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