At length his eyes fell on his own father, coming up from an abyss, covered with scars and scourge-marks, stretching out his hands to him, and not permitted to keep silence, but forced by those presiding over his punishment to confess his blood-guiltiness in the case of certain guests of his who had money, and whom he had killed by poison. There, on earth, he had concealed the deed from all; but being here convicted, he was now enduring such sufferings as his son saw, and they were leading him where he would suffer still more. From amazement and dread, Thespesius dared not offer supplication or intercession for his father; and desiring to return and flee, he no longer saw his gentle and familiar guide. But, forced forward by certain fearful-looking beings, as if it were necessary for him to advance, he saw that the shades of those who had been openly wicked or who had been punished in this world were not so severely dealt with as others, nor in the same way, having been made aimlessly and slavishly vicious by the unreasoning and passion-driven element of the soul; while as for such as had lived all their days in secret vice, disguised under the pretence and reputation of virtue, others standing round them, as ministers of justice, compelled them with toil and pain to make the soul’s interior outermost, which they did, wriggling and twisting themselves in unnatural ways, as the sea-polyps, when they have swallowed the hook, turn themselves inside out. Some of them the tormentors flayed, and then laid them open, showing them inwardly ulcerated and scarred with the depravity in their minds and in the governing principles of their lives. Thespesius said that he saw other souls interwreathed like vipers, two, three, or more together, and devouring one another from remembered enmity and ill will for what they had suffered or done in life.