Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
Having spoken so, Quintus, Epicurus went off before anyone could answer, since we had by then reached the far end of the portico. As for us, in sheer wonder at the man's strangeness, we stood still in silence, glancing at one another, and then turned back again along the walk we happened to be taking. Then Patrocleas spoke first: "Well then, does it seem best to drop the inquiry, or shall we answer the argument as though its speaker were both present and not present?" Timon took this up: "But even if the man had let fly his shot and made his escape, it would hardly have been right to overlook the dart still lodged in us. Brasidas, it is said, pulled the spear out of his own body and with that very weapon struck down and killed the man who had thrown it; but for us it is no great task, I think, to ward off
those who let loose an absurd or false charge against us — it is enough if, before the opinion takes hold, we ourselves cast it out." "What then," I asked, "most disturbed you in what was said? For the man poured out a great deal all at once, in no order, dragging one thing from here and another from there, as if in some fit of anger and abuse, hurling it all together against providence." And Patrocleas said: "It is the slowness and delay of the divine in punishing the wicked
that seems to me the most terrible thing. Indeed, just now, under the pressure of these arguments, I found myself as fresh and unsettled in opinion as if I had never thought about it, though long ago I used to be indignant on hearing Euripides say, 'it delays, but such is the nature of the divine.' And yet it suits nothing less than it suits God to be lax toward the wicked, since they themselves are not lax
nor slow to do wrong, but are swept toward injustice by the sharpest of impulses under their passions. And indeed, as Thucydides says, 'retaliation, lying nearest to the wrong suffered,' at once blocks the road for those who make the freest use of the smooth-flowing stream of wickedness. For nothing so much as a debt of justice falling into arrears makes the wronged man weak in hope and humbled, while it swells the wrongdoer with boldness and
daring; whereas punishments that fall close upon the heels of daring deeds also serve as checks upon crimes not yet committed, and above all they carry within them what comforts the victims. That is why the saying of Bias often troubles me when I call it to mind: he said, it seems, to some wicked man, that he did not fear the man would go unpunished, but that he himself would not live to see it.
For what good did it do the Messenians, who had already perished, that Aristocrates was at last punished — the man who betrayed them at the battle of the Trench, escaped detection for more than twenty years, and all that time ruled as king over the Arcadians, and only later paid the penalty when he was found out? The men themselves were no longer alive. Or what comfort did it bring to the Orchomenians, who had lost children, friends, and kinsmen betrayed by Lyciscus, that a disease attacked him many years later,
eating away that part of his body which he had always dipped and soaked in the river when he swore his oath and called down the curse that it might rot, if he betrayed and wronged them? For the castings-out of the accursed bodies at Athens, and the banishments of the dead, were never even witnessed by the grandchildren of those men who had been slaughtered. This is why Euripides is beside the mark when, to deter men from wickedness, he uses these lines: 'Justice will not come upon you, do not tremble, and strike you to the liver,
nor any other mortal who does wrong, but silently, with slow foot advancing, she will seize the wicked, whenever it happens.' For it is likely that the wicked encourage and urge one another with these very words to rejoice in their transgressions, on the ground that injustice yields its fruit at once, ripe and plain to see, while its punishment comes late and lags far behind the enjoyment."
When Patrocleas had gone through this, Olympichus took up the argument: "And this too, Patrocleas — how great an absurdity there is in the divine's lingering and procrastination over these matters, in that the delay strips away belief in providence, and since the evil that follows does not come hard upon each wrongdoing but only later, men classify it instead under the head of misfortune, calling it a disaster rather than a punishment, and gain nothing from it,
being vexed at what has happened to them but not repenting of what they themselves have done. For just as with a horse, the blow and the prick that follows immediately upon the stumble and the fault corrects it and turns it toward what is required, but blows and checks and jerks that come later and after an interval seem to happen for some other purpose rather than instruction, so that they carry the pain without the lesson —
in the same way, vice, when it is struck and checked for each particular fault as it stumbles into it, being punished on the spot, would most likely become thoughtful, humbled, and fearful before god, as one who stands over human affairs and passions as a judge not behind on his accounts; whereas the Justice that steals along quietly and 'with slow foot,' as Euripides says, and falls upon the wicked as chance has it rather than according to
providence, resembles something wandering, overdue, and disorderly. And so I do not see what use there is in these things said to be ground late indeed by the mills of the gods, seeing that they make justice dim and blunt the fear of wickedness." When this had been said, and I was turning it over in my own mind, Timon spoke up: "Shall I now myself set the capstone
upon the difficulty, or shall I first let him fight it out against these points on his own?" "Why," I said, "is it necessary to bring up a third wave and flood the argument further, if he will not be able to fend off the first ones, nor escape the charges? Let us then begin, as it were from an ancestral hearth, with the reverence toward the divine shown by the philosophers of the Academy: as to speaking as though we knew anything certain about these matters,
we shall disclaim that in advance. For it is a greater thing than for men unversed in music to discuss musicians, or men who have never served in war to discuss soldiers, for us, being human, to examine divine and daemonic matters — like untrained persons pursuing, from opinion and conjecture, some likely approximation of a craftsman's thinking. For it is no easy task even for a layman to work out a doctor's reasoning as to why he did not operate earlier but later, or did not bathe the patient yesterday but today —
that indeed would be work; but about the gods it is easy for a mortal to say nothing else with certainty, except that he, knowing best the right moment for the treatment of wickedness, applies punishment to each case as a physician applies a remedy, having neither a common measure of severity nor one and the same span of time for all alike. For that the therapy of the soul — called justice, or righteousness — is the greatest of all arts,
besides countless other witnesses, Pindar too testified, when he called the ruler and lord of all things, God, 'supreme craftsman,' as being the maker of justice, to whom it belongs to determine when, and how, and for how long each of the wicked must be punished. And of this very art Plato says that Minos, being a son of Zeus, became a pupil, on the ground that it is not possible for one who has not learned and acquired the knowledge either to succeed rightly in matters of justice
or even to perceive one who does succeed rightly. For not even the laws that men themselves make have what is reasonable in them plain and evident at all times — indeed some of their ordinances seem quite absurd: for instance, in Sparta, the ephors, as soon as they enter office, proclaim publicly that no one is to grow a moustache, and that men are to obey the laws, so that the laws may not be harsh toward them;
whereas the Romans, when they set a slave free, lay a thin straw upon his body; and when they draw up wills, they leave some men as heirs while selling their property to others — which seems paradoxical. And most paradoxical of all is Solon's law, that a man who in a civil conflict of the city joins neither faction, and takes no part in the sedition, is to be stripped of his citizen rights. And in general one could point out many absurdities in laws, without either
grasping the lawgiver's reasoning or understanding the cause behind each provision written down. What wonder is it, then, if, human affairs being so hard for us to observe, it is no easy matter to speak about the gods — by what reasoning they punish some offenders later and others sooner?" "These considerations," I said, "are not a pretext for evasion but a request for indulgence, so that the argument, looking to them as to
a harbor and refuge, may more confidently make its way back up toward the difficulty by way of what is plausible. But first consider this: that according to Plato, God, having set himself in the midst as a pattern of all things beautiful, grants to those able to follow him a human virtue that is in some way an assimilation to himself. For indeed the nature of the universe, being disorderly, took this as the starting point of its transformation into an ordered cosmos, through a certain likeness
and participation in the divine idea and its virtue. And this same man says that God kindled sight itself within us so that the soul, growing accustomed through the viewing and wonder of the bodies borne along in heaven to welcome and love what is orderly and well-arranged, might come to be hostile to passions that are discordant and errant, and might flee what is random and haphazard, as being
the origin of vice and of every kind of error. For there is nothing greater that man by nature can gain from God than, by imitating and pursuing the beautiful and good things in him, to be established in virtue. This is why God also applies punishment to the wicked slowly and at leisure — not because he himself fears making some error by punishing quickly, or fears later regret, but because he is stripping away from us
the beastlike and violent element in acts of vengeance, and teaching us not to fall upon those who have wronged us in anger, nor at the very moment when our passion is most inflamed and leaping and bounding above our reason, glutting ourselves on the wrongdoer as though slaking a thirst or hunger, but rather, imitating his own gentleness and his delay, taking as counselor a period of time least inclined toward repentance, to lay hold of justice in due order and measure. For
to make use of troubled water when one happens upon it, through simple lack of self-control, is a lesser evil, as Socrates used to say, than, while one's reasoning is still murky and brimming with anger and madness, to glut oneself with the punishment of a kindred and related being before that reasoning has settled and become clear. For it is not, as Thucydides said, that retaliation lies nearest at hand to the wrong suffered; rather, being set at the greatest distance, it receives its due more fittingly. For just as anger, according to
Melanthius, does terrible things once it has taken up residence in the mind, so too reasoning does what is just and measured once it has put anger and passion out of the way. This is why men are also tamed by human examples, hearing how Plato, having raised his stick against a slave-boy, stood a long while, as he himself said, chastising his own anger; and how Archytas, having noticed some fault and disorder among his household slaves in the field,
and their unruliness, then becoming aware that he himself felt rather too much passion and harshness toward them, did nothing more than say, as he walked away, only this: 'You are fortunate that I am angry with you.' If, then, the remembered words and recounted deeds of mere men can strip away the harshness and violence of anger, it is far more likely that we, seeing that God — who has no fear and no cause for regret about anything — nevertheless
lays up punishment for the future and waits out the time, should ourselves become cautious in such matters, and should regard gentleness and moderation of passion as a divine portion of virtue, one that God displays by correcting a few through punishment, but by his slowness benefiting and admonishing many." "Let us, then, consider this second point: that acts of justice among men, having only the function of paying back pain for pain,
stop at making the wrongdoer suffer in his turn, and go no further; hence, like a dog, they keep close watch upon offenses and pursue the deeds hot on their heels. But it is likely that God, whenever he lays his justice upon a soul that is diseased, also looks closely into its passions, to see whether they yield in any way and incline toward repentance, and gives time to those in whom vice is not by nature
unmixed or unchangeable. For, knowing what portion of virtue souls carry with them as they set out from him toward birth, and how their nobility is implanted in them as something strong and not easily quenched, but blossoms into vice against its own nature, corrupted by bad nurture and bad company, and then, in some cases, once properly tended, recovers its rightful condition — he does not press the same punishment equally upon all, but
whatever is incurable he removes at once from life and cuts away, since it is altogether harmful to others and most harmful of all to itself to go on living in company with wickedness; but to those in whom the tendency to err seems to have arisen more from ignorance of the good than from deliberate choice of the shameful, he grants time to change. And if they persist in wrongdoing even so, he renders justice to these as well — for surely he has no fear that they will escape him. Consider, then,
how many changes have occurred in the character and life of men — indeed 'character' itself (tropos) was named from the changing (metaballon) of a man's own disposition and temper, insofar as habit most fully clothes it and, once it takes hold, prevails above all. I think, for my part, that the ancients called Cecrops 'of two natures' not, as some say, because he turned from a good king into a savage, dragon-like tyrant, but on the contrary because at first he was crooked
and fearsome, and only later ruled gently and humanely. But if that case is uncertain, we do at least know of Gelon and Hiero the Sicilians, and Peisistratus the son of Hippocrates, that though they acquired their tyrannies by wickedness, they put those tyrannies to the use of virtue, and, having come to power unlawfully, became moderate rulers who benefited the people — the one providing good order in abundance and care for the land, and rendering
the citizens themselves temperate and hard-working instead of extravagant and idly talkative. Gelon, moreover, though he had fought most excellently in war and had defeated the Carthaginians in a great battle, would not make peace with them when they begged for it until he had also included this in the treaty: that they should stop sacrificing their children to Cronus. And in Megalopolis, Lydiadas was tyrant; then, in the very midst of his tyranny, he changed his ways, and, disgusted at his own
injustice, restored their laws to the citizens, and, fighting the enemy on behalf of his homeland, fell gloriously in battle. But if someone had put Miltiades to death earlier as a tyrant in the Chersonese, or had pursued and caught Cimon for living with his sister and had him executed, or had taken the city away from Themistocles for the outrages by which he ran riot and reveled disgracefully through the marketplace — indicting him as later happened to Alcibiades — would we not have lost
our Marathons, our battles at the Eurymedon, our fair Artemisium, 'where the sons of the Athenians laid the shining foundation of freedom'? For great natures bring forth nothing small, nor does their vehemence lie idle because of its very sharpness — indeed it is active within them; rather, they are tossed about in turmoil before they arrive at a fixed and settled character. Just as, then, a man with no experience of farming would not welcome a piece of land, seeing it thick with
...full of dense undergrowth, wild plants, and many beasts, with streams of water and a great deal of mud. But to a man trained to perceive and to judge, these very features reveal the land's strength and everything it promises, and also its softness. In the same way great natures put forth many strange and base shoots before they bloom, and we, unable to bear at once their roughness and their sting, think we must cut them off and check them. But the better judge, discerning in these very things what is useful and noble, waits for the age and season that will cooperate with reason and virtue, the season in which nature renders its proper fruit.
"So much, then, for that. But as for the law in Egypt, do you not think some of the Greeks were right to have adopted it in copying down for you — the law which commands that a pregnant woman condemned to death be kept in custody until she gives birth?" "Certainly," they said. So I went on: "But if a person, though not pregnant with a child, is nevertheless able in time to bring to light and disclose some secret act or design — having revealed some hidden wrong, or having become the counselor of a saving plan, or the discoverer of some necessary benefit — is not the one who waits for this better than the one who kills off in advance what is useful, before the punishment is exacted? To me, at least," I said, "it seems so." "And to us," said Patrocleas. "Rightly," I said.
"Consider: if Dionysius had paid the penalty at the very start of his tyranny, no Greek would have gone on living in Sicily, for it would have been laid waste by the Carthaginians — just as neither Apollonia nor Anactorium nor the Leucadian peninsula would have been inhabited by Greeks, had Periander not been punished only after a long time. I think Cassander too was granted a postponement of his punishment, so that Thebes might be resettled again. As for the mercenaries who joined in seizing this very shrine, most of them crossed over to Sicily with Timoleon, and when they had defeated the Carthaginians and put down the tyrannies there, they too later came to a bad end, wicked men meeting a wicked fate. For indeed, in some cases the divine has made use of other wicked men, as public executioners so to speak, to punish still other wrongdoers, and then afterward crushed them in turn — as it did, I think, with most tyrants. For just as the hyena's gall and the seal's rennet, though these are foul creatures in other respects, have some use against disease, so too, when certain people need biting and chastisement, the god casts upon them the harsh bitterness of a tyrant hard to appease, or the grievous roughness of a ruler, and does not remove what pains and disturbs them until he has cleansed and rid them of what is diseased. Such a remedy Phalaris was for the people of Agrigentum, and Marius for the Romans. And to the Sicyonians the god plainly foretold that their city would need whip-bearers, because in robbing the Cleonaeans of the boy Teletias, who had been crowned victor at the Pythian games, and claiming him as their own citizen, they tore him to pieces. Now for the Sicyonians, Orthagoras, becoming tyrant, and after him Myron and Clisthenes and their circle, put a stop to this licentiousness; but the Cleonaeans, who did not obtain the same treatment, have come to nothing at all.
"And you have heard Homer say somewhere that a son far better than his father was born of one far worse in every virtue. And yet that son of Copreus performed no brilliant or distinguished deed; but the line of Sisyphus, and of Autolycus, and of Phlegyas, flourished in the fame and virtues of great kings. Pericles too was born at Athens of an accursed house, and Pompey the Great at Rome was son of Strabo, whose corpse the Roman people, out of hatred, threw out and trampled underfoot. What is strange, then, if — just as the farmer does not cut down the thorn until he has taken the asparagus growing beside it, and the Libyans do not burn the brushwood before gathering the ladanum resin from it — the god does not destroy the wicked and rough root of a famous and royal stock before the fitting fruit has grown from it? For it was better for the Phocians that countless oxen and horses of Iphitus should be lost, and more gold and silver be carried off from Delphi, than that neither Odysseus nor Asclepius should ever have been born, nor the others who, sprung from bad and wicked men, became good and greatly beneficial men."
"Do you not think it better that punishments should come at the fitting time and in the fitting manner, rather than swiftly and at once? Consider the case of Callippus — with the very same dagger with which, pretending to be his friend, he killed Dion, he himself was afterward killed by Dion's friends. Or consider Mitys of Argos: when he was killed in a civil disturbance, a bronze statue in the marketplace, while a spectacle was in progress, fell upon the man who had killed Mitys and slew him. And you surely know the story concerning Bessus the Paeonian and Ariston the Oetaean mercenary captain, Patrocleas?" "No, by Zeus," he said, "but I would like to learn it." "Ariston," I said, "took down the ornament of Eriphyle that lay dedicated here, when the tyrants gave it to him, and brought it home as a gift to his wife; and his own son, enraged against his mother for some reason, set fire to the house and burned them all together in it. As for Bessus, it seems that after killing his own father he went undetected for a long time; but later, when he had come to dine with strangers, he struck a swallows' nest with his spear and knocked it down, destroying the nestlings. When those present said, as was natural, 'Man, whatever possessed you to do such a strange thing?' he replied, 'Have not these birds long been bearing false witness against me, crying out that I killed my father?' The astonished bystanders reported the remark to the king, and when the matter was investigated and proved true, Bessus paid the penalty.
"But these examples," I said, "we have offered, as was proposed, to establish that there is some postponement of punishment allowed to the wicked. As for the rest, we ought to think we are listening to Hesiod, when he says — though Plato disagrees — that punishment is not something that follows injustice afterward, but is born together with it, of the same age, sprung from the same root and the same soil: 'For evil counsel is worst for the one who counsels it,' and 'whoever devises evil for another devises evil for his own heart.' For the blister-beetle is said to contain within itself, mixed together, the antidote to its own poison, from a kind of natural counteraction; but wickedness, in the very act of engendering what will pain and punish it, does not pay the penalty for its injustice later, but pays it at the very moment of the outrage. And just as, of those criminals punished in the body, each wrongdoer carries his own cross out to execution, so vice fashions out of itself each one of its instruments of torture against itself, being the crafts-woman of a terrible life that carries with it disgraceful reproaches, many fears, harsh sufferings, and unceasing regrets and disturbances. But some people are no different from children who, watching criminals in the theaters often dressed in gold-embroidered tunics and purple robes, wearing crowns and dancing the pyrrhic dance, admire them and gape at them as blessed — until the moment they are seen being goaded and whipped and giving off fire from beneath that flowered and costly clothing. For most wicked men, though wrapped about with great houses and offices and conspicuous power, do not notice that they are already being punished, until they are suddenly cut down or hurled from a cliff — which one might call not the punishment itself, but the completion and consummation of the punishment.
"For just as they say that Herodicus of Selymbria, having fallen into consumption, an incurable disease, and having been the first man to combine gymnastic training with medicine, is said by Plato to have made his own death a long one, and likewise that of others suffering the same disease — so too, of the wicked, as many as seem to have escaped the immediate blow do not pay their penalty after a longer time, but pay a longer penalty in that time; they are not punished only once they have grown old, but grow old in the very process of being punished. I speak, of course, of a long time as it appears to us; for to the gods every span of human life is as nothing, and 'now,' as opposed to 'thirty years ago,' is the same sort of thing as torturing or hanging a wicked man in the evening rather than in the morning — especially when he is kept under guard throughout his life as in a prison with no removal and no escape, though with many banquets set in between, and business, and gifts, and favors, and even amusements — much as men gamble or play draughts in prison while the noose hangs over their heads. And yet what prevents us from saying that even those shut up to await execution are not yet being punished, until someone cuts off their neck; or that a man who has drunk the hemlock and then walks about, waiting for the heaviness to settle into his legs before the numbness and stiffening that bring insensibility overtake him, is likewise not yet being punished — if we reckon only the final moment of the penalty as the punishment, and set aside the sufferings in between, the fears, the expectations, and the regrets in which every wrongdoer is caught, just as we would refuse to say that a fish has been caught once it has swallowed the hook, until we see it being roasted or cut up by the cooks?
For each wrongdoer, from the moment he commits injustice, is held fast by justice, and has already swallowed down the sweetness of his injustice like bait; but the guilty conscience lodged within him, exacting its payment, thrashes about like a young tunny caught in open water. For that boldness and audacity of vice is strong and ready only up to the point of the wrongdoing; after that, as the passion fails like a dying wind, it grows weak and abject, and falls prey to fears and superstitious terrors — so that, in the face of what actually happens and of the truth, one might well believe Stesichorus was not merely inventing when he composed his account of Clytemnestra's dream, speaking somewhat as follows: 'And to her it seemed that a serpent came, its head bloodied at the tip, and from it there appeared the king, a son of Pleisthenes.' And indeed visions in dreams, and apparitions by day, and oracles, and omens from the sky, and whatever comes to be thought as brought about by the agency of a god, bring storms of fear upon those so disposed. They say, for instance, that Apollodorus once dreamed he was being flayed by Scythians and then boiled, and that his heart spoke to him from within the cauldron, saying, 'I am the cause of these things for you'; and again, that he saw his daughters running around him in circles, ablaze and burning in their bodies. And Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, shortly before his death saw Aphrodite splash blood upon his face from a bowl. The friends of Ptolemy Ceraunus used to see him being summoned to trial by Seleucus, with vultures and wolves sitting as his judges, and distributing great quantities of flesh to his enemies. And Pausanias, having summoned Cleonice, a freeborn girl of Byzantium, by night, meaning to force himself on her, then killed her in some fit of confusion and suspicion as she approached him; he often saw her afterward in his sleep, saying to him, 'Draw near to justice: hybris is truly an evil thing for men.' And since the apparition would not stop, he sailed, it seems, to the place of the dead at Heraclea, and by certain rites of propitiation and libations called up the girl's soul; and when she came into his sight she told him he would be free of his troubles once he reached Lacedaemon — and upon arriving there he died at once.
So that, if nothing at all remains for the soul after death, but death is the limit of every grace and of every punishment alike, one might rather say that the divine deals gently and carelessly with those wicked men who are punished swiftly and who die easily and without suffering. And indeed, even if one were to say that no other evil at all belongs to the wicked in their lifetime,
but that, injustice being exposed somewhere along the way — a fruitless and thankless business, bringing back nothing good or worth the effort from many great struggles — the mere perception of this overturns the soul. So they tell, for instance, that Lysimachus, driven by thirst to surrender his person and his power to the Getae, once he had drunk after falling into their hands, said, 'Alas for my cowardice, that for so brief a pleasure I have been robbed of so great a kingdom.' And yet to resist a natural compulsion of passion is an exceedingly difficult thing. But when a man, whether out of greed for money, or envy of another's political fame and power, or for some pleasure of illicit union, has committed a lawless and terrible deed, and then, once the craving and frenzy of his passion have subsided, comes in time to see the shameful and fearful consequences of his injustice still remaining with him, of no use, no necessity, and no benefit — is it not likely that the thought often occurs to him, that for the sake of empty glory, or for some ignoble and thankless pleasure, he has overturned the finest and greatest of the rights that hold among men, and has filled his life with shame and turmoil? For just as Simonides used to say, jesting, that he always found his money-chest full but his chest of graces empty, so too the wicked, looking closely into their own vice, find that the pleasure it gave was empty of gratitude and quickly gone, and bare of any good hope, while it is forever full of fears and griefs and joyless memory, and of suspicion toward the future and distrust toward the present. Just as we hear Ino, in the theaters, saying, after she has repented of what she did, 'Dear women, how might I, from the beginning, have dwelt in the house of Athamas, having done none of the deeds now done?' — it is likely that the soul of every wicked person turns this same thought over within itself, reasoning how it might step out of the memory of its wrongdoings and cast the guilty conscience out of itself, and, becoming clean, might live some other life all over again from the start. For there is nothing bold, nothing free of vanity, nothing settled and secure, in the things the wicked man chooses — unless, by Zeus, we are to say that wrongdoers are in some sense wise. But wherever love of wealth and love of pleasure, fiercely contested, and unmixed envy take up residence together with ill will or malice, there too, if you look, you will find superstition lurking beneath, and softness in the face of toil, and cowardice in the face of death, and a sudden shifting of impulses, and a hollow vanity about reputation born of empty boasting. Such men fear those who find fault with them, and dread those who praise them too, as though they were being wronged by the flattery, and they are especially hostile to the wicked, because these are the ones who most readily praise those who seem to be good. For hardness in vice, like hardness in poor iron, is brittle, and what resists is easily shattered; hence, in the course of a long time, coming to understand better how they stand, such men grow burdened and discontented and hold their own lives up to reproach.
For surely it is not the case that a base man who has restored a deposit entrusted to him, or stood surety for an acquaintance, or given and contributed to his country's cause with honor and public spirit, is straightway plunged into regret and pained at what he has done, on account of the utter instability and wandering of his character — while men applauded in the theaters at once groan, as their love of glory subsides back into love of money. Others, however, who sacrifice human beings for the sake of tyrannies and conspiracies, as Apollodorus did, or who defraud their friends of money, as Glaucus son of Epicydes did, felt no repentance, no hatred of themselves, no grief over what had been done. For my part, indeed, if it is permitted to say so, I do not think the impious have need of any punisher, whether god or man, but that their own life suffices them, overturned as it is by wickedness —
wholly corrupted and thrown into turmoil." "But consider," I said, "whether the argument is running too far past its proper point." And Timon said, "Perhaps so, in view of what remains and the length still left to it; for I am already raising up, like a reserve held in waiting, the last difficulty, since it has contended moderately well with the first ones. For the charges Euripides brings and speaks freely against the gods, in turning the failings of parents onto their offspring, think that we too, who keep silent about them, share in the blame.
For either those who did the wrong themselves paid the penalty, in which case there is no further need to punish those who did no wrong—since it is not even just to punish the wrongdoers twice for the same acts; or else, through negligence, they let the punishment of the wicked slip by, and then exact it late from the innocent, and there is nothing right in adding injustice to slowness. Take, for instance, what is said to have happened here.
They say Aesop came here bringing gold from Croesus, so that he might offer a magnificent sacrifice to the god and distribute four minas to each of the Delphians. But some quarrel and dispute arose, it seems, between him and the local people, so he performed the sacrifice but sent the money back to Sardis, on the ground that the men were not worthy to benefit from it. They, having conspired against him, charged him with temple robbery
and killed him, hurling him from that rock which they call Hyampeia. And because of this, they say, the divine power grew angry with them and brought both barrenness of the land and every sort of strange disease, so that, going about at the Greek festivals, they had to proclaim and invite anyone willing to exact justice from them on Aesop's behalf. In the third generation a Samian, Iadmon, arrived—a man in no way related to Aesop by blood,
but a descendant of those who had bought him in Samos; and when the Delphians paid him certain penalties, they were freed from their troubles. From that time, they say, the punishment of temple-robbers was also transferred from Hyampeia to Nauplia. And even those who love Alexander most warmly—among whom we count ourselves—do not praise him for destroying the city of the Branchidae and putting to death every age of its people, on account
of the betrayal, committed by their ancestors, of the temple near Miletus. And Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, when the Corcyreans jeeringly and with laughter asked why he was ravaging their island, said, "Because, by Zeus, your fathers received Odysseus." And when the Ithacans likewise complained that his soldiers were taking their sheep, he said, "But your king, when he came
to us, even blinded our shepherd besides." Is not Apollo, then, more absurd than these men, if he destroys the Pheneatans of today by blocking up their chasm and flooding their whole country, because a thousand years before, as they say, Heracles tore up the prophetic tripod and carried it off to Pheneus? Or if he declares release from their troubles to the Sybarites only when they have propitiated the wrath
of the Leucadian Hera by three disasters? And indeed it is not long since the Locrians ceased sending their maidens to Troy—girls who, cloakless and barefoot, like slave-women of the dawn, used to sweep around the altar of Athena, without a headband, even should heavy old age come upon them—all on account of the licentiousness of Ajax. Where, then, is the reasonableness and justice in this? We do not, after all, praise the Thracians for still tattooing
their own wives to this day, in vengeance for Orpheus; nor the barbarians who live along the Eridanus for wearing black in mourning for Phaethon, as they say. Indeed I think it would be even more ridiculous if, while the people of that time, when Phaethon perished, had let the matter drop, those born five or ten generations after the event had then begun to change their clothing on his account and to mourn. And yet that
involves only foolishness, nothing terrible or incurable. But by what reasoning do the wraths of the gods, which at first sink from view like certain rivers, then later rise again upon other people and end in the utmost calamities?" When he first paused, I, fearing he might start over again and bring in still more and greater absurdities, at once asked him, "Well then," I said, "do you hold all this to be true?" And he said, "If
not all of it," he said, "still some of it—do you not think the argument faces the same difficulty?" "Perhaps," I said, "just as with those who are burning with high fever, whether they happen to be wrapped in one cloak or in many, the heat is the same and much alike, yet it still helps, as a comfort, to remove the excess. But if you do not wish that, let it go—though most of these tales resemble myths and fictions.
Remember rather the recent Theoxenia, and that fine portion which they proclaim is to be set aside and given to the descendants of Pindar—how noble and pleasant the thing appeared to you." "Who," he said, "would not delight in the grace of an honor observed in so Greek and simple, archaic a fashion—if only he had not forged for himself 'a black heart in cold flame,' to use Pindar's own words?" "I pass over, then,"
I said, "a proclamation like this one made at Sparta—'after the Lesbian singer'—proclaimed in honor and memory of the ancient Terpander; for it is the same argument. But you yourselves, I take it, claim to have precedence over others both among the Boeotians, as being of the family of the Opheltiadae, and among the Phocians, through Daiphantus; and you were present with me and joined in helping, first, when for the Lycormae and the Satilaei, in pursuing
their ancestral honor and right of wreath-bearing as descendants of Heracles, I argued that it was especially fitting that honors and favors should remain secure for the descendants of Heracles, since he, having benefited the Greeks, did not himself obtain a worthy return or recompense." "You have reminded us," he said, "of a fine contest indeed, and one very fitting for philosophy." "Then drop," I said, "my good fellow, this vehemence of accusation, and do not
take it bitterly if some are punished for having come from base or wicked stock, or else do not rejoice or praise noble birth when it is honored. For if we preserve gratitude within a family line on account of virtue, then by the same reasoning we ought not to think that punishment must stop short and abandon its claim in the case of wrongdoing, but rather that it should run alongside that same principle, rendering what is deserved in reverse. Now the man who is glad to see the descendants of Cimon
honored at Athens, but is vexed and indignant when the descendants of Lachares or of Ariston are driven out, is altogether too soft and careless—or rather wholly fond of finding fault and ill-disposed toward the divine: for he complains, on the one hand, if the children and children's children of an unjust and wicked man seem to prosper; and complains again, on the other hand, if the families of base men are cut short and disappear, blaming the god equally,
whether the children of a good father fare badly, or equally, whether those of a bad one do." "Let these points, then," I said, "stand as a kind of barrier for you against those who are excessively harsh and accusatory. But taking up again, as it were, the beginning of a thread in an argument about the god that runs dark and full of many windings and wanderings, let us guide ourselves cautiously and gently toward what is likely and probable, since
we cannot state with clarity and certainty even the truth about matters we ourselves do. For instance: why do we bid the children of those who have died of consumption or dropsy to sit with their feet soaked in water until the corpse is burned? For it seems that in this way the disease is thought not to shift its ground or draw near to them. Or again, for what reason, when a goat
takes sea-holly into its mouth, does the whole herd stand stock-still, until the goatherd comes up and removes it? Other powers too have contacts and transmissions beyond belief, working through sharp and far-reaching channels from one thing to another. But we marvel at intervals occurring across time, not across space—and yet it would be more marvelous still if, a plague having taken its start in Ethiopia, Athens should be filled with it and
Pericles should die of it and Thucydides fall ill, than if, when the Delphians and the Sybarites had turned wicked, the justice due should have made its way around and come at last upon their children. For these powers have certain connections and linkages reaching from the last things back to the first, whose cause, even if unknown to us, works out its own proper end in silence." "And yet, surely, the public wraths visited on cities do have
the argument of justice ready to hand. For a city is a single continuous thing, like a living creature, which does not step outside itself through the changes wrought by age, nor become one thing after another through time, but remains ever a sympathetic and united whole with itself, and takes upon itself the responsibility and the credit for everything it does, or has done, as a community, so long as the fellowship that makes and binds it together through its interweavings
preserves its unity. To divide a single city into many, or rather into countless cities, by means of time, is like making the one man into many, on the ground that he is now older, but was younger before, and higher up still was a boy. Rather, this resembles altogether the argument of growth that arose among the sophists from Epicharmus's sayings, according to which the man who once took out a loan long ago
no longer owes it, having become someone else; and the man invited to dinner yesterday comes uninvited today, for he is a different person. And yet the changes that the successive ages of life work upon each of us individually are greater than those which cities undergo in common; for a person who saw Athens thirty years ago would recognize, even now, that its manners and its movements, its playfulness and its earnestness, its graces and
its fits of anger, closely resemble those of old, on the part of the people as a whole—whereas a relative or friend, meeting a man again after a long time, would scarcely recognize his outward form; and the changes of character, readily altered as they are by every argument, every labor, every experience, and every law, and always shifting toward whoever is with them at the time, present an astonishing strangeness and novelty. Yet a man is said to remain one and the same
from birth right to the end, while we think it right that a city, though it remains this same city throughout, should be held liable for the disgraces of its ancestors, by the same right by which it shares in their glory and their power—or else we shall find, without noticing it, that we have thrown all things together into Heraclitus's river, into which he says one cannot step twice, because nature, by moving and altering everything, changes it." "But if a city is one continuous thing,"
then surely also a family, depending as it does from a single origin, possesses a certain power and a fellowship that has grown up together and carries itself forward; and what is begotten has not been separated from its begetter as though it were some artifact once made—for it has come to be out of him, not merely by him; and so it has and carries within itself some part of that man, both being punished appropriately and being honored. And if I may say so without seeming to jest, I would say
that a bronze statue of Cassander, melted down by the Athenians, suffers something more unjust, and that the body of Dionysius, exiled after his death by the Syracusans, suffers something more unjust, than would the punishment of their descendants when they pay the penalty. For in the statue there is nothing at all of Cassander's nature, and the soul of Dionysius has already left the corpse behind; but in Nysaeus and Apollocrates and Antipater and Philip and the other children of wicked men, alike,
the most essential and sovereign part has been implanted and remains present, not quiescent or idle, but living, being nourished, governed, and thinking along with them. And there is nothing terrible or strange in it, if, being of those men, they have what belongs to those men. To put it generally: just as in medicine what is useful is also just, and it is ridiculous for anyone to claim it unjust to cauterize the thumb for those suffering pain in the hip, or
to lance the abdomen when the liver has become ulcerated, or, in the case of cattle whose hooves have grown soft, to anoint the tips of their horns—so too the man who, regarding punishments, holds anything else to be just besides what heals the vice, and who is indignant if the cure is applied to one person through another, as those who open a vein to relieve inflammation of the eye do—such a man seems
to see no further than what strikes the senses at once, nor to remember that a teacher, by disciplining one of his pupils, admonished the rest, and that a general, by putting to death one man out of ten, brought all of them to their senses. And thus certain dispositions, faults, and corrections come about not only from one part to another part of the same body, but also from one soul to another soul, even more than from body to body; for there, it seems, the same
affection must arise and the same change occur, but here the soul, led by its impressions of confidence or fear, is by nature apt to turn out worse or better." While I was still speaking, Olympichus broke in and said, "You seem, in your argument, to be laying down a great foundation—the persistence of the soul." "And it is you," I said, "who are granting it to me—or rather, who have already granted it; for it is on the assumption that
god apportions to us what we deserve that the argument has proceeded thus far." And he said, "Then do you really think it follows, from the gods overseeing and apportioning each of our affairs, that souls exist either wholly indestructible, or that they remain for some time after death?" "No, my good friend," I said, "but the god would be so petty and given to empty concerns, that, though
we have nothing divine in ourselves, nor anything even remotely resembling him, lasting and stable, but instead, like leaves, as Homer said, wither away entirely and perish in a short time, he should take such account of us—like the women who tend and nurse the 'gardens of Adonis' in little pots, nursing creatures of a day that sprout in tender flesh which admits no strong root of life, only to be quenched
at once by whatever chance occasion arises. But if you like, leave the other gods aside, and consider this one of ours right here—whether it seems to you that, though he knows that the souls of the dead perish at once, breathing away from their bodies like mists or smoke, he nevertheless prescribes many propitiations for the departed, and demands great gifts and honors for the dead—thereby deceiving and cheating those who believe him.
For my part, I would not readily give up the persistence of the soul, unless someone, like Heracles, should snatch away the Pythia's tripod and abolish and destroy the oracle. But so long as many such predictions continue to be given even in our own time, such as they say was delivered to Corax of Naxos, it is not a holy thing to condemn the soul to death." And Patrocleas said, "What, then, was
the prophecy," he said, "or who is this Corax? Both the matter and the name are strange to me." "Not at all," I said, "the fault is mine, for using his nickname instead of his real name. The man who killed Archilochus in battle was called Callondas, it seems, but Corax was his nickname. Having been expelled at first by the Pythia as a man who had slain a sacred
of the Muses, he was ordered — after certain supplications and pleas for pardon along with a defense of his case — to go to the dwelling of the Cicada and propitiate the soul of Archilochus. This dwelling was Taenarum; for they say that Tettix the Cretan came there with a colony, founded a city, and settled beside the place where souls are conducted. Similarly the Spartans, when an oracle bade them propitiate the soul of Pausanias, sent for evocators of the dead from Italy, who by sacrifice drew the phantom away from the sanctuary.
“So it is one and the same account,” I said, “that establishes both the god's providence and the persistence of the human soul, and it is not possible to abandon the one while doing away with the other. If the soul continues to exist after death, it is more likely that it also receives both honors and punishments; for it contends, as it were, like an athlete throughout life, and when it has finished its contest, then it obtains what is fitting for it. But whatever recompenses or punishments it receives there, by itself, for the deeds of its former life, are nothing to us the living — they are disbelieved and pass unnoticed; whereas those that pass through children and through one's line, becoming visible to people here, turn many away from wickedness and restrain them. That there is no more shameful or more distressing punishment than to see, because of oneself, evils befalling those who spring from oneself — and that no one, seeing the soul of an impious and lawless man, after his death, looking not upon statues overturned nor upon any honors, but upon children or friends or his own kin meeting with great misfortunes on his account and paying the penalty — no one, I say, would be persuaded that it is a light thing, even with the honors owed to Zeus at stake, to become unjust and unrestrained.
I do have an argument to offer that I recently heard, but I hesitate lest it appear to you a mere myth; so I will use only what is probable.” “By no means,” said Olympichus, “go through that one too” — and since the others made the same request, “allow me,” I said, “to render to the argument first what is probable; afterward, if it seems good, we will bring in the myth, if indeed it is a myth.
“Bion says that the god, in punishing the children of the wicked, is more ridiculous than a doctor who administers medicine to a descendant or child for a disease belonging to his grandfather or father. Now in some respects the two cases are unlike, but in others they resemble and correspond to one another. For in disease, one person's being treated does not cure another, nor has anyone with ophthalmia or a fever ever fared better by seeing another person anointed or plastered with medicine; but the punishments of the wicked are displayed to all for this reason: that it is the work of justice, when carried out according to reason, that some be checked through the punishment of others.
But what Bion compared did not, as it happens, correspond to the matter under inquiry — it escaped his notice. For consider: a man has already fallen into a wretched but not incurable disease, and then through intemperance and softness lets his body be given over to the affliction and ruined by it; his son does not seem to be sick, but only to be disposed in a way suited to the same disease. A doctor, or a household member, or a trainer who has observed this, or a good master, puts him on a strict regimen, removes rich foods and pastries and drinking and women, uses continual medications, and works the body hard with exercises — thus he scatters and dispels the seed of a great affliction while it is still small, not allowing it to grow to its full size.
Is this not just what we urge, when we think it right that people pay attention to themselves and be on guard and not neglect it, whoever is born of fathers or mothers prone to disease, but instead expel at once the ingrafted predisposition, while it is still easily dislodged and precarious, by taking preventive measures?” “Certainly,” they said. “It is, then,” I said, “not an absurd but a necessary thing, nor a ridiculous but a beneficial one, when to the children of epileptics, of the melancholic, and of the gouty we prescribe exercises, diets, and medicines — not because they are sick, but so that they may not become sick. For a body born from a diseased body deserves not punishment but treatment and watchful care; and if anyone, because such treatment removes pleasures and brings on stinging pain and toil, calls it a punishment inflicted out of cowardice and softness, he may be dismissed without concern.
Well then — if a body that is the offspring of a defective body deserves to be treated and guarded, must a hereditary likeness of vice, sprouting and springing up in a young character, be left alone and awaited and allowed to bide its time, until, poured out into the passions, it becomes visible and 'brings to light the wicked fruit of its mind,' as Pindar says?” “Or is it that in this respect the god is no wiser than Hesiod, who bids and enjoins us not to beget offspring 'on returning from a doleful funeral, but from the feast of the immortals' — meaning that not only vice and virtue but also grief and joy and all such things are received by the process of generation, and so we should approach begetting cheerful, glad, and at ease?
But the following is not, according to Hesiod, nor is it a work of human wisdom at all, but of god's: to discern and perceive the resemblances of temperament and their differences before the passions, falling into great wrongdoing, make them manifest. For the cubs of bears and the whelps of wolves and of apes display their kindred character at once, while still infants, disguised and covered over by nothing; but human nature, casting itself into customs, opinions, and laws, hides its bad qualities and often imitates the good, so that it either entirely effaces and escapes the inborn stain of vice, or else conceals it for a long time — wrapping its own knavery about itself as though in a husk — and eludes us, who barely perceive the vice of each wrongdoing as though from a single blow or bite, and rather suppose that people become altogether unjust only when they act unjustly, licentious only when they commit outrage, and cowardly only when they flee — just as if one were to suppose that scorpions grow their sting only when they strike, and vipers their venom only when they bite: a foolish notion.
For each wicked person does not come into being and become manifest at the same moment; rather, he possesses the vice from the beginning, but employs it once he seizes upon opportunity and power — the thief turns to stealing, the tyrannically inclined to lawbreaking. But the god surely neither fails to know each person's disposition and nature, since it is his nature to perceive the soul rather than the body, nor does he wait to punish violence once it has come into action by the hands, or impudence once it is voiced, or licentiousness once it is manifest in the body's organs; for he does not avenge himself on the wrongdoer by having first suffered ill, nor grow angry at the robber by having been forcibly robbed, nor hate the adulterer by having been outraged — but for the sake of healing he often punishes the man prone to adultery, or to greed, or to injustice, destroying the vice, as it were, like an epileptic seizure, before it has taken hold.”
“We, however, were just now indignant that the wicked pay the penalty late and slowly; and now, because the god checks the tendency and disposition of some even before they do wrong, we find fault with that too — not realizing that what is future and hidden is often worse and more fearsome than what has already occurred and is manifest, and that we are unable to reckon up the reasons why it is better to let some go even after they have done wrong, while forestalling others while they are still only intending it — just as, of course, medicines do not suit some who are sick, while they benefit others who are not sick but are in a more precarious condition than those who are. Hence the gods do not turn all the failings of parents upon their offspring; rather, if a good man is born of a bad one, as a healthy man is born of a sickly one, he is released from the penalty owed to his lineage, having been, so to speak, disowned by its vice.
But a young man who through resemblance is carried back into a wicked line owes it, as though a debt of inheritance, to receive the punishment due to its wickedness in turn. For it was not on Demetrius' account that Antigonus paid the penalty, nor, of the heroes of old, was it on Augeas' account that Phyleus did, nor on Neleus' account that Nestor did; for these were good men sprung from bad ones. But whoever's nature has cherished and taken to itself the family likeness — these are the ones that justice, pursuing the resemblance of the vice, has gone after and punished. For just as warts, dark blemishes, and moles, vanishing in the children of their fathers, have reappeared later in grandsons and granddaughters — and a certain Greek woman, having borne a black infant and then being tried for adultery, discovered that she was, four generations back, descended from an Ethiopian —
and among the children of Pytho of Nisibis, who died not long ago, and who was said to belong to the Sown Men, one of them bore on his body the mark of a spear-point, which after so long a time rose up and emerged, as it were from the depths, from the family resemblance — so too the characters and passions of the soul are often hidden by the first generations and submerged, but later, sometimes even through other lines, they blossom forth again and give back what is proper to nature, whether for vice or for virtue.”
When I had said this and fallen silent, Olympichus smiled and said, “We are not praising you, lest we seem to be letting the myth go, as though the argument were sufficient proof on its own — but we will render our verdict only once we have heard that one too.” So then I said that Thespesius of Soli, a kinsman and friend of that Protogenes who lived in our own time here,
having spent the earlier part of his life in great licentiousness, then quickly squandering his estate, for a time also became wicked out of necessity; and pursuing wealth out of a change of heart, he suffered the same thing that happens to licentious men who, while they have their wives, do not guard them, but once they have let them go, try again to seduce them unjustly when they are now with other men. Abstaining from no shameful act that offered enjoyment or profit, he amassed not much property but, in a short time, the greatest possible reputation for depravity.
What discredited him most was an oracle brought back from Amphilochus's shrine; for having sent to ask the god, it seems, whether he would live the rest of his life better, the god replied that he would fare better once he had died. And indeed, in a certain manner, this came to pass for him not long after.
For he was thrown headlong from some height onto his neck, and though no wound resulted, only the blow, he died from it; and on the third day, just as the funeral rites were being performed, he revived. Quickly regaining his strength and coming to himself, he brought about an incredible change in his manner of life: for the Cilicians of that time knew no man more just in his dealings, none more pious toward the divine, none more painful to his enemies or more steadfast to his friends. So those who met him longed to hear the reason for the change, not supposing — rightly, as it turned out — that so great a transformation of character had come about from any chance cause, as he himself related to Protogenes and to those of his friends who were similarly upright.
For when his power of understanding had left his body, at first he experienced what a helmsman might experience if he were flung from his ship into the deep; but then, gradually rising, he seemed to breathe freely again with his whole self and to look about on every side, as though the soul had opened a single eye. He saw none of the things he had seen before, only stars of enormous size and immeasurable distance from one another, sending out a light marvelous in color and possessing great intensity, so that the soul, riding upon it as though in a calm, moved everywhere easily and swiftly through the light.
Passing over most of the sights, he said that the souls of the dying, rising up from below, formed a fiery bubble as the air gave way; then, as the bubble gently broke, they emerged bearing a human shape, but slight in bulk, and moving not all in the same way — some leapt out with wondrous lightness and darted straight upward, while others whirled around in a circle like spindles, and, inclining now downward, now upward, were carried along in a mixed and disordered motion, only after a very long time and with difficulty settling into a steady course. Most of them he did not know who they were; but seeing two or three acquaintances, he tried to approach and speak to them. They, however, neither heard him nor were in possession of themselves, but, frantic and terrified, avoiding every sight and touch, wandered about at first alone by themselves, then, meeting others in a similarly disordered state and becoming entangled with them, were borne along in every direction without any judgment, and gave out inarticulate cries, like wails mingled with lamentation and fear.
Others, higher up at the outer edge of the encompassing region, appeared bright, and drawing near to one another repeatedly out of goodwill, turned away from those disordered ones — showing, it seemed, by their contraction into themselves their displeasure, and by their expansion and diffusion their joy and welcome. There he said he saw the soul of a certain kinsman, though not clearly, for the man had died while he himself was still a child; but it drew near and said, 'Greetings, Thespesius.' Astonished, he replied that he was not Thespesius but Aridaeus;
but the other said, 'That was your name before; from now on you are Thespesius. For you have not really died, but by some dispensation of the gods you have come here with your understanding, while you have left the rest of your soul, like an anchor, in your body. And let this be a sign to you, now and hereafter: the souls of the dead cast no shadow and do not blink.' Hearing this, Thespesius gathered himself together the more, by reasoning it out,
and, looking closely, saw that with himself there hovered a faint and shadowy line, while those others were illuminated all around and were translucent — though not all alike. Some sent forth one smooth, continuous, and even color, like the purest full moon; in others certain scaly patches ran across, or scattered bruises; others still were altogether mottled and strange to look upon, like vipers, marked with black blotches; and others had faint scratches upon them. And so the kinsman of Thespesius went on explaining each thing to him — for nothing prevents calling the souls by the names of human beings — how Adrasteia, daughter of Necessity and Zeus, is stationed as avenger of all wrongdoing, highest of all, and no wrongdoer, however great or however small, has ever escaped her notice, whether by stealth or by force;
and how there are three different punishments, each assigned to its own guardian and executioner. Those who are punished at once, in the body and through the body, are dealt with by swift retribution, in a comparatively gentle manner, passing over many things that need further purification; but those whose vice requires a greater work of healing are handed over by the guardian spirit, after death, to Justice;
while those who are altogether incurable, once Justice has rejected them, are pursued by the third and fiercest of Adrasteia's servants, the Fury, who chases them as they wander and flee, each in a different direction, and pitiably and harshly annihilates them all and submerges them in what is unspeakable and unseen. 'Of the other modes of retribution,' he said, 'the one inflicted by Punishment in life resembles the barbarian...'
So it seems. For just as among the Persians they strip off the garments and tiaras of those being punished and scourge them, while the victims weep and beg them to stop, so too punishments carried out through money and through the body have no sharp edge and do not take hold of the vice itself, but for the most part aim only at reputation and at the victim's own sensation. But whoever arrives there undisciplined and unpurified,
him Justice takes and lays bare to the soul's view, naked, with nothing into which he can sink or hide or cover over his depravity, but seen from every side, by everyone, and in every part. She shows him first to his good parents, if such they were, or to his ancestors, as an object of loathing and unworthy of them; but if they were base men, having watched them punished and having been seen by them in turn, he is made to answer for justice a long time, each of his passions being drawn out of him
with pains and torments that exceed in magnitude and intensity those inflicted through the flesh by as much as waking reality is more vivid than a dream. Scars and weals remain on the soul from each passion, in some more lasting, in others less so. "Observe," he said, "these varied and manifold colors of souls: the murky and filthy one is the stain of meanness and greed,
and the blood-red, fiery one is that of cruelty and bitterness; and wherever the sea-green shows, from there some incontinence about pleasures has been scraped away, though with difficulty; and malice mixed with envy gives off this livid, festering color, just as cuttlefish give off their black ink. For there, in life, it was the vice of the soul, itself turned about by the passions and in turn turning the body, that produced these colors; but here
is the very end of purification and punishment, when these stains, once smoothed away, leave the soul entirely radiant and of a single uniform hue. But as long as they remain, there occur certain relapses of the passions, with throbbings and leapings, in some souls faint and quickly extinguished, in others straining violently. Of these, some, having been punished again and again, recover their proper state and disposition, while others
are dragged once more into the bodies of animals by the sheer violence of ignorance and love of pleasure. For the one, ignorance, through weakness of reason and idleness in contemplation, tips the soul toward the active, practical life, toward becoming; the other, love of pleasure, needing an instrument for its incontinence, longs to stitch its desires to enjoyments and to be carried along together through a body: for here there is nothing present but some imperfect shadow and dream of a pleasure that never reaches fulfillment." Having said this,
he led him quickly through what seemed an immense space, traversing it easily and without going astray, as though borne up on wings by the rays of the light, until, on arriving at a kind of great chasm reaching downward, he was left behind by the power that had been carrying him. And he saw the other souls undergoing the same thing there: drawing themselves together like birds and swooping down, they circled around the chasm
— for they did not dare to cross straight through it — which within appeared, like the caves of Bacchic revelers, decked out all over with foliage, greenery, and the fresh shoots of every kind of flower; and it breathed out a soft, gentle breeze that carried up scents of wonderful pleasure, producing a blending such as wine works in those growing drunk. For the souls, feasting on the fragrances, were suffused with delight and showed one another affection,
and all around the place was filled with revelry and laughter and every kind of music from those playing and taking their pleasure. He said it was here that Dionysus ascended to the gods, and afterward led Semele up as well; and that the place is called Lethe. For this reason the guide would not let Thespesius linger, wishful though he was, but pulled him away by force, teaching him as he did so that the rational part of the soul is melted and dissolved by
pleasure, while the irrational, bodily part, watered and made fleshly, creates in the soul a memory of the body, and out of that memory a longing and desire that draws it toward becoming — which is accordingly called a "leaning" toward earth, since the soul is weighed down by moisture. Having then traveled another such distance, he seemed to see a great mixing bowl, and streams pouring into it, one whiter than sea-foam or snow,
another the color of the purple that blooms in the rainbow, and others tinted with still other dyes, each having its own particular gleam when seen from a distance; but as they drew near, that bowl — once what surrounded it had vanished and the colors had grown faint — kept only the more flowery hue, except for the whiteness. And he saw three deities sitting together in the shape of a triangle, blending the streams with one another according to certain measures. Then
the guide of Thespesius's soul said that Orpheus had advanced only this far, when he went in search of his wife's soul, and, not remembering well, brought back to mankind a false report — that there was a shared oracle at Delphi of Apollo and Night; for Night shares nothing in common with Apollo. "But this," he said, "is a shared oracle of Night and the Moon, having no fixed place on earth and no single seat,
but wandering everywhere among men in dreams and phantoms; for it is from this source, as you see, that dreams arise, mixing the simple and the true with the deceptive and the manifold, and scattering it about. But you did not see the oracle of Apollo," he said, "nor will you be able to see it; for the earthly part of the soul does not rise so high, nor does it slacken, but is held taut, tethered to the body." At the same time
he tried, bringing him closer, to show him the light from the tripod, resting, as he said, on Parnassus through the folds of Themis. And though eager to see it, he could not, because of its brightness; but as he passed by he heard the shrill voice of a woman speaking in verse of various other matters, and, it seemed, of the time of his own death. The daimon told him the voice was the Sibyl's,
for she sang of things to come as she was carried around on the face of the moon. Wishing then to hear more, he was thrust back in the opposite direction by the rush of the moon, as in an eddy, and caught only a little of it — among which was the coming destruction of Mount Vesuvius and of Dicaearchia by fire, and a small fragment about the ruler of that time, that though he was noble in nature, through illness
he would lay down his tyranny. After this they turned to the spectacle of those undergoing punishment. At first the sights he saw were only distressing and pitiable; but when Thespesius, quite unexpectedly, came upon friends, relatives, and acquaintances among those being punished, who, enduring terrible sufferings and shameful, painful torments, cried out to him in pity and wept aloud, at last he caught sight of his own
father, emerging from a kind of pit, covered with brands and scars, stretching out his hands to him and not being allowed to keep silent, but forced by those set over the punishments to confess that, having become guilty of a crime against certain guest-friends who possessed gold, he had destroyed them with poison, and though he had escaped everyone's notice there, here he had been exposed, and having already suffered some of his penalty was being led away to suffer more. He did not dare to plead or beg mercy
on his father's behalf, out of shock and fear; and wishing to turn back and flee, he no longer saw that gentle, familiar guide, but, pushed forward by certain other fearsome-looking beings, as though it were necessary to pass through in this way, he observed that among those who had become notorious in wickedness and had already been punished there, the shadow-self was no longer being worn away so harshly or in the same manner,
since the pain concerned the irrational, passionate part, which was already worn down by toil; but as for those who had wrapped themselves in a pretense and reputation of virtue and lived their lives with a hidden vice, other beings standing around them forced them, painfully and grievously, to turn what was within to the outside of the soul, writhing unnaturally and bending back on themselves, like sea-centipedes that, having swallowed the hook, turn themselves inside out; and some they flayed and unfolded, exposing them as festering
and mottled, their depravity residing in the reasoning, governing part. He said he saw other souls too, coiled together like vipers, two, three, or more at once, devouring one another out of rancor and ill will for what they had suffered or done to one another while alive. And there were also lakes lying side by side, one boiling round about with gold, another most frigid with lead, another rough with iron,
and certain daimons stood over them, like smiths, with their instruments, taking up and lowering by turns the souls of those made wicked through insatiability and greed. For in the gold they threw them, once they had become red-hot and translucent from the burning, dipping them next into the lead; and once they had hardened there and become as hard as hailstones, they transferred them again into the iron; and there
they turned terribly black, and, shattering because of their hardness and being crushed, they changed their forms; then in this state they were carried back once more into the gold, enduring, as he said, terrible pains in each change. But of all of them, he said, those suffered most pitiably who, having already seemed to be released from justice, were then seized again — these were the ones through whom the penalty had come round upon certain descendants or children.
For whenever one of these descendants arrived and came upon them, the punished soul fell upon him in anger, cried out, and displayed the marks of its sufferings, reproaching him and pursuing him as he tried to flee and hide, unable to escape; for the tormentors quickly ran after him toward the punishment, and from the very start hurried him along as he wailed, already knowing what torment awaited him through foreknowledge. He said that with some souls many of their descendants at once were fastened on, just like bees
or bats, clinging on quite literally and shrieking out of memory and anger for what they had suffered because of them. Last of all, as he watched, he saw the souls turning toward a second birth bent by force into all sorts of animals and reshaped by those who fashion such things, using certain instruments and blows — some driving whole limbs together, others twisting them back, some smoothing away and obliterating entirely,
so that the soul might fit other characters and lives. Among these he saw the soul of Nero, already in a wretched state generally, and pierced through with red-hot nails. And when the craftsmen had prepared for this soul too the shape of a Pindaric viper, in which, conceived within it and eating its way out through its mother, it was to live, he said a great light suddenly shone out, and a voice came from the light commanding them to change it instead into another, gentler kind of creature,
contriving something like a singing creature that lives about marshes and pools; for he had already paid the penalty for the wrongs he had done, but something good was also owed him by the gods, because he had freed the best and most god-beloved of the peoples subject to him, namely Greece. Up to this point, then, he had only been a spectator; but as he was about to turn back, he fell into utter dread, for a certain woman took hold of him,
wondrous in form and stature, and said, "Come here, you, so that you may remember each thing all the better." And she brought toward him a kind of small red-hot rod, such as painters use, but another woman prevented her. And he himself, as though suddenly snatched up by a violent, forceful blast as from a pipe, fell back into his body and opened his eyes, finding himself almost exactly at his own tomb.