21. A little while ago we expressed our ill-will at the late and tardy punishment of the wicked; now we find fault because in some cases, even before they perpetrate any evil deed, God checks the natural bent and disposition of men, though we are aware that the future is often worse and more to be feared than the past, and what is dormant than what is apparent. We are not able to fathom the reasons why it is sometimes better to let men commit crimes and sometimes better to anticipate them while they are merely deliberating and contriving; just as some medicines are not adapted to certain patients, though helpful to others who are not actually sick, and yet in a worse condition than the former. For this reason the gods do not ‘turn all the transgressions of the parents upon their offspring,’ but if a virtuous son is begotten by a wicked father, as it were, a sound man, by one who is diseased, he averts the penalty from the house, the offspring of one being, so to speak, adopted into another. But it is fitting that a young man who conforms himself to the likeness of a corrupt family should also share the chastisement of its villainies as a debt incurred by inheritance. Antigonus was not punished on account of Demetrius, any more than the heroes of the olden time, Phyleus and Nestor, for the sake of Augeas and Neleus; since these men, though sprung from wicked fathers, were themselves good men. But those who cherish and take naturally to the baseness that is born in them must also expect to be pursued to the end by that justice which the likeness of vice demands. For just as warts and livid spots and freckles that fathers sometimes have, are not on their sons, but afterwards reappear on the grandsons, and granddaughters; and a certain Greek woman who had given birth to a black child for which she was charged with adultery until she proved that she was descended from an Ethiopian in the fourth generation; and one of the sons of Pytho of Nisibis, who recently died, and who was said to be sprung from the Sparti, was born with the print of a spear on his body—in which case the family likeness reappeared and came to the surface as out of the deep, after such a long space of time,—so in like manner the character and passions of the soul are often concealed in the first generations and remain unknown, but some time afterward and in other persons nature springs up and asserts its power, either for virtue or vice.”