FullReads

Sec. XII. “But consider now whether I have not spoken too long.” Then Timon said, “Perhaps you have, considering 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 conduct resembles the story told of AEsop’s coming to this very spot,[837] with money from Croesus, to offer a splendid sacrifice to the god, and to give four minae to each of the Delphians. And some quarrel or difference belike ensuing between him and the Delphians here, he offered the sacrifice, 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 invited by proclamation whoever wished to take satisfaction of them for AEsop’s death. And three generations afterwards came Idmon[838] a Samian, no relation of AEsop’s, but a descendant of those who had purchased AEsop 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 sacrilege was transferred from Hyampia to Nauplia.[839] And even 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 temple at Miletus.[840] And Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, 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.”[841] And is it not stranger still in Apollo punishing the present inhabitants of Pheneus, by damming up the channel dug to carry off their water,[842] 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[843] 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? Nor do we praise the Thracians who to this day, in honour of Orpheus, mark their wives;[844] nor the barbarians on the banks of the Eridanus who, they say, wear mourning for Phaeethon. And I think it would be still more ridiculous if the people living at the time Phaeethon 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 completely ruin them?