough. Over these stood daemons, as it might be smiths, with tongs,
picking up by turns the souls of those whose wickedness came of greed
and grasping, and plunging them in. When they had become all fiery and
transparent in the burning gold, they were thrust into the bath of lead;
and when frozen till they became hard as hailstones, they were shifted
on to the iron, and there they became hideously black, [Sidenote: D] and
were broken up and crushed, so hard and brittle were they, and their
shapes were changed. Then they were conveyed, just as they were, back to
the gold, enduring dire pains in the transition. Most pitiful of all, he
said, was the case of those who seemed already quit of Justice and then
were seized up anew. These were the souls whose penalty had come round
to any descendants or children. For whenever any one of these last came
up and met them, he would fall upon them in anger, and shout aloud, and
show the marks of his sufferings, reviling and pursuing, while the
parent soul sought to flee and hide [Sidenote: E] itself, but could not;
for the torturers would run swiftly after and bring them to Justice, and
force them through all from the beginning, while they bewailed
themselves because they knew the punishment before them. And there were
some, he said, to whom a number of their offspring were attached,
clinging to them just like bees or bats, and jibbering in wrathful
recollection of what they had suffered on account of their parents. Last
of all, while he was looking at the souls returning to a second
birth—how they were violently bent and transformed into animals of every
sort by the executioners of this task, [Sidenote: F] who used certain
implements and blows, here squeezing together the limbs entire, here
twisting them aside, here planing them away and getting rid of them
altogether, to fit into other characters and other lives—, there
appeared among these the soul of Nero, already in torment, and pierced
with red-hot nails. For it the executioners had prepared the form of a
viper, as Pindar describes it, wherein the beast is to be conceived, and
live, after having devoured its own mother. And then, he said, there
shone out a great light, and from the light came a voice commanding them
to shift Nero to some other milder species, and to fashion a beast to
sing around marshes and pools, for that he had paid the penalty of his
crimes; and moreover some benefit was due to him from the Gods, because
he had freed [Sidenote: 568] the best and most God-loving race, that of
Hellas. Up to this point, Thespesius had been, he said, a spectator. But
as he was about to return, he suffered a horrible fear. For a woman of
marvellous form and stature seized hold of him: “Come here, fellow!” she
said, “that thou mayest have a better memory of these things.” Then she
brought near him a rod, such as painters use, red-hot, but another woman
prevented her. He, sucked up by a sudden violent wind, as out of a
blow-pipe, fell on to his own body, and just opened his eyes on the edge
of the tomb.’
Footnote 199:
See p. 313.
Footnote 200:
On the proverb ‘Post Lesbium Cantorem’.
Footnote 201:
i. e. in the battle of Amphipolis. See Thuc. 5, 10 and Plut. _Life of
Nicias_, c. 9.
Footnote 202:
_Orestes_, 420.
Footnote 203:
3, 38.
Footnote 204:
See Pausanias, 4, 17.
Footnote 205:
Fr. 969.
Footnote 206:
The author of this famous line is unknown.
Footnote 207:
Fr. 57.
Footnote 208:
_Minos_, 319 C.
Footnote 209:
No specific passage can be identified with the words in the text. For
the sequel cp. _Timaeus_, 30 A.
Footnote 210:
Cp. _Rep._ 6, 508 A.
Footnote 211:
See p. 181 n. 1.
Footnote 212:
This line is a continuation of the quotation from Melanthius above.
Footnote 213:
Cp. Aesch. _Cho._ 313, &c.
Footnote 214:
Quoted several times as from Pindar (see Fr. 77), but perhaps rather
Simonides.
Footnote 215:
_Il._ 15, 641.
Footnote 216:
Cp. Aristot. _Poet._ c. 9.
Footnote 217:
_W. and D._ 266, 265.
Footnote 218:
_Laws_, 5, 728 C.
Footnote 219:
i.e. under Roman law. See Smith’s _Dict. Ant._, _s.v._ Crux.
Footnote 220:
_Rep._ 406 B.
Footnote 221:
See H. Richards in _Class. Rev._ vol. 29, p. 235, and, for the
quotation, the _Life of Lucullus_, c. 1.
Footnote 222:
Fr. 42, and see Jebb’s Introd. to the _Electra_ of Sophocles.
Footnote 223:
See _Life of Aristides_, c. 6. also Dion Chrys. _Orat._ 64.
Footnote 224:
See _Life of Cimon_, c. 6.
Footnote 225:
Again quoted, _De Curiosit._ 520 A.
Footnote 226:
Eur. _Ino_, Fr. 403.
Footnote 227:
Fr. 970.
Footnote 228:
See Herod. 2, 134.
Footnote 229:
i. e. Polyphemus. See _Od._ 9, 375 foll.
Footnote 230:
See Herod. 66, 74, and Pausan. 4, 252, and 8, 18.
Footnote 231:
From an unknown poet; Euphorion and Arctinus are suggested.
Footnote 232:
Fr. 123.
Footnote 233:
Hence a proverb applied to what was second-rate.
Footnote 234:
Arist. _H. A._ 9, 3, 610 b 29.
Footnote 235:
See Thuc. 2, 48; also _Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art_,
by Raymond Crawfurd, M.D., chap. 2 and Appendix.
Footnote 236:
Cp. Plato, _Laws_, 4, 715 A.
Footnote 237:
Fr. 41.
Footnote 238:
_Il._ 6, 146.
Footnote 239:
Fr. 211.
Footnote 240:
_W. and D._ 735-6.
Footnote 241:
Eur. Fr. 970.
Footnote 242: