|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