he said those souls suffered most piteously of all that, when they seemed to have escaped justice, were arrested again, and these were those whose crimes had been visited on their children or descendants. For whenever one of these latter happened to come up, he fell into a rage and cried out, and showed the marks of what he had suffered, and upbraided and pursued the soul of the parent, that wished to fly and hide himself but could not. For quickly did the ministers of torture pursue them, and hurry them back again to Justice,[876] wailing all the while on account of their fore-knowledge of what their punishment would be. And to some of them he said many of their posterity clung at once, and just like bees or bats stuck to them, and squeaked and gibbered[877] in their rage at the memory of what they had suffered owing to them. Last of all he saw the souls of those that were to come into the world a second time, forcibly moulded and transformed into various kinds of animals by artificers appointed for the very purpose with instruments and blows, who broke off all the limbs of some, and only wrenched off some of others, and polished others down or annihilated them altogether, to fit them for other habits and modes of life. Among them he saw the soul of Nero tortured in other ways, and pierced with red-hot nails. And the artificers having taken it in hand and converted it into the semblance of a Pindaric viper, which gets its way to life by gnawing through its mother's womb, a great light, he said, suddenly shone, and a voice came out of the light, ordering them to change it into something milder, so they devised of it the animal that croaks about lakes and marshes, for he had been punished sufficiently for his crimes, and now deserved some favour at the hands of the gods, for he had freed Greece, the noblest nation of his subjects and the best-beloved of the gods.[878] So much did Thespesius behold, but as he intended to return a horrible dread came upon him. For a woman, marvellous in appearance and size, took hold of him and said to him, "Come here that you may the better remember everything you have seen." And she was about to strike him with a red-hot iron pin, such as the encaustic painters use,[879] when another woman prevented her; and he was suddenly sucked up, as through[880] a pipe, by a strong and violent wind, and lit upon his own body, and woke up and found that he was close to his tomb. [806] In the temple at Delphi, the scene of the discussion, as we see later on, Sec.Sec. vii. xii. [807] Reading [Greek: edokei] with Reiske. [808] Euripides, "Orestes," 420. Cf. "Ion," 1615. [809] Thucydides, iii. 38. [810] See the circumstances in Pausanias, iv. 17 and 22. [811] Compare Petronius, "Satyricon," 44: "Dii pedes lanatos habent." Compare also "Tibullus," i. 9. 4: "Sera tamen tacitis Poena venit pedibus." [812] Reading [Greek: maliota] (for [Greek: molis]) with Wyttenbach.