Part 18

For great natures produce nothing petty; their vehemence and energy cannot rest for very intensity, they toss about on the surge before they settle into their solid and abiding character. As then one ignorant of husbandry would not welcome the prospect of a piece of land full of thick undergrowth and weeds, with many wild creatures on it, and streams of water, and deep mud; whereas, to one who has learned to use his senses and to discriminate, those very things suggest strength and fatness and everything that is good in the soil, so it is with great natures. They break out early into many strange bad growths, [Sidenote: D] out of which we, in our intolerance, think it our duty to cut away and stunt all that is rough and prickly; but the Judge who is better than we and who sees the good and generous crop to come, waits for Time, the fellow-worker with Reason and Virtue, and that ripeness whereby Nature yields the proper fruit.

VII. ‘So much for this. Now do you not think that some of the Greeks are right in copying the Egyptian law which enacts that a pregnant woman who has been condemned to death should be kept in custody until she has borne a child?’ ‘Certainly’, they said. I went on: ‘Next, suppose a person not pregnant with children, but able, if time be given, to bring into [Sidenote: E] the light of the sun some secret action or design, either by denouncing a hidden evil, or by becoming the promoter of a salutary policy or the inventor of some needful expedient, is it not the better course to let punishment wait on convenience rather than to inflict it too soon? It seems to me to be so.’ ‘And to us’, said Patrocleas. ‘And rightly,’ said I, ‘for consider that if Dionysius had paid the penalty at the beginning of his reign, no Greek settler would have been left in Sicily, because the Carthaginians would have devastated it. So neither Apollonia, nor Anactorium, nor the Leucadian peninsula would have been occupied by Greeks if Periander had [Sidenote: F] been punished without such a long interval. I think that Cassander also had a respite in order that Thebes might be re-established. Most of the foreigners who helped to seize this temple crossed over with Timoleon into Sicily; and when they had conquered the Carthaginians, and put an end to the tyrannies, met deservedly miserable deaths themselves. Surely Heaven uses some bad men to punish others, like executioners, and afterwards crushes them, and this has been the case, I think, [Sidenote: 553] with most tyrants. For as the gall of the hyaena, the refuse of the seal, and other products of disgusting animals, have their specific use in disease, so there are some who need the sharp tooth of chastisement; on whom the God inflicts a bitter and implacable tyrant, or a harsh rough ruler, and only removes this torment when he has relieved and purged their ailment. Such a medicine was Phalaris to the Agrigentines, and Marius to the Romans. To the Sicyonians the God declared in plain terms that their state needed beadles with whips, because they had taken by force from the men of Cleonae a boy named Teletias, who was to be crowned at the Pythian games, as being their own citizen, and torn him in pieces. The Sicyonians got [Sidenote: B] Orthagoras for a tyrant, and after him Myron and Cleisthenes, who put an end to their bad ways, while the Cleonaeans, who never found such a remedy, have come to nothing. Listen to Homer,[215] who says somewhere

_So sprung from meaner sire a nobler son, Skilled in all art and excellence._

Yet that son of Copreus has left us no brilliant or signal achievement, while the posterity of Sisyphus and Autolycus and Phlegyas burst into flower of glory and virtue in the persons of great kings. Pericles at Athens came of a house which was under a curse. Pompey the Great, at Rome, was the son of Strabo, whose corpse the Romans cast out and trampled [Sidenote: C] in their hatred. What is there strange then if God acts like the farmer, who does not cut down the thistle till he has picked the asparagus, or like the Libyans who do not burn the dry stalks before they have collected the gum; who spares to destroy a bad and rough-grown root of a noble race of kings till the due fruit has issued from it? For it were better for the Phocians that Iphitus should lose tens of thousands of cattle and horses, or that even more gold should leave Delphi, and silver too, than that Ulysses should never have been born, or Asclepius, or [Sidenote: D] the other brave men and mighty benefactors who have come of bad and vicious lines.

VIII. ‘But do you not all think it better that punishments should fall in the fitting time and manner than hastily and at once? There is the case of Callippus, who was slain by his friends with the very dagger which he had used to slay Dion in the guise of a friend. Again, there is Mitys[216] of Argos, killed in a party quarrel, whose brazen statue in the market-place fell on the murderer during a public performance and killed him. And I think you know all about Bessus the Paeonian, Patrocleas, and Ariston of Oeta, the commander of foreign troops?’ [Sidenote: E] ‘Indeed I do not,’ he replied, ‘but I want to hear.’ ‘Ariston,’ I said, ‘with the consent of the tyrants, took down the ornaments of Eriphyle, deposited here, and carried them off to his wife for a present. Then his son, enraged with his mother for some reason, set fire to the house, and burnt up all who were within it. Bessus, it appears, slew his own father, and for a long time escaped detection. Afterwards, having come to some friends for supper, he put his spear through a swallows’ nest and brought it down, and destroyed the young birds. All present exclaimed, as well they might: “Man, what has [Sidenote: F] possessed you to do such a monstrous thing?” To which he replied: “Have they not been telling lies against me this long time, shrieking that I have killed my father?” Astonished at such a speech, they informed the king, an inquiry was held, and Bessus suffered.

IX. ‘So far’, I said, ‘we have been speaking, as was agreed, upon the assumption that some respite is really granted to wicked men. For what remains, you must suppose that you are listening to Hesiod,[217] laying down, not with Plato[218] that punishment is [Sidenote: 554] “suffering which waits on wrongdoing”, but that it is a contemporary growth, springing up with sin, from the same place and the same root,

_Bad counsel to the counsellor is worst_,

and

_Who plots ’gainst others, plots his heart away._

The corn-beetle is said to carry in herself an antidote compounded on a principle of opposites, but wickedness as it grows breeds its own pain and punishment, and suffers the penalty, not by and by, but in the very moment of insolence. In the body, every criminal who is punished[219] carries forth his own [Sidenote: B] cross; but vice fabricates for herself, out of herself, all the instruments of her chastisement; she manufactures a terrible life, piteous and shameful, with terrors and cruel pains, with regrets and troubles unceasing. But there are persons just like children, who see evildoers on the stage crowned and caparisoned, as often happens, in gold and purple, and dancing heartily; and gape and gaze, as though these men were happy indeed; until they are seen goaded and lashed, and fire issuing out of those gay and costly robes. Most bad men are wrapped as in a vesture [Sidenote: C] of great houses, and eminent offices and powers; and so it is unperceived that they are being punished, until, before you can think, they are stabbed or hurled down a rock, which is not to be called punishment, but the end or consummation of punishment. For as Herodicus of Selymbria, who fell into a hopeless decline, and, for the first time in human history, combined gymnastics with medicine, made death, in Plato’s[220] words, “a long affair for himself”, and for similar invalids, so has it been with bad men. They thought to escape the blow at the time; the penalty comes, not after more time, but over more time, and is lengthened, not retarded. They were not punished after they [Sidenote: D] came to old age, but became old under punishment. I speak of length of time in a sense relative to ourselves, since to the Gods any span of human life is as nothing. “Now”, instead of “thirty years ago”, for the torture or hanging of a criminal, is as though we were to speak of “afternoon” not “morning”; the rather that he is confined in life, a prison where is no change of place, no escape, yet many feastings the while, and business affairs, and gifts, and bounties, and amusements, just as men play dice or draughts in jail, with the rope hanging over their heads.

X. ‘Yet where are we to stop? Are we to say that prisoners [Sidenote: E] awaiting execution are not under punishment until the axe shall fall? Nor he who has drunk the hemlock, and is walking about while he waits to feel the heaviness in the legs which precedes the chill and stiffness of approaching insensibility? Yet we must say so, if we think that the last moment of the punishment is the punishment, and leave out of account the sufferings of the intervening time, the fears, and forebodings, and movements of [Sidenote: F] remorse, in which every sinner is involved. This would be like saying that a fish when he has swallowed the hook has not been caught until he has been roasted by the cook, or at least sliced up, before our eyes. Every man is in the grasp of Justice when he has done a wrong, he has nibbled away the sweets of Injustice which are the bait; but he has the hook of conscience sticking there and, as it pays him out,[221]

_Like spear-struck thunny makes the ocean boil._

For the forwardness and the audacity of vice of which we hear [Sidenote: 555] are strong and ready till the crimes are committed, then passion fails them like a dying breeze, and leaves them weak and abject, a prey to every fear and superstition. Thus the dream of Clytaemnestra in Stesichorus[222] is fashioned true to the reality of what happens. It was like this:

_She thought a serpent came on her, his crest Dabbled with gore, and, lo, from out it peered, Child of the race of Pleisthenes, the King._

For phantoms of dreams, and visions of midday, and oracles, and thunderbolts, and whatever has the appearance of being caused by a God, bring storms and terrors upon those who are in such a mood. So it is told that Apollodorus, in his sleep, saw [Sidenote: B] himself being flayed by Scythians and then boiled, and that his heart murmured out of the cauldron the words, “I am the cause of this to thee.” And, again, he saw his daughters all on fire, and running around him with their bodies burning. Then Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, a little before his death, saw Aphrodite throwing blood at his face out of a sort of bowl. The friends of Ptolemy “Thunderbolt”[223] beheld him called to justice by Seleucus before a jury of vultures and wolves, and [Sidenote: C] dealing out large helpings of flesh to his enemies. Pausanias had wickedly sent for Cleonice at Byzantium, a maiden of free birth, that he might enjoy her person in the night, then, as she approached, he killed her out of some panic or suspicion; and he would often see her in his dreams, saying to him:

_To judgement go; man’s lust works woe to man._

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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: D] Locrians have ceased to send those maidens to Troy,

_Who with no trailing robes, feet bared, as slaves, At early dawn must sweep Athene’s fane, No veils, though grievous eld were drawing near_,[231]

because of the misbehaviour of Ajax. Where do you find the reasonableness and justice here? Certainly we do not praise the Thracians, because they still brand their own wives to avenge Orpheus, or the Barbarians living about the Eridanus for wearing black, in mourning for Phaethon as they say. It would have been still more ridiculous, I think, if the men living when Phaethon perished thought nothing about it, and then those [Sidenote: E] born five generations or ten generations after the sad occurrence began to change into mourning clothes for him! Yet there is nothing but stupidity in that, nothing terrible or beyond cure; but the angers of the Gods pass underground at the time, like certain rivers, then afterwards breakout to injure quite different persons, and bring the direst ruin at the last. What reason is there in that?’

XIII. At the first check, I, in terror lest he should go back to the beginning and introduce more and greater cases of [Sidenote: F] anomaly, at once proceeded to ask him: ‘Come,’ I said, ‘do you take all these things for true?’ ‘Suppose that they are not all true, but that some are, do you not think that the same perplexity comes in?’ ‘Perhaps’, said I, ‘it is as with persons in a violent fever, who feel the same heat, or nearly the same, whether they are wrapped in one cloak or in many, yet we must give some relief by removing the excess. If you will not allow this, drop the point (though to my thinking, most of the instances look like myths and inventions); but call to mind the recent Theoxenia, and that “fair portion” which is set aside and [Sidenote: 558] assigned by proclamation to the descendants of Pindar, and how impressive that seemed and how pleasant. Who could fail to find pleasure in that graceful honour, so Greek and so frankly of the old world, unless he be one whose

_Black heart of adamant Was wrought in chilly fire_,

in Pindar’s[232] own words? Then I pass over’, I said, ‘the similar proclamation made at Sparta, in the words,

_After the Lesbian bard_,[233]

in honoured memory of old Terpander, for the case is the same. But I appeal to you, who claim, as I understand, precedence among the Boeotians as Opheltiadae, and among the Phocians [Sidenote: B] because of Daiphantus; and who stood by me formerly, when, speaking in support of the claim of the Lycormae and Satilaeans through their ancestor to receive the honour and wear the crown due to the Heraclidae, I argued that those sprung of Hercules had the strongest right to be confirmed in the honours and prizes, because their ancestor received no worthy prize or return for his good deeds to the Greeks.’ ‘And a noble contention it was,’ he said, ‘and worthy indeed of Philosophy!’ ‘Then pray drop’, I said, ‘that vehement tone in your arraignment, and do not make it any grievance that some born of bad or vicious ancestors are punished; or else never rejoice or applaud in the other case, when noble birth is honoured. For [Sidenote: C] if the gratitude due to virtue is to be kept active for the benefit of the family, it is logical and right also that the punishment for crimes should never be exhausted or fail, but should run a parallel course, so that payment should follow deserts under either head. Any one who finds pleasure in seeing honour done to the descendants of Cimon at Athens, but makes it a grievance that those of Lachares or Ariston are banished, is too soft and too careless, or, as I would rather say, is quarrelsome and captious in all his attitude to Heaven. He challenges, if the children of an unjust and evil man appear to prosper, and he challenges if the families of the bad are abased or extinguished; he blames [Sidenote: D] the God equally if the children of a good father are in trouble, or of a bad one.