10. Moreover, what reason is there for saying that those who lie in prison under sentence of death do not receive their punishment until they are decapitated? or that he who has drunk the hemlock-juice, but is still walking about waiting for the heaviness to get into his legs, until he is seized by anaesthesia and the rigor of death, (has not received his?) If we regard the consummation of the punishment as the punishment itself, we overlook the intervening sufferings and fears, as well as the apprehension and regret with which every evil-doer is harassed. Is not this just as if we were to say of the fish that has swallowed the hook, that it is not caught until we see it broiled or cut up by the cooks? Every one who has committed a crime is firmly held by justice and has then and there fastened within himself, like a bait the sweet morsel of iniquity. Having an avenging conscience in his breast, ‘Like a frantic tunny he spins round in the sea.’ For the well-known reckless audacity and over-confidence of vice is active and ardent until the evil deed has been done; then the passion subsiding like a wind, sinks down weak and cowed under the weight of fears and superstitions; so that it is entirely in accordance with the event and the truth that Stesichorus attributes a dream to Klytemnestra in about these words: ‘She thought a dragon with gory head approached her, and from it Pleisthenades came forth.’ For visions by night and apparitions by day and oracles and celestial portents and whatever other phenomenon is regarded as caused by the direct interposition of God, cause anxieties and fears to persons who have a guilty conscience. For example, it is said, that Apollodorus once in a dream saw himself flayed by the Scythians, then boiled, and heard his heart speaking from the caldron and saying, ‘I am the cause of all this’; and that at another time he saw his daughters all ablaze, their bodies encircled with flame, running about him. Hipparchus also, the son of Peisistratus, a little before his death saw Aphrodite flinging blood in his face from a kind of basin; and the favorites of Ptolemy the Thunderer, saw him summoned before a tribunal by Seleucus where vultures and wolves were the judges, distributing many pieces of flesh among his enemies. Pausanias, likewise, having caused a free maiden to be brought by force from Byzantium in order to pass the night with her, but when she was come, owing to some perturbation of mind and suspicion, had her put to death—this maiden he frequently saw in a dream calling to him, ‘Hasten to judgment; assuredly lust brings sorrow on men.’ As the apparition did not cease to haunt him, it is said that he set sail for the oracle of the dead at Heracleia where he called up the ghost of the damsel by expiatory rites and libations. Appearing before him, she said that he would be freed from his troubles when he came to Lacedaemon; but as soon as he arrived there he died.