The Dialogue on Delay in Divine Punishment stands somewhat apart from the others. It deals gravely with grave matters, the ways of Providence with man, and the ‘last things’. The method is ingenious and satisfactory. An Epicurean, after scoffing at Providence in a manner which deeply offends the company, leaves them abruptly. We are reminded of the departure of the Cynic Didymus at Delphi (p. 124), and of the immortal episode of Thrasymachus in the First Book of the Republic of Plato. The small family party which remains, Plutarch, his brother Timon, his son-in-law Patrocleas, and an intimate friend Olympicus, take up the points suggested by the attack, not contentiously, or in the language of the Schools, but with a view to ascertain whether there is anything in them which concerns reasonable men. The friends successively raise these points: the slowness of the Gods in punishing, and their purposes in the delay; the justice of visiting the sins of parents upon children, or of a city upon a new generation of citizens; the persistence of the soul after physical death here. In all cases it is Plutarch who supplies the answer, whereas, in the other long Dialogues, there is some distribution of parts and an interplay of character. In the tone of the dissertations, which is sustained, and little relieved by humour, the piece most nearly resembles the essay On Superstition. Plutarch’s argument is marked by truly academic caution, and an admission of man’s ignorance and limitations, which might have come from the pen of Bishop Butler.
When Plutarch has sufficiently established ‘to demonstration’ the ‘probability’ of his position, he adds, at the urgent desire of the company, a myth, which he had already offered to produce. The ‘myth’ is a device of which Plato has many examples, intended to give symmetry to the Dialogue, ‘that it may not go about without a head’. But it is more than a literary device; it is a satisfaction of the desire for something poetical and constructive which mere Dialectic can never feed. The myth about Thespesius here must be compared with that of Timarchus in the Genius of Socrates and with the traveller’s tale of the Island of Cronus in the Face in the Moon.[199] Of Platonic myths, we are first reminded of that of Er, which closes the Republic, and raises to a higher plane the question whether the just man or the unjust has the best of it. There are necessarily strong points of resemblance to the magnificent judgement myth of the Gorgias, and much of the imagery recalls the Phaedo. The Timaeus is not perhaps so conspicuously before Plutarch’s mind here as it is in other works. While there is so much which can be referred to Plato, there is nothing to suggest that Plutarch set himself to make a patchwork out of the stores of his retentive memory, still less that he sought to imitate the master from whose genius his industrious and curious mind lay poles apart. His honesty and his common-sense forbade any such attempt.
It is fortunate that we possess a fragment (redeemed for Plutarch by Wyttenbach) of a Dialogue with the same speakers, and perhaps intended to follow immediately, in which, as though in ‘calculated contrast’, writes M. Gréard (p. 292), to the grim details contained in the Dialogue before us, we have a delightful picture of what awaits the just beyond the grave, the truly ‘initiate’. As all the questions discussed in the main Dialogue are raised in old Greek writers, Homer, Pindar, the Tragedians, supplemented by the philosophers, and the myth, in its stern imagery, is on all fours, for instance, with the Eumenides of Aeschylus, so the comfortable vision of the initiate in the fragment is anticipated by Greeks who wrote four hundred or five hundred years before. Thus we have the lines of the Frogs of Aristophanes (154 foll., tr. G. Murray):
And the still more famous picture of Pindar (Ol. 2, 68-74, tr. G. Moberly):
Perhaps it would hardly be untrue to say that the whole of Plutarch’s daring speculation owes its origin to the words of Heraclitus, with which the fragment closes, as to the surprises which await man after death.
There is one distinct note of date, in the Sibylline prophecy quoted in c. 22, that the emperor of that day should die in his bed. Vespasian, who was doubtless meant, died in June, A.D. 79, and the great eruption of Vesuvius (by which, however, Puteoli does not appear to have suffered specially) took place in August of the same year. The Dialogue must have been written later than these events. On the whole, if we may venture a conjecture where all is uncertain, we may perhaps suppose it to have followed the Symposiacs at a comparatively short interval, and to have been an early attempt to apply the method of dialogue to elaborate discussion of great themes. It has characteristics of its own which enable us to understand how Erasmus (Adagia)[200] felt doubts as to its genuineness, though we have the confident assurance of Wyttenbach that there is Plutarch’s seal upon it.
Readers should consult Mr. Oakesmith’s pages on this work (The Religion of Plutarch, pp. 103 foll.), and, on the myth, Bishop Westcott’s Essay on The Myths of Plato (reprinted in History of Religious Thought in the West), or Professor J. A. Stewart on The Myths of Plato.
A DIALOGUE
THE SPEAKERS
I. Having spoken to this effect, Quintus, before any one |548 B| replied—we had just reached the far end of the colonnade—Epicurus took himself off. We stopped our walk for a while, in silent surprise at the oddness of the man, then glanced at one another, turned back, and resumed it. Patrocleas was the first to speak: ‘Which is it to be,’ he said, ‘are you for dropping the inquiry, or shall we answer the argument as though the speaker of it were present, though he is not present?’ Timon interposed: ‘Well, suppose he had thrown a spear and gone away, it would not do quietly to let it lie. Brasidas,[201] we are |C| given to believe, drew the spear out of his wound, and with it struck and slew the thrower. Now perhaps it is no business of ours to punish those who have discharged a monstrous or a false argument at us; enough if we eject it from ourselves before it has taken hold.’ ‘Then what is it’, I asked, ‘which has moved you most, in what he said? for there were a number of things, a disorderly mass, which the man drew from all quarters, to let them off against Divine Providence in his rage and fury.’
II. Then Patrocleas: ‘The slowness and procrastination of Divine Justice in the punishment of wicked men appears to |D| me especially terrible. At the present moment, after what we have just heard, I seem to come “all fresh and new” to this (Epicurean) view; but long ago I used to feel indignant when I heard Euripides[202] telling how
Yet it does not become the God to be slack in anything, least of all in dealing with wicked men; they are never slack or procrastinating in evil-doing, but are borne on by the passions at racing speed into their iniquities. Again, “Vengeance, when |E| it follows most closely upon the wrongs,” to use the words of Thucydides,[203] at once blocks the road against those who are in the fullest enjoyment of successful vice. No debt so surely as the debt of justice, if left unpaid till the morrow, at once depresses the person wronged by enfeebling his hopes, and enhances the boldness and self-trust of the miscreant; whereas the punishments which meet audacious acts promptly are checks against future offences, and have a sovereign virtue to encourage the sufferers. Thus I often feel distressed when I recall the saying |F| of Bias. It appears that he told a certain wicked man that he had no fear of his escaping retribution, he did fear that he himself might not be there to see. What did the Messenians gain by the punishment of Aristocrates, when they had been already slain? He had lost the battle at the Trench[204] by treachery, reigned over the Arcadians for more than twenty years undiscovered, and was at last found out and punished, but the Messenians were no more. What consolation to the Orchomenians, who had lost children, friends, and kinsmen through the treason of Lyciscus, was the disease which fastened upon him long years afterwards, and devoured his body? He had once and again dipped both feet into the river, with prayers and imprecations |549| as he wetted them, that they might rot away if he had done any wrong or treachery. At Athens, when the corpses of the “Accursed” were thrown out, and set beyond the frontier, it was not possible even for the children’s children of the victims to see it done. Hence it is strange that Euripides[205] should have used such thoughts as these to deter men from wickedness:
|B| The very phrases—are they not?—which bad men might use to give themselves encouragement and assurance to set hand to lawless acts, since they show injustice yielding her harvest ripe and ready, and punishment lagging late and far behind the enjoyment.’
III. When Patrocleas had done, Olympicus spoke next: ‘Take another point, Patrocleas; what a grave absurdity these delays and hesitations on the part of Heaven involve! The slowness takes away all assurance of a Providence; and when misfortune comes to bad men, not on the heels of each wicked |C| deed, but later on, they set it down to mischance, and call it a calamity, not a punishment; they do not profit by it, they are annoyed at the things which befall them, but do not repent of the things which they have done. It is so with a horse; the touch of whip or spur which follows immediately on a stumble or blunder sets him up and brings him to his duty; whereas tugs and checks and ratings later on, after an interval, seem to him to have some purpose which is not education, they irritate, but do not school him. And so with vice; if punishment |D| from switch or rein follow every trip and tumble, vice will have the best chance of becoming thoughtful and lowly, and getting the fear of God, as of a Judge who stands over men in their acts and their passions, and does not wait till the day after to-morrow. Whereas, the Justice which moves calmly, “with a slow foot”, as Euripides put it, and falls upon the wicked “when the day comes”, resembles an automaton rather than a Providence, in her vague, procrastinating, unmethodical procedure. Thus I do not see what use there is in those “mills of the Gods” which |E| “grind slowly”, we are told,[206] for they make the form of Justice dim, and the fears of the wicked evanescent.’
IV. When all this had been said, and while I was deep in thought, Timon said: ‘Shall I intervene and with my own hand add the crowning stone of difficulty to our argument, or shall I allow it first to win through for itself against what we have already heard?’ ‘What need’, I said, ‘to let in the “third wave” and sluice the argument anew, if it prove unable to force aside the first objections and escape them? In the first place, then, we will start from our own ancestral hearth, from the |F| reserve, I mean, which the philosophers of the Academy show in speaking of what is divine; and reverently clear ourself from any claim to speak with knowledge about these matters. It is a graver mistake than for unmusical persons to discuss music, or civilians a campaign, if we mere men are to scrutinize the things which belong to Gods and daemons; the inartistic trying to track the inner thought of the artist, by fanciful and random conjecture. If it is hard for a layman to guess at the reasoning which led a doctor to use the knife later and not sooner, or to apply a lotion to-day and not yesterday, surely it is not easy for a mortal to speak with any certainty about God, more than this—that |530| he best knows the proper time for the curative treatment of vice, and applies the due punishment, as a medicine, to each man accordingly; for vice admits of no measure common to all, the proper time is not the same for every case. That the medical treatment of the soul which we call “Right” and “Justice” is of all arts the greatest, we have the testimony of thousands of witnesses, Pindar[207] among them. He acclaims the sovereign ruler of all the Gods as “in art most excellent”, because Justice is of his workmanship, and to her it pertains to determine the “when” and the “how” and the degree of punishment for every offender. And Plato[208] tells us that Minos, who is a son of Zeus, has become a learner of this art; showing that it is not possible for one who has not learnt, and acquired |B| the knowledge, to go straight in questions of right, or to apprehend the guiding principle. Even the laws which men frame are not everywhere, and on the face of them, reasonable; some enactments appear simply ludicrous. In Lacedaemon, for instance, the Ephors, when they first enter office, make proclamation that no one is to grow a moustache, and that “men should obey the laws, that the laws may not be hard upon them”. The Romans, when they release slaves “into freedom” give them a tap with a light reed. When they draw a will, they make one set of persons “heirs” and “sell” the property to others, which appears strange. Strangest of all is the enactment |C| of Solon, that the man who takes neither side in a party contest, but stands out, should lose the franchise. One might go on to mention many legal absurdities, where the intention of the lawyers and the reason of the provisions are out of our knowledge. Then, if human codes are so inscrutable, what wonder that, in speaking of the Gods, we cannot lightly lay down the principle upon which they punish some offenders later, some sooner?
V. ‘All this is no pretext for evading the issue; but it is a plea for indulgence; that the argument, having its harbour of refuge in sight, may rear itself confidently from the depths to meet the difficulty. Now first consider that, as Plato[209] shows, |D| God sets himself before us for a pattern of all good things, and implants in those who are able to follow God that human virtue which is, in a sort, likeness to himself. For Universal Nature, while yet unorganized, found the beginning of its change to a world of order in assimilation to the idea and excellence of God, and in a measure of participation therein. The same Plato[210] tells us that Nature kindled in us the sense of sight, in order that the soul, by gazing in wonder at the bodies which move through heaven, may become accustomed to welcome what is shapely and well ordered, to abhor ill-regulated and |E| roving passions, and to eschew, as the origin of all vice and naughtiness, whatever is random and fortuitous. For man has no greater natural enjoyment of God than to imitate and pursue all that in him is fair and good, and so to attain to virtue. Therefore is God slow and leisurely in inflicting punishment on the bad, not that he fears mistake on his own part if he punish quickly, or any repentance; rather he is putting away from us all brutish vehemence in the punishments we inflict, and teaching |F| us not to choose the moment of heat and agitation, when
to spring upon those who have vexed us, as though glutting a thirst or a hunger; but to copy his own gentleness and long-suffering, to be orderly and staid when we set our hand to punishment, taking Time for a counsellor who will never have Repentance for his consort. For it is a smaller evil, as Socrates |551| used to say, to drink turbid water in our greediness, when we find it by the way, than with the reason still muddied, full of wrath and frenzy, before it has settled down and run clear, to glut ourselves in the punishment of a body which is of one race and tribe with our own. It is not, as Thucydides would tell us, the retribution following most closely on the injury received, but that most remote from it, which really exacts what is its due. For as temper, according to Melanthius,[212]
so reason, on the contrary, employs justice and moderation, setting passion and temper afar. So it is that even human examples make men gentle, as when we hear that Plato stood long over his servant with rod uplifted, correcting, as he said |B| himself, his own temper; or, again, as Archytas, informed of some disorderly behaviour of his workmen in the field, and feeling himself unusually irritated and harsh, did nothing, but just said, as he went away, “Well for you that I am feeling angry.” If sayings like these and anecdotes about men drain away what is rough and violent in our anger, much more when we see God, in whom is no fear nor any sort of repentance, yet reserving punishment and abiding his time, may we well become |C| cautious in such matters, and deem the gentleness and lofty patience which he exhibits a god-like part of virtue. By his punishment he corrects a few, by the slowness of his punishment he helps and admonishes many.
VI. ‘Let us now turn our attention to a second point, which is this: All kinds of human retribution deal out pain for pain and stop there. “Suffering for the doer”[213] is their principle, and beyond it they do not go. So they follow sin like a howling pack which hunts on the heels of the offences. Whereas God, we may suppose, when he sets his hand to punish a soul that is sick, |D| scrutinizes its passions, if perhaps they may be bent aside, and a way opened to repentance; he fixes a time, in cases where the wickedness seated within is not absolute or inflexible. He knows how large a portion of virtue, proceeding from himself, souls carry with them when they pass to birth, how powerful within the noble principle naturally is, and how ineffaceable; that it may flower into vice contrary to nature, when nurture and company are bad and corrupting, yet is afterwards cured in some persons and recovers its own proper state. And so he |E| does not bring down punishment equally upon all. What is incurable he at once removes out of the life and prunes away, because, happen what may, it is injurious to others, most injurious of all to a man’s self, to consort with wickedness all his time. Where the sinful principle may be supposed to exist through ignorance of the good rather than from deliberate preference for the base, he gives them time for reformation; but if they persist, they, too, receive punishment in full; for he has no fear, we may be sure, lest they escape him at the last. Now consider how many changes take place in human character and life. And this is why that in them which changes is called “tropos” (turning) and “ethos” (ēthos), because habit (ĕthos) finds its way in so often, and masters them so mightily. I think |F| myself that the ancients called Cecrops “double-shaped”, not, as some say, because from a good king he became a very dragon of a tyrant, but, on the contrary, because he was, to begin with, perverse and terrible, and afterwards became a mild and humane ruler. This instance may be an uncertain one, but we know of Gelon at any rate, and Hiero in Sicily, and Pisistratus son of Hippocrates, how they won power by wickedness, but all used |552| it virtuously; came to rule through unlawful ways, but turned out fair and patriotic rulers; introduced the reign of law and of careful agriculture, found their subjects men of jest and gossip, and made them sober and industrious. Gelon, moreover, fought nobly at the head of his people, won a great battle against the Carthaginians, and refused them a peace when they sued for one, until he had bound them in a covenant to give up the practice of sacrificing their children to Cronus. Then, in Megalopolis, there was a tyrant Lydiadas, who changed |B| his ways in the actual course of his reign, and in disgust with his own injustice restored to the citizens their laws, and fell gloriously fighting for the country against its enemies. Suppose some one had slain Miltiades while tyrant in the Chersonese, as he first was, or had got a conviction for incest against Cimon, or had robbed Athens of Themistocles by a prosecution for his riotous passage through the market-place, as was done with Alcibiades later on, where would be our Marathons, our Eurymedons, that noble Artemisium, |C|
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, |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 |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 |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, |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 |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
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 |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 |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?’ |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 |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 |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,
and
The corn-beetle is said to carry in herself an antidote compounded on a principle of opposites, but wickedness as it grows breeds its own pain and punishment, and suffers the penalty, not by and by, but in the very moment of insolence. In the body, every criminal who is punished[219] carries forth his own |B| cross; but vice fabricates for herself, out of herself, all the instruments of her chastisement; she manufactures a terrible life, piteous and shameful, with terrors and cruel pains, with regrets and troubles unceasing. But there are persons just like children, who see evildoers on the stage crowned and caparisoned, as often happens, in gold and purple, and dancing heartily; and gape and gaze, as though these men were happy indeed; until they are seen goaded and lashed, and fire issuing out of those gay and costly robes. Most bad men are wrapped as in a vesture |C| of great houses, and eminent offices and powers; and so it is unperceived that they are being punished, until, before you can think, they are stabbed or hurled down a rock, which is not to be called punishment, but the end or consummation of punishment. For as Herodicus of Selymbria, who fell into a hopeless decline, and, for the first time in human history, combined gymnastics with medicine, made death, in Plato’s[220] words, “a long affair for himself”, and for similar invalids, so has it been with bad men. They thought to escape the blow at the time; the penalty comes, not after more time, but over more time, and is lengthened, not retarded. They were not punished after they |D| came to old age, but became old under punishment. I speak of length of time in a sense relative to ourselves, since to the Gods any span of human life is as nothing. “Now”, instead of “thirty years ago”, for the torture or hanging of a criminal, is as though we were to speak of “afternoon” not “morning”; the rather that he is confined in life, a prison where is no change of place, no escape, yet many feastings the while, and business affairs, and gifts, and bounties, and amusements, just as men play dice or draughts in jail, with the rope hanging over their heads.
X. ‘Yet where are we to stop? Are we to say that prisoners |E| awaiting execution are not under punishment until the axe shall fall? Nor he who has drunk the hemlock, and is walking about while he waits to feel the heaviness in the legs which precedes the chill and stiffness of approaching insensibility? Yet we must say so, if we think that the last moment of the punishment is the punishment, and leave out of account the sufferings of the intervening time, the fears, and forebodings, and movements of |F| remorse, in which every sinner is involved. This would be like saying that a fish when he has swallowed the hook has not been caught until he has been roasted by the cook, or at least sliced up, before our eyes. Every man is in the grasp of Justice when he has done a wrong, he has nibbled away the sweets of Injustice which are the bait; but he has the hook of conscience sticking there and, as it pays him out,[221]
For the forwardness and the audacity of vice of which we hear |555| are strong and ready till the crimes are committed, then passion fails them like a dying breeze, and leaves them weak and abject, a prey to every fear and superstition. Thus the dream of Clytaemnestra in Stesichorus[222] is fashioned true to the reality of what happens. It was like this:
For phantoms of dreams, and visions of midday, and oracles, and thunderbolts, and whatever has the appearance of being caused by a God, bring storms and terrors upon those who are in such a mood. So it is told that Apollodorus, in his sleep, saw |B| himself being flayed by Scythians and then boiled, and that his heart murmured out of the cauldron the words, “I am the cause of this to thee.” And, again, he saw his daughters all on fire, and running around him with their bodies burning. Then Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, a little before his death, saw Aphrodite throwing blood at his face out of a sort of bowl. The friends of Ptolemy “Thunderbolt”[223] beheld him called to justice by Seleucus before a jury of vultures and wolves, and |C| dealing out large helpings of flesh to his enemies. Pausanias had wickedly sent for Cleonice at Byzantium, a maiden of free birth, that he might enjoy her person in the night, then, as she approached, he killed her out of some panic or suspicion; and he would often see her in his dreams, saying to him:
When the phantom never ceased to trouble him, he sailed, as it appears, to Heracleia, where is the Place of Summons of Souls, and with soothing rites and libations set himself to call up the soul of the girl; she appeared to him and told him that he “will cease from his troubles when he reaches Lacedaemon”; and, directly he got there, he died.[224]
XI. ‘Then, if nothing remains for the soul after death, but |D| death is a limit beyond which is neither grace nor punishment, we should rather say that bad men who are punished quickly, and who die off, are used gently and indulgently by Heaven. For if it could be held that there is no other evil for the bad while life and time last, yet even so, when injustice is tried and proved an unfruitful, thankless business, which yields no return for many and great struggles, the mere sense of these upsets the soul. You will remember the story of Lysimachus, how, under |E| great stress of thirst, he surrendered himself and his power to the Getae, and, when now their prisoner, said as he drank: “Wretch that I am, for so brief a pleasure to have lost so great a kingdom!” And yet to resist the physical compulsion of appetite is very hard. But when a man, by grasping at money, or in envy of political reputation and power, or for the pleasure of some union, has wrought a lawless dreadful deed, and afterwards, when the thirst or frenzy of passion has left him, sees, as |F| time goes on, the disgrace and terror of iniquity becoming permanent, with nothing useful, or necessary, or delightful gained, then is it not natural that he should often reckon up and feel how hollow is the glory, how ignoble and thankless the pleasure, for which he has upset all that is greatest and noblest in human codes of right, and filled his own life with shame and confusion? Simonides[225] used to say in jest that he found the chest of silver always full, but that of gratitude empty; and so bad men, when they look into the wickedness within them, find that, through the pleasure which has a short-lived return, it is |556| left void of hope, but filled to the brim with fears and pains and joyless memory, with suspicion of the future, and distrust of the present. So Ino on the stage,[226] when she is repenting of what she has done:
Such thoughts we may suppose that the soul of every bad man rakes up within itself, while it calculates how it may escape |B| from the memory of its misdoings, and cast out conscience, and become pure, and lead another life as from the beginning. There is no confidence, nothing free from caprice, nothing permanent or solid, in the designs of wickedness, unless, save the mark! we are to call wicked-doers philosophers of a sort! But where love of wealth or pleasure, as of great prizes, and envy undiluted, are lodged by the side of hate and ill-temper, there, if you look deep, you will find superstition seated, and softness to meet toil, and cowardice to meet death, and a rapid shifting of impulses, and a vain-gloriousness which comes of arrogance. They fear those who censure them, and equally fear those who |C| praise, as being victims whom they have deceived, and who are the bitterest enemies of the bad, just because they praise so heartily those whom they take to be good. For hardness in vice, as in bad steel, is unsound, its rigidity is soon broken. Hence more and more, as time goes on, they discover their own condition; they are vexed and discontented, and spurn their own life away. We see that a bad man, when he has restored a pledge, or gone bail for an acquaintance, or given a patriotic subscription or a contribution which brings him glory and credit, is immediately seized with repentance, and grieves at |D| what he has done, so shifty and unsettled is his judgement. We see others when applauded in the theatre at once groaning inwardly, as ambition subsides into greed of money. And did not, think you, those who sacrificed men to get a tyranny, or to advance a conspiracy, as Apollodorus did, or who robbed their friends of money, as Glaucus the son of Epicydes did, repent, and hate themselves, and suffer pain at what had been done? For my own part, if I may be allowed to say so, I think that the doers of unholy deeds need no God nor man to punish them; their own life is sufficient, when ruined by vice, and thrown into all disorder. |E|
XII. ‘But keep an eye on the discussion,’ I said, ‘for it may be running out beyond our limits.’ ‘Perhaps it is,’ said Timon, ‘if we look on, and consider the length of what remains to be said. For now I am going to call up the final difficulty, as a champion who has been standing out, since those which came forward first have pretty well had their round out. Turn to the charge so boldly thrown at the Gods by Euripides,[227]