ON THE INSTANCES OF DELAY IN DIVINE PUNISHMENT
A DIALOGUE
THE SPEAKERS
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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.
|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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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, |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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?’ |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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. |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 |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, |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 |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, |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 |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.’
FROM THE DIALOGUE ‘ON THE SOUL’
A FRAGMENT
[Preserved by Stobaeus, Florileg. 119.[[251]]]
I. When Timon had spoken thus, Patrocleas replied: ‘Your argument is as forcible as it is ancient, yet there are difficulties. For if the doctrine of immortality is so very old, how is it that the fear of death is “oldest of terrors”[[252]]? Unless, of course, it is this which has engendered all other terrors. For there is nothing “fresh or new” in our mourning for the dead, or in the use of those sad sinister forms of speech, “Poor man!” “Unfortunate man!”’
II. ‘But there’, said Timon, ‘we shall find a confusion of ideas between what perishes and what does not. Now when we speak of the dead as having “passed away” and being “gone”, there is clearly no suggestion of anything actually harsh, only of a change or transition of some sort. Where that change takes place for those who undergo it, and whether it be for worse or better, let us consider by looking into the other words used. Our actual word for death[[253]], in the first place, does not appear to point to a movement downward, or beneath the earth, but rather to a mounting upward towards God of that which passes. Thus we may reasonably suppose that the soul darts out and runs upward, as though a bent spring had been released, when the body breathes it out, and itself draws an upward vital breath. Next, look at the opposite of death, which is generation; this word, on the contrary, expresses a tendency downward, an inclination to earth[[254]] of that which at the time of death again speeds upward. Hence, too, we call our natal day by a name which means a beginning of evils and of great troubles.[[255]] Perhaps we shall see the same thing even more clearly from another set of words. A man when he dies is said to be “released”, and death called a “release”—if you ask the question “from what?”, a release from body[[256]]—for body is called dĕmas, because the soul is kept in bondage in it, contrary to nature, nothing being forcibly detained in a place which is natural to it. A further play upon this “bondage” and “force” gives the word “life”, as Homer,[[257]] I think, uses Hesperus for the feminine “evening”, and so, in contrast to “life”, the dead is said to come to his rest, released from a great and unnatural stress. So with the change and reconstitution of the soul into the Whole; we say that it has perished when it has made its way thither; while here it does not know this unless at the actual approach of death, when it undergoes such an experience as those do who are initiated into great mysteries. Thus death and initiation closely correspond, word to word,[[258]] and thing to thing. At first there are wanderings, and laborious circuits, and journeyings through the dark, full of misgivings where there is no consummation; then, before the very end, come terrors of every kind, shivers, and trembling, and sweat, and amazement. After this, a wonderful light meets the wanderer; he is admitted into pure meadow lands, where are voices, and dances, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions. Here the newly initiate, all rites completed, is at large; he walks at large like the dedicated victim with a crown on his head, and joins in high revelry; he converses with pure and holy men, and surveys the uninitiate unpurified crowd here below in the dirt and darkness, trampled by its own feet and packed together; through fear of death remaining in its ills, because it does not believe in the blessings which are beyond. For that the conjunction of soul with body, and its imprisonment, are against nature, you may clearly see from this.’
III. ‘From what?’ said Patrocleas. ‘From the fact that of all our experiences sleep is the most agreeable. First, it always extinguishes any perception of pain, because its pleasure is mingled with so much that is familiar, secondly, it overpowers all other appetites, even the most vehement. For even those who are devoted to the body become disinclined for pleasure when sleep comes on, and when they slumber reject loving embraces. Why dwell on this? When sleep takes possession, it excludes even the pleasure which comes from learning, and discussion, and philosophic thought, as though a smooth deep stream swept the soul along. All pleasure, perhaps, is by its essence and nature a respite from pain, but of sleep this is absolutely true. For, though nothing exciting or delightful should approach from without, yet we feel pleasure in a sound sleep; sleep seems to remove a condition of toil and hardness. And that condition is no other than that which binds soul to body. In sleep the soul is separated, and speeds upward, and is gathered unto itself after having been strained to fit the body, and dispersed among the senses. Yet some assert that, on the contrary, sleep immingles soul with body. They are wrong. The body bears its witness the other way, by its lack of sensation, its coldness, and heaviness, and pallor proving that the soul leaves it in death, and shifts its quarters in sleep. This produces the pleasure; it is a release and respite for the soul, as though it laid down a burthen which it must again resume and shoulder. For when it dies it runs away from the body for good; when it is asleep, it plays truant. Therefore death is sometimes accompanied by pains, sleep always by pleasure; in the former case the bond is snapped altogether, in the latter it gives, and is slackened, and becomes easier, as the senses are loosened like parting knots, and the strain which ties soul to body is gone.’
IV. ‘Then how is it’, said Patrocleas, ‘that we do not feel discomfort or pain from being awake?’ ‘How is it’, said Timon, ‘that when the hair is cut, the head feels lightness and relief, yet there was no sense of oppression at all while the hair was long? Or that men released from bonds feel pleasure, yet there is no pain when the chains are on? Or why is there a stir of applause when light is brought suddenly into a banquet, yet its absence did not appear to cause pain or trouble to the eye? There is one cause, my friend, in all these cases; that gradual habituation made the unnatural familiar to the sense, so that it felt absolutely no distress then, but felt pleasure when there was release and a restoration to nature. The strangeness is seen at once when the proper condition comes, the presence of what pained and pressed by contrast with the pleasure. It is exactly so with the soul: during its association with mortal passions, and parts, and organs, that which is unnatural and strange produces no apparent pressure because of that long familiarity; yet when discharged from the activities of the body, it feels ease, and relief, and pleasure. By them it is distressed, and about these it toils, and from these it craves leisure and rest. For all that concerns its own natural activities—observation, reasoning, memory, speculation—it is unwearied and insatiable. Satiety is nothing but a weariness of pleasure, when soul feels with body. To its own pleasures soul never cries “Enough”; but while it is involved in body, it is in the plight of Ulysses.[[259]] As he clung to the fig-tree, and hugged it, not from love of the tree, but fearing Charybdis down below, so soul clings to body and embraces it, from no goodwill to it or gratitude, but in horror of the uncertainty of death,
For life the gods conceal from mortal men,
says the wise Hesiod.[[260]] They have not strained soul to body by fleshy bonds, one bond they have contrived and one encompassing device, the uncertainty of what comes after death, and our slowness to believe; since, “if the soul were persuaded”, as Heraclitus[[261]] says, “of all the things which await men when they have died, no force would keep it back.”’