Plutarch's Morals
fell gloriously, 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 Alcibiades, 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?"[823] 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 bearing, so that we think
it right to cut off such offenders and 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.
Sec. 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 Leucadians, 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 conquered 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 executioners, 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 Cleonaeans (as if he was a Sicyonian) the lad Teletias, who
was crowned in the Pythian games, and tore him to pieces. As for the
Sicyonians, Orthagoras became their tyrant, and subsequently Myro and
Clisthenes, and these three checked their wanton outbreaks; but the
Cleonaeans, 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;'[824]
"and yet that son of Copreus never performed any brilliant or notable
action: but the descendants of Sisyphus and Autolycus and Phlegyas
nourished in the glory and virtues of great kings. Pericles also sprang
of a family under a curse,[825] 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 AEsculapius should not have been
born, nor those others who from bad and wicked men became good and
useful."
Sec. 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 Paeonian,
and about Aristo the Oetaean leader of mercenaries." "Not I, by Zeus,"
said Patrocleas, "but I should like to hear." "Aristo," I continued, "at
the permission of the tyrants removed the necklace of Eriphyle[826]
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 swallows.
And when the company said, as it was likely they would, 'Whatever makes
you act in such a strange manner?' '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."
Sec. IX. "These cases," I continued, "we cite supposing, as has been laid
down, that there is a deferring of punishment 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;"[827]
and,
"He who plots mischief 'gainst another brings
It first on his own pate."[828]
The cantharis is said to have in itself the antidote to its own sting,
but wickedness, creating its own pain and torment, pays 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 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.[829] 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 extending 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."[830]
Sec. 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
intermediate sufferings and fears and anxiety and remorse, the destiny
of every guilty wretch? 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 rampant 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 Clytaemnestra's
dream may have represented 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 Aphrodite 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 Byzantium, having sent for Cleonice
a free-born maiden, intending to outrage her and pass the night with
her, being seized with some alarm or suspicion killed her, and
frequently 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