fallen into wrong-doing, rather from ignorance of what was
good than from deliberate choice of what was bad, he gives
time to repent. But if they persist in vice he punishes them
too, for he has no fear that they will escape him. Consider
also how many changes take place in the life and character
of men, so that the Greeks give the names rpoiroQ and 7]doQ
to the character, the first word meaning cha7ige, and the
latter the immense force and power of habit. I think also
that the ancients called Cecrops half man and half dragon '^
^ It seems necessary to read either Tcopilav with Mez, or opi^eir with
Wyttenbach.
^ Compare Aristophanes, " Vespse," 438.
338 Plutarch's morals,
not because, as some saj, he became from a good king wild
and dragon-like, but contrariwise because he was originally
perverse and terrible, and afterwards became a mild and
humane king. And if this is uncertain, at any rate we know
that Grelon and Hiero, both Sicilians, and Pisistratus the
son of Hippocrates, though they got their supreme power by
bad means, yet used it for virtuous ends, and though they
mounted the throne in an irregular way, yet became good and
useful princes. For by good legislation and by encouraging
agriculture they made the citizens earnest and industrious
instead of scoffers and chatterers. As for Gelon, after
fighting valiantly and defeating the Carthaginians in a great
battle, he would not conclude with them the peace they
asked for until they inserted an article promising to cease
sacrificing their sons to Cronos. And Lydiades was tyrant
in Megalopolis, yet in the very height of his power chang-
ing his ideas and being disgusted with injustice, he re-
stored their old constitution to the citizens,^ and fell glo-
riously, fighting against the enemy in behalf of his country.
And if any one had slain prematurely Miltiades the tyrant
of the Chersonese, or had prosecuted and got a conviction
against Cimon for incest with his sister, or had deprived
Athens of Themistocles for his wantonness and revellings
and outrages in the market, as in later days Athens lost Alci-
biades, by an indictment, should we not have had to go
without the glory of Marathon, and Eurymedon, and
beautiful Artemisium, *' where the Athenian youth laid the
bright base of liberty ? " ^ For great natures produce
nothing little, nor can their energy and activity rust owing
to their keen intellect, but they toss to and fro as at sea
till they come to a settled and durable character. As then
one inexperienced in farming, seeing a spot full of thick
bushes and rank growth, full of wild beasts and streams
and mud, would not think much of it, while to one who
has learnt how to discriminate and discern between different
kind of soils all these are various tokens of the richness and
goodness of the land, so great natures break out into many
strange excesses, which exasperate us at first beyond bear-
ing, so that we think it right to cut off such offenders and
^ See Pausanias, viii. 27. ^ Pindar.
ON THOSE WHO ARE PUNISHED BY THE DEITY LATE. 339
stop their career at once, whereas a better judge, seeing
the good and noble even in these, waits for age and the
season which nature appoints for gathering fruit to bring
sense and virtue.
§ VII. So much for this point. Do you not think also
that some of the Greeks did well to adopt that Egyptian
law which orders a pregnant woman condemned to death
not to suffer the penalty till after she has given birth ? "
" Certainly," said all the company. I continued, " Put the
case not of a woman pregnant, but of a man who can in
process of time bring to light and reveal some secret act
or plan, point out some unknown evil, or devise some
scheme of safety, or invent something useful and necessary,
would it not be better to defer his execution, and wait the
result of his meditation ? That is my opinion, at least."
" So we all think," said Patrocleas. " Quite right," said I.
" For do but consider, had Dionysius had vengeance taken
on him at the beginning of his tyranny, none of the Greeks
would have dwelt in Sicily, which was laid waste by the
Carthaginians. Nor would the Greeks have dwelt in
Apollonia, or Anactorium, or the peninsula of the Leuca-
dians, had not Periander's chastisement been postponed for
a long time. I think also that Cassander's punishment
was deferred that Thebes might be repeopled. And of the
mercenaries that plundered this very temple most crossed
over into Sicily with Timoleon, and after they had con-
quered the Carthaginians and put down their authority,
perished miserably, miserable wretches that they were. For
no doubt the deity makes use of some wicked men, as exe-
cutioners, to punish others, and so I think he crushes as it
were most tyrants. For as the gall of the hyena and
rennet of the seal, both nasty beasts in all other respects,
are useful in certain diseases, so when some need sharp
correction, the deity casts upon them the implacable fury
of some tyrant, or the savage ferocity of some prince, and
does not remove the bane and trouble till their fault be got
rid of and purged. Such a potion was Phalaris to the
Agrigentines, and Marius to the Romans. And to the
people of Sicyon the god distinctly foretold that their city
needed a scourge, when they took away from the Cleonceans
(as if he was a Sicyonian) the lad Teletias, who was crowned
340 Plutarch's morals,
in the Pythian games, and tore him to pieces. As for the
Sicyonians, Orthagoras became their tyrant, and subse-
quently Myro and Clisthenes, and these three checked their
wanton outbreaks ; but the Cleoneeans, not getting such a
cure, went to ruin. You have of course heard Homer's
lines,
" ' From a bad father sprang a son far better,
Excelling in all virtue ; ' '
and yet that son of Copreus never performed any brilliant
or notable action : but the descendants of Sisyphus and
Autolycus and Phlegyas flourished in the glory and virtues
of great kings. Pericles also sprang of a family under a
curse,' and Pompey the Great at Rome was the son of
Pompeius Strabo, whose dead body the Roman people cast
out and trampled upon, so great was their hatred of him.
How is it strange then, since the farmer does not cut down
the thorn till he has taken his asparagus, nor do the
Libyans burn the twigs till they have gathered the
ledanum, that god does not exterminate the wicked and
rugged root of an illustrious and royal race till it has
produced its fit fruit ? For it would have been better for
the Phocians to have lost ten thousand of the oxen and
horses of Iphitus, and for more gold and silver to have
gone from Delphi, than that Odysseus and -^sculapius
should not have been born, nor those others who from
bad and wicked men became good and useful."
§ VIII. " And do you not all think that it is better that
punishment should take place at the fitting time and in
the fitting manner rather than quickly and on the spur of
the moment ? Consider the case of Callippus, who with the
very dagger with which he slew Dion, pretending to be his
friend, was afterwards slain by his own friends. And when
Mitius the Argive was killed in a tumult, a brazen statue
in the market-place fell on his murderer and killed him
during the public games. And of course, Patrocleas,
you know all about Bessus the Pseonian, and about Aristo
the QLtddsm. leader of mercenaries." " Not I, by Zeus,"
said Patrocleas, "but I should like to hear." "Aristo," I
^ Homer, "Iliad," xv. 641, 642. ' See Thueydides, i. 127.
ON THOSE WHO ARE PUNISHED BT THE DEITY LATE. 341
continued, " at the permission of the tyrants removed the
necklace of Eriphyle ^ which was hung up in this temple,
and took it to his wife as a present ; but his son being
angry with his mother for some reason or other, set the
house on fire, and burnt all that were in it. As for
Bessus, it seems he had killed his father, though his
crime was long undiscovered. But at last going to sup
with some strangers, he knocked down a nest of swallows,
pricking it with his lance, and killed all the young swal-
lows. And when the company said, as it was likely they
would, ' Whatever makes you act in such a strange man-
ner ? ' ' Have they not,' he replied, ' been long bearing
false witness against me, crying out that I had killed my
father ? ' And the company, astonished at his answer, laid
the matter before the king, and the affair was inquired into,
and Bessus punished."
§ IX. " These cases," I continued, " we cite supposing, as
has been laid down, that there is a deferring of punish-
ment to the wicked ; and, for the rest, I think we ought
to listen to Hesiod, who tells us — not like Plato, who
asserts that punishment is a condition that follows crime —
that it is contemporaneous with it, and grows with it from
the same source and root. For Hesiod says,
" Evil advice is worst to the adviser ; " ^
and,
'• He who plots mischief 'gainst another brings
It first on his own pate." ^
The cantharis is said to have in itself the antidote to its own
sting, but wickedness, creating its own pain and torment,
pars the penalty of its misdeeds not afterwards but at the
time of its ill-doing. And as every malefactor about to
pay the penalty of his crime in his person bears his cross,
so vice fabricates for itself each of its own torments, being
the terrible author of its own misery in life, wherein in
addition to shame it has frequent fears and fierce passions
and endless remorse and anxiety. But some are just
' See Pausanias, v. 17 ; viii. 24 ; ix. 41 j x. 29.
^ Hesiod, " Works and Days,'' 266.
â– '' Ibid. 265. Compare Pausanias, ii. 9; Ovid, A. A, i. 655, 656.
342 PLUTARCH'S MORALS.
like children, who, seeing malefactors in the theatres in
golden tunics and purple robes with crowns on and dancing,
admire them and marvel at them, thinking them happy,
till they see them goaded and lashed and issuing fire from
their gaudy but cheap garments.^ For most wicked people,
though they have great households and conspicuous offices
and great power, are yet being secretly punished before
they are seen to be murdered or hurled down rocks, which
is rather the climax and end of their punishment than the
punishment itself. For as Plato tells us that Herodicus the
Selymbrian having fallen into consumption, an incurable
disease, was the first of mankind to mix exercise with the
art of healing, and so prolonged his own life and that of
others suffering from the same disease, so those wicked
persons who seem to avoid immediate punishment, receive
a longer and not slower punishment, not later but extend-
ing over a wider period ; for they are not punished in their
old age, but rather grow old in perpetual punishment. I
speak of course of long time as a human being, for to the
gods all the period of man's life is as nothing, and so to
them ' now and not thirty years ago ' means no more than
with us torturing or hanging a malefactor in the evening
instead of the morning would mean ; especially as man is
shut up in life as in a prison from which there is no egress
or escape, and though doubtless during his life he has
much feasting and business and gifts and favours and
amusement, yet, just like people playing at dice or draughts
in a prison, the rope is all the time hanging over his
head."=^
§ X. " And indeed what prevents our asserting that people
in prison under sentence of death are not punished till their
heads are cut off, or that the person who has taken hemlock,
and walks about till he feels it is getting into his legs, suffers
not at all till he is deprived of sensation by the freezing
and curdling of his blood, if we consider the last moment,
of punishment all the punishment, and ignore all the inter-
mediate sufferings and fears and anxiety and remorse, the
^ " Significat martyres Christianos, in tunica molesta fumantes.'" —
Rdske.
^ Like the sword of Damocles. See Horace, " Odes," iii. 1. 17-21.
ON THOSE WHO ARE PUNISHED BY THE DEITY LATE. 343
destiny of every guilty wretcli ? That would be arguing
that the fish that has swallowed the hook is not caught,
till we see it boiled by the cook or sliced at table. For
every wrong-doer is liable to punishment, and soon
swallows the pleasantness of his wrong-doing like a bait,
while his conscience still vexes and troubles him,
'• As through the sea the impetuous tunny darts,"
For the recklessness and audacity of vice is strong and ram-
pant till the crime is committed, but afterwards, when the
passion subsides like a storm, it becomes timid and dejected
and a prey to fears and superstitions. So that Stesichorus
in his account of Clytfemnestra's dream may have repre-
sented the facts and real state of the case, where he says,
" A dragon seemed to appear to her with its lofty head
smeared all over with blood, and out of it seemed to come
king Orestes the grandson of Plisthenes." For visions in
dreams, and apparitions during the day, and oracles, and
lightning, and whatever is thought to come from the deity,
bring tempests of apprehension to the guilty. So they
say that one time Apollodorus in a dream saw himself
flayed by the Scythians, and then boiled, and that his
heart out of the caldron spoke to him in a low voice and
said, "I am the cause of this;" and at another time he
dreamed that he saw his daughters running round him in
a circle all on fire and in flames. And Hipparchus the son
of Pisistratus, a little before his death, dreamt that Aphro-
dite threw some blood on his face out of a certain phial.
And the friends of Ptolemy Ceraunus dreamed that he was
summoned for trial by Seleucus, and that the judges were
vultures and wolves, who tore his flesh and distributed it
wholesale among his enemies. And Pausanias at Byzan-
tium, having sent for Cleonice a free-born maiden, intend-
ing to outrage her and pass the night with her, being
seized with some alarm or suspicion killed her, and fre-
quently saw her in his dreams saying to him, " Come near
for judgement, lust is most assuredly a grievous bane to
men," and as this apparition did not cease, he sailed, it
seems, to Heraclea to the place where the souls of the dead
could be summoned, and by propitiations and sacrifices
called up the soul of the maiden, and she appeared to him
344 Plutarch's morals.
and told him that this trouble would end when he got to
LacedaBmon, and directly he got there he died."^
§ XI. " And so, if nothing happens to the soul after death,
but that event is the end of all enjoyment or punishment,
one would be rather inclined to say that the deity was
lax and indulgent in quickly punishing the wicked and
depriving them of life. For even if we were to say that
the wicked had no other trouble in a long life, yet, when
their wrong- doing was proved to bring them no profit or
enjoyment, no good or adequate return for their many and
great anxieties, the consciousness of that would be quite
enough to throw ^ their mind off its balance. So they record
of Lysimachus that he was so overcome by thirst that he
surrendered himself and his forces to the Getee for some
drink, but after he had drunk and bethought him that he
was now a captive, he said, " Alas ! How guilty am I for
so brief a gratification to lose so great a kingdom ! " And
yet it is very difficult to resist a necessity of nature. But
when a man, either for the love of money, or for political
place or power, or carried away by some amorous propen-
sity, does some lawless and dreadful deed, and, after his
eager desire is satisfied, sees in process of time that only
the base and terrible elements of his crime remain, while
nothing useful, or necessary, or advantageous has flowed
from it, is it not likely that the idea would often present
itself to him that, moved by vain-glory, or for some illiberal
and unlovely pleasure, he had violated the greatest and
noblest rights of mankind, and had filled his life with
shame and trouble ? For as Simonides used to say play-
fully that he always found his money-chest full but his
gratitude-chest empty,^ so the wicked contemplating their
own vice soon find out that their gratification is joyless
and hopeless,* and ever attended by fears and griefs and
gloomy memories, and suspicions about the future, and dis-
trust about the present. Thus we hear Ino, repenting for
what she had done, saying on the stage,
^ See also Paiisanias, iii. 17.
^ Surely dv uvarp'tTroi must be read.
^ Compare " On Curiosity," § x.
* The reading is very doubtful. I adopt ifdovtJQ jxev tv9v<; Ksvt)v
Xopiv, iXTTtSog ipi]}xov ivpiaKovai.
ON THOSE WHO ARE PUNISHED BY THE DEITY LATE. 345
" Dear women, would that I could now inhabit
For the first time the house of Athamas,
Guiltless of any of my awful deeds ! " '
It is likely that the soul of every wicked person will medi-
tate in this way, and consider how it can escape the memory
of its ill-deeds, and lay its conscience to sleep, and become
pure, and live another life over again from the beginning.
For there is no confidence, or reality, or continuance, or
security, in what wickedness proposes to itself, unless by
Zeus we shall say that evil-doers are wise, but wherever the
greedy love of wealth or pleasure or violent envy dwells
with hatred and malignity, there will you also see and find
stationed superstition, and remissness for labour, and
cowardice in respect to death, and sudden caprice in the
passions, and vain-glory and boasting. Those that censure
them frighten them, and they even fear those that praise
them as wronged by their deceit, and as most hostile to the
bad because they readily praise those they think good.
For as in the case of ill-tempered steel the hardness of vice
is rotten, and its strength easily shattered. So that in
course of time, understanding their real selves, they are
vexed and disgusted with their past life and abhor it. For
if a bad man who restores property entrusted to his care,
or becomes surety for a friend, or contributes very gene-
rously and liberally to his country out of love of glory or
honour, at once repents and is sorry for what he has done
from the fickleness and changeableness of his mind ; and if
men applauded in the theatres directly afterwards groan,
their love of glory subsiding into love of money ; shall we
suppose that those who sacrificed men to tyrannies and con-
spiracies as Apollodorus did, or that those who robbed
their friends of money as Grlaucus the son of Epicydes did,^
never repented, or loathed themselves, or regretted their
past misdeeds r For my part, if it is lawful to say so, I do
not think evil-doers need any god or man to punish them,
for the marring and troubling of all their life by vice is in
itself adequate punishment."
§ XII. " But consider now whether I have not spoken too
long." Then Timon said, " Perhaps you have, considering
^ Euripides, " Ino." ^ gge Herodotus, vi. 86 ; Juvenal, xiii. 199-207.
346 Plutarch's morals.
what remains and the time it will take. For now I am
going to start the last question, as if it were a combatant
in reserve, since the other two questions have been debated
sufficiently. For as to the charge and bold accusation that
Euripides brings against the gods, for visiting the sins of
the parents upon the children, consider that even those of
us who are silent agree with Euripides. For if the guilty
were punished themselves there would be no further need
to punish the innocent, for it is not fair to punish even the
guilty twice for the same offence, whereas if the gods
through easiness remit the punishment of the wicked,
and exact it later on from the innocent, they do not well
to compensate for their tardiness by injustice. Such con-
duct resembles the story told of ^sop's coming to this
very spot,^ with money from Croesus, to offer a splendid
sacrifice to the god, and to give four minse to each of the
Delphians. And some quarrel or difference belike ensuing
between him and the Delphians here, he offered the sacri-
fice, but sent the money back to Sardis, as though the
Delphians were not worthy to receive that benefit, so they
fabricated against him a charge of sacrilege, and put him
to death by throwing him headlong down yonder rock
called Hyampia. And in consequence the god is said to
have been wroth with them, and to have brought dearth on
their land, and all kinds of strange diseases, so that they
went round at the public festivals of the Greeks, and in-
vited by proclamation whoever wished to take satisfaction
of them for ^ sop's death. And three generations after-
wards came Idmon" a Samian, no relation of ^sop's, but
a descendant of those who had purchased ^sop as a slave
at Samos, and by giving him satisfaction the Delphians got
rid of their trouble. And it was in consequence of this,
they say, that the punishment of those guilty of sacrilef^e
was transferred from Hyampia to Nauplia.^ And e^en
great lovers of Alexander, as we are, do not praise his
destroying the city of the Branchidae and putting everybody
in it to death because their great-grandfathers betrayed the
' The company are in the temple at Delphi, be it remembered.
^ Called ladmon in Herodotus, ii. 134, where this story is also told.
2 Wyttenbach suggests Daulis.
ON THOSE WHO ARE PUNISHED BY THE DEITY LATE. 347
temple at Miletus.' And Agathocles, the tyrant of Syra-
cnse, laughing and jeering at the Corcyraeans for asking
him why he wasted their island, replied, " Because, by
Zeus, your forefathers welcomed Odysseus." And when
the people of Ithaca likewise complained of his soldiers
carrying off their sheep, he said, " Your king came to us,
and actually put out the shepherd's eye to boot."^ And is
it not stranger still in Apollo punishing the present inha-
bitants of Pheneus, by damming up the channel dug to
carry off their water,^ and so flooding the whole of their
district, because a thousand years ago, they say, Hercules
carried off to Pheneus the oracular tripod ? and in telling
the Sybarites that the only end of their troubles would be
propitiating by their ruin on three occasions the wrath of
Leucadian Hera ? And indeed it is no long time since the
Locrians have ceased sending maidens^ to Troy,
" Who without upper garments and barefooted,
Like slave-girls, in the early morning swept
Around Athene's altar all unveiled,
Till old age came upon them with its burdens,"
all because Ajax violated Cassandra. Where is the reason
or justice in all this? N^or do we praise the Thracians
who to this day, in honour of Orpheus, mark their
wives;" nor the barbarians on the banks of the Eridanus
who, they say, wear mourning for Phaethon. And I think
it would be still more ridiculous if the people living at the
time Phaethon perished had neglected him, and those who
lived five or ten generations after his tragic death had
begun the practice of wearing mourning and grieving for
him. And yet this would be only folly, there would be
nothing dreadful or fatal about it, but what should make
the anger of the gods subside at once and then afterwards,
like some rivers, burst out against others till they com-
pletely ruin them ?"
' To Xerxes.
- The allusion is to the well-known story of Odysseus and the Cyclops
Polyphemus, who is supposed to have dwelt in the island of Sicily,
where Agathocles was tyrant.
^ See Pausanias, viii. 14.
* Two were to be sent for 1,000 continuous years.. So the Oracle.
^ See Pausanias, ix. 30; Herodotus, v. 6.
348
PLUTARCH S MORALS.
§ XIII. Directly he left off, fearing that if he began again
he would introduce more and greater absurdities, I asked
him, " Well, do you believe all this to be true ? " And he
replied, " If not all, but only some, of it is true, do you not
think that the subject presents the same difficulty?"
"Perhaps," said I, "it is as with those in a raging fever,
whether they have few or many clothes on the bed they are
equally hot or nearly so, yet to ease them we shall do well
to remove some of the clothes ; but let us waive this point,
if you don't like the line of argument, though a good deal
of what you have said seems myth and fable, and let us
recall to our minds the recent festival in honour of Apollo
called Theoxenia,^ and the noble share in it which the
heralds expressly reserve for the descendants of Pindar,
and how grand and pleasant it seemed to you," " Who
could help being pleased," said he, " with such a delightful
honour, so Greek and breathing the simple spirit of an-
tiquity, had he not, to use Pindar's own phrase, ' a black
heart forged when the flame was cold ?' " "I pass over
then," said I, " the similar proclamation at Sparta, ' After