says Empedocles. But about Cydnus, and the sacred sword of Apollo at Tarsus, we used to hear the story from you, dear Demetrius, how Cydnus cleans that steel best, and no other water suits the sword. And again, at Olympia, water from [Sidenote: C] Alpheus is poured on the ashes to make them adhere to the altar in a mass, and the water of no other river which has been found has the power of cementing the ash.
XLII. ‘It is not to be wondered at, then, that of the many streams which the earth sends up, these alone affect souls with inspiration and give them imagination of the future. Certainly legend agrees with reason as to this. In this very place it is related that the prophetic virtue was first made manifest by the accidental falling into it of a shepherd, who thereupon uttered sounds as of one inspired. These passed at first unheeded by those present; but afterwards, when the things which the man foretold had happened, there was astonishment. The most learned of the Delphians even mention [Sidenote: D] the man’s name, which was Coretas.
I am, however, myself strongly of opinion that a soul acquires a temperature congruous with the prophetic current, such as the eye has with light sympathetic to it. Though the eye possesses the power of seeing, this cannot act without light; and the prophetic organ of the soul needs, as the eye does, a congenial medium to help in kindling its flame, or whetting its edge. Hence most of the older generations used to think that Apollo and the sun were one and the same God, while those who knew and honoured that beautiful and wise proportion, “as body to soul, so sight [Sidenote: E] to intellect, so light to truth”, would add the conjecture “so the power of the sun to the nature of Apollo”, declaring the sun to be his offspring and scion, the ever becoming of the ever subsisting. For the sun kindles and enhances and helps to excite the visual power of the sense, as the God that of prophecy in the soul.
XLIII. ‘It was natural, however, that those who take the view that they are one and the same God should have dedicated this oracle to Apollo and Earth in common, thinking that the sun produces in the earth the disposition and temperament from which come the prophetic exhalations out of her. We [Sidenote: F] then, like Hesiod,[190] who understood the matter better than some philosophers, when he called her _Unshaken base of all_, consider her to be eternal and imperishable. But of the powers which are about her it is to be expected that some should fail here, and others come into being there, and that there should be shiftings from place to place, and cross-currents, and that such cycles should often revolve within her if we take time as a whole; and the phenomena point to such an inference. For in the case of lakes and rivers, and still more frequently in that of hot springs, there have been failure and entire disappearance in some places, in others a retreat so to call it, and an absorption; [Sidenote: 434] then they reappear at intervals of time in the same places, or bubble up in their neighbourhood. Again, we hear of mines where the ore has been exhausted and then renewed, as in the silver mines of Attica, and the copper lodes of Euboea, out of which the chilled sword-blades used to be manufactured, as Aeschylus[191] has said _Th’ Euboean blade, self-tempered, in his hand._ Then there is the rock at Carystus where it is only lately that the yield of delicate thread-like filaments of mineral has ceased. I think some of you will remember having seen towels, and nets, and caps made of these, which were non-inflammable. [Sidenote: B] Any which were soiled by use were placed in a flame out of which they came bright and clear.
Now there has been an entire disappearance of these, and scarcely a few fibres or thin filaments run in streaks about the mines.
XLIV. ‘Yet Aristotle[192] holds that exhalation is the operative cause within the earth of all these things, that is, of the natural effects which necessarily fail, shift place, and break out concomitantly. The same view must be taken of prophetic currents; the power which they have is not perennial nor ageless, it is liable to changes. Probably they are extinguished by excessive storms of rain, and dispersed by thunderbolts [Sidenote: C] falling upon them; above all, when the earth is shaken, and subsidence or conglomeration takes place in her depths, the exhalations are shifted or wholly lost to view; thus the effects of the great earthquake which actually overturned the town are said to be permanent here. In Orchomenus they say that there was a pestilence in which many men perished, and that the oracle of Teiresias then wholly failed, and remains to this day idle and voiceless. If the like happened also to those in Cilicia, as we hear it did, there is no one, Demetrius, who could tell us about it more clearly than you.’
XLV. Demetrius said: ‘I cannot say how things are now, for it is a long time since I left home, as you know; the [Sidenote: D] oracle of Mopsus was in full force when I was there, and also that of Amphilochus. I can tell you of a very remarkable thing which happened to that of Mopsus, in my presence. The propraetor of Cilicia was himself still of two minds about religious questions; from the weakness of his scepticism, I imagine, for his general character was violent and bad; but he had about him certain Epicureans, professed mockers at all such things on the strength of their fine physiology. He sent in a freedman, equipping him like a spy going into an enemy’s land, with sealed tablets inside which was written the question, but no one knew what it was. The man spent a night in the [Sidenote: E] sanctuary, as the custom was, and went to sleep. The following day he reported a dream, which was this. He thought that a handsome man stood over him, and said the one word “Black”, nothing more, and went straight away. This appeared to us strange, and caused much perplexity. However, that propraetor was struck with consternation, and worshipped; then he opened the tablets and showed us this question written inside: “Shall I sacrifice a white bull or a black?” Even the Epicureans [Sidenote: F] were confounded at this, and he himself completed his sacrifice, and ever afterwards held Mopsus in reverence.’
XLVI. After saying this, Demetrius was silent. As I wished to bring the discussion to a head, I glanced again at Philippus and Ammonius, who were sitting together. They appeared to me to wish to exchange some remarks, and again paused. Then Ammonius spoke: ‘Philippus has also something to say on our past discussion; his own view, as that of most people, is that Apollo is not a different God from the sun, but the same. [Sidenote: 435] My own difficulty is a greater one, and turns on greater matters. Just now we managed to let the argument take its own way with due solemnity, to transfer prophetic art simply from Gods to daemons. But now it seems to me that we are thrusting the latter out in their turn, chasing them hence from oracle and tripod, and resolving the origin—I would rather say the existence and power—of prophecy into winds, and vapours, and exhalations. What we have heard about temperatures, and [Sidenote: B] heatings and sharpenings, withdraws no doubt the credit from the Gods, but thereby suggests the inference as to cause which the Cyclops in Euripides[193] draws: _The earth by force, whether it will or no, Bringing forth grass, fattens my flocks and hinds._ Only he says that he does not sacrifice to Gods, _but to myself, And this great belly first of deities_, whereas we sacrifice and pray to get our oracles; and why do we do it, if souls carry within themselves a power of prophecy, which power is stirred up by temperature of some sort in air or breeze? And then the condition of the priestesses, what does [Sidenote: C] that mean, and the refusal to respond unless the whole victim from the hoof-joint up be set quivering when it is sprinkled? For it is not enough, as in other sacrifices, for it to shake the head, the shivering must be in all the parts, and with a tremulous sound; otherwise they tell you that the oracle is not giving responses, and do not bring in the Pythia. Now, if they ascribe the cause mainly to a God or daemon, it is reasonable to do and think thus, but on your view it is not reasonable. For the exhalation, if it be there, will produce the transport whether the sacrifice quiver or not, and will affect the soul, [Sidenote: D] not only of the Pythia, but equally of any chance comer who has physical contact with it. Thus it is mere folly to employ one woman only for the oracles, and to take trouble to keep her chaste and holy all her life.
For that Coretas who fell in, as the Delphians tell you, and was the first to make evident the virtue of the place, was in no respect different, as I think, from the other goatherds and shepherds, always supposing that this is not a story and an idle fiction, which I think it is. Then, when I reckon up the great benefits of which this oracle has been the cause to the Greeks, in wars, in the founding of cities, in [Sidenote: E] times of pestilence and of failure of crops, I think it dreadful to ascribe its discovery and origin, not to God and Providence, but to Chance and automatic causes. It is this point’, he added, ‘that I want Lamprias to argue; will you not wait?’ ‘Indeed I will,’ said Philippus, ‘and so will the others, the discussion has stirred us all.’
XLVII. I turned to him. ‘Stirred us, Philippus? It has confounded me, to think that before so large and so grave a company I should seem so to forget my years as with a show of plausible rhetoric to upset and disturb any view about religion which is established in truth and holiness. I will [Sidenote: F] defend myself by producing Plato, as witness and advocate in one. Plato[194] found fault with old Anaxagoras because he attached himself too much to physical causes, and because, in his constant pursuit of the working of necessary law in all which affects bodies, he dismissed the better causes or principles, the Final and the Efficient. He himself, first of the philosophers or more than any of them, went into both sets, attributing to God the origin of all things which are according to reason, but [Sidenote: 436] refusing to deprive matter of the causes necessary for their production; he recognized that in some such way the whole sensible universe is organized, yet is not pure nor free from admixture, but has its origin in matter involved with reason. Now look at this first in the case of the artists. Take, for instance, the famous base or stand, called by Herodotus[195] “cup-stand”, of the bowl here; it had its physical causes, iron, steel, fire to soften and water to temper it, without all which the object could not possibly be produced; but the more potent principle [Sidenote: B] which stirred the others and was working through them, was furnished to it by Art and Reason. Now the name of the maker or artificer has been inscribed on these several figures or works of imitation: _Here Polygnotus, son of Aglaophon, The Thasian, painted towering Ilion’s sack._ You may see it for yourself. But without pigments crushed and compounded it would be impossible to present such a composition to the eye. Does then the man who seeks to grasp the physical principle, investigating and laying down the effects and [Sidenote: C] the changes of a mixture of Sinopic red earth with yellow, or Melian gray with black, rob the painter of his glory? Or he who follows out the processes of tempering or softening steel, how it is weakened by fire and submits itself to be drawn and hammered, then, plunged into fresh water and compressed and densified by the cold, because of the softness and rarefication induced by the fire, acquires temper and consistence—“the iron’s might” Homer[196] calls it—does he any the less preserve for the artist his part in the causation? I think not! There [Sidenote: D] are those who criticize the properties of medical appliances; they do not overthrow the art of Medicine. As, for the matter of that, Plato[197] in proving that we see by means of the flash of our eyes mingling with that of the sun, and hear by the pulsations of the air, did not rule out the fact that we have received our sight and our hearing in accordance with Reason and Providence.
XLVIII. ‘The whole matter, as I maintain, stands thus. All becoming has two causes, of which the most ancient theologians and poets chose to turn their attention to the stronger only, pronouncing over all things the universal refrain: _Zeus first, Zeus middle, all things are of Zeus_,[198] while they never approached the necessary or physical causes. Their successors, called physicists, did the very reverse; they [Sidenote: E] strayed away from that beautiful and divine principle, and refer everything to bodies, and pulsations, and changes, and temperaments.
Hence the systems of both are deficient; they have ignored or neglected, the latter the person through whom and the agent by whom, the former the things from which and the means through which. He who first distinctly grasped both, and attached by necessary law the subject affected to the rational Maker and Mover, relieves us as well as himself from any charge of contempt or detraction. We do not make [Sidenote: F] prophecy a godless or irrational thing, when we assign to it for its matter the soul of man, and for its instrument, or harp-quill, the inspiring current and the exhalation. For, in the first place, the earth which breeds the exhalations, and the sun who gives to earth all power of temperature or of change, are reckoned Gods in the traditions of our fathers. Further, in leaving daemons to preside over and guard this temperature, as though it were a melody, to relax the strings in due course [Sidenote: 437] or to tighten, to clear away that excess of ecstasy and agitation which it causes in the worshippers, and to leave excitement a painless and harmless compound, we shall not be thought to do what is irrational or impossible.
XLIX. ‘Nor can we allow that in offering the previous sacrifice, or crowning the victim, or pouring on it lustral draughts, we do anything repugnant to this view. For when the priests and holy men sacrifice the victim, and sprinkle it, and watch its movement and its trembling, they do not profess to get from it an intimation of anything but the one fact that the God is giving answers. For the thing offered in sacrifice must be pure both in body and in soul, and free from any injury or taint. As to body, it is not very difficult to make [Sidenote: B] out visible proof; the test of soul is to offer corn to the bulls, pease to the he-goats; an animal which refuses is reckoned out of health. For the she-goat it is cold water; a soul in a normal state cannot be apathetic and motionless under the sprinkling. For my own part, even if it be certain that trembling is a sign that the God is ready to give responses, the contrary that he [Sidenote: C] is not, I see no disastrous consequence. As I said before, every natural force produces its result better or worse according to season; if the right season is escaping us, it is to be expected that the God should signify the fact.
L. ‘I think, further, that the exhalation is not always the same, it has times of relaxation and of intensity. In proof, I can bring forward witnesses, many of them strangers, and all the members of the temple staff. For the room in which they place consultants of the God, is, at intervals, which are not frequent or fixed, but come as it may happen, filled with fragrance and a sweet gale, such as the most costly spices might emit, which are thrown up, as out of a well, from the sanctuary.
[Sidenote: D] We may suppose that they burst out by the action of heat or of some other force within. Or, if this does not seem to you convincing, you will at least grant that the Pythia herself appears to show at different times different states and moods of that part of the soul which is in contact with the current, and does not present throughout one temperament, like a melody which never changes. Many conscious troubles and excitements, more which are unnoticed, seize her body and stream on into the soul; and when she is charged with these, it is better for her not to go in, not to present herself to the God when she is not perfectly pure, like an instrument well strung and tuneful, but is passionate and disordered. Wine does not always affect [Sidenote: E] the hard drinker in the same way, nor the flute one susceptible to its music; the same men are stirred to tipsy revelling, now less now more, according to difference of temperament. The imaginative part of the soul seems, more than any other, to be controlled by variations in the body, and to change with it. This is clearly shown by dreams; sometimes we find ourselves among many visions of every sort in our sleep, at others again there is a perfect calm and relief from such illusions. We know [Sidenote: F] ourselves Cleon here of Daulia, who says that in the many years which he has lived he has never once seen a dream-vision. In an older generation the same is recorded of Thrasymedes of Heraea. The cause is bodily temperament, just as, on the other side, there is that of melancholic persons, all dreams and phantoms; although these are supposed to have the gift of dreaming right, for their imagination turns them this way or that, [Sidenote: 438] just as those who shoot often, often hit.
LI. ‘When then the imaginative and prophetic faculty of the soul is attempered to the current as to a drug, the inspiration must be brought about in the persons who are to prophesy, when not, not; otherwise the result will be a distortion by no means free from trouble and disturbance, as we know was the case with the Pythia who lately died. A deputation came from abroad to consult the God; the victim remained motionless and impassive under the first sprinkling, then the priests in [Sidenote: B] excess of zeal persisted, and at last it did give in when drenched with their shower-bath. What happened to the Pythia?
Unwillingly and with no alacrity, they say, she went down into the vault. In her very first answers she made it clear by the hoarseness of her voice that she could not bear up; she was like a ship driven by the wind, filled with a dumb bad spirit. At last she became all agitation; with a terrible cry she made towards the door of exit, and dashed against it, so that not only the members of the deputation fled, but also the prophet Nicander and the holy persons present. However, after a short [Sidenote: C] time, they went in and recovered her. She was then in her senses, and lived on for a few days. For these reasons, they keep the person of the Pythia free from intercourse, and from any sort of communication or contact with strangers; and they take the signs before proceeding to the oracle, thinking that it is quite clear to the God when she has the temperament and condition which will allow her to undergo the inspiration with impunity. For the force of the exhaled air does not affect all persons, nor the same persons always in the same way; it only provides fuel, a foundation, as has been explained, for [Sidenote: D] those who are fit to be subjected to the change. It is essentially divine and daemonic, not however exempt from failure, or destruction, or age, nor is it capable of enduring through that infinite space of time in which all things between moon and earth are exhausted, according to our theory. Some go on to say that the things also which are above the moon do not endure, but fail in presence of the eternal infinite, and suffer abrupt changes and new births.
LII. ‘These things’, I continued, ‘I commend to your repeated consideration, and my own, as offering many openings for objection and many suggestions of an opposite view, which the present opportunity does not allow us to follow out in their [Sidenote: E] entirety. Let them stand over then, and also the problem raised by Philippus about the sun and Apollo.’
Footnote 128: Whose account is, for convenience, somewhat recast and amplified. The fact is understated. ‘There cannot be more than five solids, each of which has all its faces with the same number of sides, and all its solid angles formed with the same number of plane angles.’ Todhunter, Footnote 129: Footnote 130: _Od._ 3, 367-8.
Footnote 131: Footnote 132: Herodotus, 8, 133-5. I have followed W.’s reconstruction.
Footnote 136: Fr. 149: see above, p. 77.
Footnote 137: Herod. 9, 28 (and see ib. c. 21).
Footnote 138: Footnote 139: The words ‘and here—heroes’ have been supplied from a quotation in Footnote 140: From a fragment, Gaisford, _Poetae Minores_, ii, p. 489 (cp. Ausonius, Footnote 141: Fr. 165.
Footnote 142: As Ausonius, loc. cit.
Footnote 143: Fr. 87.
Footnote 147: See Heraclitus, Fr. 34.
Footnote 148: Inserting, with Mezirius, ἢ δεκάκις before τεσσάρων.
Footnote 149: The meaning is simply that 40 × 3^5 = 9720, and ‘triangle-wise’ seems irrelevant.
Footnote 150: Fr. 961 (from the _Phaethon_).
Footnote 156: Fr. 730.
Footnote 157: See additional note, p. 312.
Footnote 158: Footnote 159: Cp. Herod. 2, 145.
Footnote 161: Reading οὐ πολλά (‘nihil secum trahit impossibile’. Xylander). See Preface, p. vi.
Footnote 167: Reading, with Madvig (partly anticipated by Emperius)...ὃ μὴ κοινῶς ποιὸν ἢ ἰδίως ἐστίν· ὁ δὲ κόσμος οὐ λέγεται κοινῶς εἶναι ποιός· ἰδίως Footnote 169: Inserting κάτω, with Meziriac.
Footnote 173: There is a play on the words for ‘fire’, ‘Pyramid’.
Footnote 180: Fr. 925.
Footnote 184: μᾶλλον δὲ ὄντα. Cp. Plato, _Philebus_, 33, διὰ μνήμης πᾶν ἔστι τὸ γεγονός.
Footnote 185: See Thuc. 1, 12.
Footnote 186: Fr. 963.
Footnote 188: Fr. 75.
Footnote 189: The text is corrupt, but probably contained ὁμίχλην. Cp. Plato, _Sympos._ 736 A.
Footnote 191: Fr. 371.
Footnote 195: 1, 25, where the work is ascribed to Glaucus.
Footnote 197: Footnote 198: ON THE INSTANCES OF DELAY IN DIVINE PUNISHMENT INTRODUCTION 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): _Then you will find a breath about your ears Of Music, and a light about your eyes Most beautiful—like this—and myrtle groves, And joyous throngs of women and of men, And clapping of glad hands._ And the still more famous picture of Pindar (_Ol._ 2, 68-74, tr. G.
Moberly): _But who in Godlike strife Have dared to keep their secret souls from sin, Thrice tried in either life, E’en to old Saturn’s tower their bright way win.
There with melodious din Light breezes, East and West, Fan with soft breath the Islets of the Blest; And golden flowerets breathe, Some from the Island-trees, Some floating on the ambient seas, With which their twinèd arms and brows they wreathe._ 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_.
ON THE INSTANCES OF DELAY IN DIVINE PUNISHMENT A DIALOGUE THE SPEAKERS PLUTARCH.
TIMON, Plutarch’s brother.
I. Having spoken to this effect, Quintus, before any one [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 _The Gods delay, the Gods are ever slow._ 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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: _Justice shall never strike thee to the heart— Fear not her footfall—no, nor any man That does the wrong; with silent foot and slow, When the day comes, she’ll stalk the sinners down._ [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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