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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 sacrifices called up the soul of the maiden, and she appeared to him and told him that this trouble would end when he got to Lacedaemon, and directly he got there he died.”[831]