“in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.”
Plutarch rejoices in showing in Hercules an avenger who adapted the
special mode of vengeance to the distinctive deserts of the wrong-doer.
He punished with the very mode of punishment devised by those who were
now made to suffer it. Antæus he killed in wrestling, and Termerus by
breaking his skull,—it being the _specialité_ of Termerus to destroy
the passengers he met by dashing his head against theirs. Theseus was
the imitator of Hercules in this retributive system; he punished Sinis,
a bandit,—who used to kill travellers by binding them to the boughs of
two pine-trees, which were then allowed to swing back and separate—by
making an end of him in the self-same way; Procrustes again he stretched
on his own bed. Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, infamous for his
cruelty, and specially for the device devised for him by Perillus of a
brazen bull in which he burnt his victims—this Phalaris first tried the
device on this Perillus; and when Phalaris was deposed an indignant mob
practised upon _him_ the self-same torture to which he had subjected
so many. And ever memorable among other tales of antiquity,—old wives’
fables if you will, but then have not all fables a moral?—is that of
Diomedes, who was devoured by the horses he had himself taught to feed
on the flesh and blood of men. “Ashes always fly back in the face of
him that throws them,” is a proverb in the Yoruba language, quoted by
Archbishop Trench as equivalent to our “Harm watch, harm catch,” and
perhaps to the Spanish, “He that sows thorns, let him not walk barefoot.”
An overruling Power disposes of what the malignity of man proposes, and
“Thus doth it force the swords of wicked men
To turn their own points on their masters’ bosoms.”
The psalmist felt that he was praying in accordance with the Divine will,
when he prayed that the ungodly might fall into their own nets together,
while he ever escaped them. So again with his prayer that the mischief
of their own lips might fall upon the heads of them that compassed him
about. For it was a matter at once of faith and of experience with the
psalmist, that the evil deviser and evil-doer, travailing with mischief,
conceiving sorrow, and bringing forth ungodliness, who had graven and
digged up a pit, was apt to fall himself into the destruction that he
made for other. “For his travail shall come upon his own head, and his
wickedness shall fall on his own pate.” Owen Feltham delights to recall,
from the stores of ancient and mediæval story, how Bagoas, a Persian
nobleman, having poisoned Artaxerxes and Artamenes, was detected by
Darius, and forced to drink poison himself; how Diomedes, as we have
already seen, for the beasts he had fed on human flesh was by Hercules
made food; and how Pope Alexander VI., having designed the poisoning of
his friend Cardinal Adrian, by his cup-bearer’s mistake of the bottle,
took the draught himself, “and so died by the same engine which he
himself had appointed to kill another”—a sort of enginery glanced at in
Ben Jonson:—
“I have you in a purse-net,
Good master Picklock, with your worming brain,
And wriggling engine-head”
too clever by half. Luther, in his Table-talk, welcomes the import of the
Jewish story of Og, king of Bashan, who they say had lifted a great rock
to throw at his enemies, “but God made a hole in the middle, so that it
slipped down upon the giant’s neck, and he could never rid himself of
it.” The fourth book of Southey’s “Thalaba” closes with a shriek from
Lobaba the sorcerer, which this final stanza sufficiently explains:
“What, wretch, and hast thou raised
The rushing terrors of the wilderness,
To fall on thine own head?
Death! death! inevitable death!
Driven by the breath of God,
A column of the desert met his way.”
Nor, among the lyrical pieces of the same poet, be forgotten that ballad
of the Inchcape rock, which tells how the bell put up by the abbot of
Aberbrothok to warn ships of their peril, was taken down by a sea pirate,
Sir Ralph the Rover, who in the words of an old Scottish topographer, “a
yeare thereafter perished upon the same rocke, with ship and goodes, in
the righteous judgment of God.” Many and many
“stories have been told of men whose lives
Were infamous, and so their end. I mean
That the red murderer has himself been murdered;
The traitor struck with treason; he who let
The orphan perish came himself to want:
Thus justice and great God have ordered it!
So that the scene of evil has been turned
Against the actor; pain paid back with pain;
And poison given for poison.”
Prescott’s narrative of the decline and fall of Luna, minister under John
II. of Castile, is pointed with this moral to adorn the tale; that “by
one of those dispensations of Providence which often confound the plans
of the wisest, the column which the minister had so artfully raised for
his support served only to crush him.” _Sæpe intereunt aliis meditantes
necem_; and that by the very means mediated.
“For ’tis the sport, to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard,”
says Hamlet, in vindictive anticipation of such an issue, or rather
upshot. The guilty king, his uncle, suggests misgivings lest his arrows,
by a certain mischance, might
“have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aimed them;”
and arrows, so returning, are by poetical justice apt to do the foiled
bowman a mischief. That king’s fellow-conspirator, Laertes, is thus
punished, and owns it:—
“_Osric._ How is’t, Laertes?
_Laertes._ Why as a woodcock to my own springe, Osric;
I am justly killed with mine own treachery.”