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.