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,