Plutarch on the Delay of the Divine JusticePlutarch
Philosophy
Plutarch on the Delay of the Divine Justice
Plutarch
Punishment -- Early works to 1800
[50:3] Pausanias, the Spartan, after a career of mingled glory and
shame, being detected in treasonable intrigues, took refuge in the
temple of Athene. When he was nearly exhausted by hunger the Ephori
dragged him out of the temple, and he died at its threshold. For their
sacrilege the Delphian oracle ordered that he should be re-interred on
the spot where he died, and that two brazen statues should be erected
in honor of the goddess in her temple at the public charge. Very
naturally, his ghost was supposed to haunt the sacred enclosure whence
he had been taken to die. See p. 28, n. 4.
[51:1] The clause, “than there is that they should be fully rendered in
this life,” has nothing in the original to correspond to it; but it is
necessary in order to convey the obvious meaning of the sentence.
[52:1] Probably, as it seems to me, not Bion the poet, but a
philosopher of that name,—a man of infamous character, an atheist
in his professed belief, and remarkable for pithy and epigrammatic
sayings, full of bitter humor and biting sarcasm, some of which are
still extant. Horace speaks of those who find pleasure in _Bioneis
sermonibus et sale nigro_.
[54:1] Or, “Is not God wiser than Hesiod?” With this interrogative
construction, which the sentence will bear, the sense is,—“Hesiod
teaches the hereditary transmission of character as a fact; God, still
more, traces these inherited traits before they appear to human view.”
According to the rendering that I have given, the sense is,—“The
transmission of character from father to son is recognized not only by
God in his providence, but equally by wise men, as, for instance, by
Hesiod.”
[57:1] Demetrius Poliorcetes, king of Macedonia, who was guilty of
great crimes, and in a not over-virtuous age was distinguished for
unbounded licentiousness. He died in captivity, having surrendered
to Seleucus, king of Syria, after expulsion from his own kingdom
and a series of consequent disasters. Antigonus, his son, was a man
of eminent virtue, had a diversified, but on the whole a prosperous
career, and died at the age of eighty, after a reign of nearly half a
century.
[57:2] Augeas, having made a contract with Hercules by which a tenth
part of his cattle were to be the price for cleansing his stables in
a day, refused to pay the price; and Hercules waged with him a war in
which he and all his sons but Phyleus perished. Hercules placed Phyleus
on his father’s throne, as king of the Epeians in Elis. The father’s
story is, of course, mythical, and the son hardly falls within the
domain of authentic history.
[57:3] The chief offence charged in Grecian myth against Neleus was his
refusing to perform expiatory rites for Hercules after he had killed
Iphitus, whose father was the friend of Neleus. Hercules, according to
some traditions, made war on Pylos, the kingdom of Neleus, and killed
him, with all his sons except Nestor.
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