Plutarch's Morals · Plutarch
HOW ONE CAN PRAISE ONESELF WITHOUT EXCITING ENVY.
Sec. IV. When Olympicus had done speaking, and I was musing with myself on the matter, Timon said, "Am I to put the finishing touch of difficulty on our subject, or am I to let him first contend earnestly against these views?" Then said I, "Why should we bring up the third wave[814] and drown the argument, if he is not able to refute or evade the charges already brought? To begin then with the domestic hearth, as the saying is,[815] let us imitate that cautious manner of speaking about the deity in vogue among the Academic philosophers, and decline to speak about these things as if we thoroughly understood them. For it is worse in us mortals than for people ignorant of music to discuss music, or for people ignorant of military matters to discuss the art of war, to examine too closely into the nature of the gods and demons, like people with no knowledge of art trying to get at the intention of artists from opinion and fancy and probabilities.
For if[816] it is no easy matter for anyone not a professional to conjecture why the surgeon performed an operation later rather than sooner, or why he ordered his patient to take a bath to-day rather than yesterday, how is it easy or safe for a mortal to say anything else about the deity than that he knows best the time to cure vice, and applies to each his punishment as the doctor administers a drug, and that a punishment not of the same magnitude, or applied at the same time, in all cases. For that the cure of the soul, which is called justice, is the greatest of all arts is testified by Pindar as well as by ten thousand others, for he calls God, the ruler and lord of all things, the greatest artificer as the creator of justice, whose function it is to determine when, and how, and how far, each bad man is to be punished. And Plato says that Minos, the son of Zeus, was his father's pupil in this art, not thinking it possible that any one could succeed in justice, or understand how to succeed in it, without he had learned or somehow got that science.
For the laws which men make are not always merely reasonable, nor is their meaning always apparent, but some injunctions seem quite ridiculous, for example, the Ephors at Lacedaemon make proclamation, directly they take office, that no one is to let his moustache grow, but that all are to obey the laws, that they be not grievous to them. And the Romans lay a light rod on the bodies of those they make freemen, and when they make their wills, they nominate some as their heirs, while to others they sell the property, which, seems strange. But strangest of all is that ordinance of Solon, that the citizen who, when his city is in faction, will not side with either party is to lose his civic rights. And generally one might mention many absurdities in laws, if one did not know the mind of the legislator, or understand the reason for each particular piece of legislation. How is it wonderful then, if human affairs are so difficult to comprehend, that it is no easy task to say in connection with the gods, why they punish some offenders early, and others late?
Sec. V. This is not a pretext for evading the subject, but merely a request for lenient judgement, that our discourse, looking as it were for a haven and place of refuge, may rise to the difficulty with greater confidence basing itself on probability. Consider then first that, according to Plato, god, making himself openly a pattern of all things good, concedes human virtue, which is in some sort a resemblance to himself, to those who are able to follow him. For all nature, being in disorder, got the principle of change and became order[817] by a resemblance to and participation in the nature and virtue of the deity. The same Plato also tells us that nature put eyesight into us, in order that the soul by beholding and admiring the heavenly bodies might accustom itself to welcome and love harmony and order, and might hate disorderly and roving propensities, and avoid aimless reliance on chance, as the parent of all vice and error. For man can enjoy no greater blessing from god than to attain to virtue by the earnest imitation of the noblest qualities of the divine nature.
For knowing how great a share of virtue souls come into the world with, deriving it from him, and how strong and lasting is their nobility of nature, and how it breaks out into vice against its natural disposition through the corruption of bad habits and companions, and afterwards in some cases reforms itself, and recovers its proper position, he does not inflict punishment on all persons alike; but the incorrigible he at once removes from life and cuts off, since it is altogether injurious to others, but most of all to a man's own self, to live in perpetual vice, whereas to those who seem to have 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 [Greek: tropos] and [Greek: ethos] to the character, the first word meaning _change_, and the latter the immense force and power of _habit_.
I think also that the ancients called Cecrops half man and half dragon[821] not because, as some say, 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 Gelon 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 changing his ideas and being disgusted with injustice, he restored their old constitution to the citizens,[822] and 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.
"'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 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]
"Dear women, would that I could now inhabit For the first time the house of Athamas, Guiltless of any of my awful deeds!"[835] It is likely that the soul of every wicked person will meditate 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 generously 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 conspiracies as Apollodorus did, or that those who robbed their friends of money as Glaucus the son of Epicydes did,[836] never repented, or loathed themselves, or regretted their past misdeeds? 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."
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.
Sec. 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,[845] 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 antiquity, 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 the Lesbian singer,' in honour and memory of old Terpander, for it is a similar case. But you yourselves certainly lay claim to be better than other Boeotians as descended from Opheltes,[846] and than other Phocians because of your ancestor Daiphantus,[847] and you were the first to give me help and assistance in preserving for the Lycormae and Satilaei their hereditary privilege of wearing crowns as descendants of Hercules, when I contended that we ought to confirm the honours and favours of the descendants of Hercules more especially because, though he was such a benefactor to the Greeks, he had had himself no adequate favour or return." "You remind me," he said, "of a noble effort, and one well worthy of a philosopher." "Dismiss then," said I, "my dear fellow, your vehement accusation against the gods, and do not be so vexed that some of a bad or evil stock are punished by them, or else do not joy in and approve of the honour paid to descent from a good stock. For it is unreasonable, if we continue to show favour to a virtuous stock, to think punishment wrong in the case of a criminal stock, or that it should not correspond with the adequate reward of merit. And he that is glad to see the descendants of Cimon honoured at Athens, but is displeased and indignant that the descendants of Lachares or Aristo are in exile, is too soft and easy, or rather too fault-finding and peevish with the gods, accusing them if the descendants of a bad and wicked man are fortunate, and accusing them also if the progeny of the bad are wiped off the face of the earth; thus finding fault with the deity alike, whether the descendants of the good or bad father are unfortunate."
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.