VII. ‘So much for this. Now do you not think that some of the Greeks are right in copying the Egyptian law which enacts that a pregnant woman who has been condemned to death should be kept in custody until she has borne a child?’ ‘Certainly’, they said. I went on: ‘Next, suppose a person not pregnant with children, but able, if time be given, to bring into [Sidenote: E] the light of the sun some secret action or design, either by denouncing a hidden evil, or by becoming the promoter of a salutary policy or the inventor of some needful expedient, is it not the better course to let punishment wait on convenience rather than to inflict it too soon? It seems to me to be so.’ ‘And to us’, said Patrocleas. ‘And rightly,’ said I, ‘for consider that if Dionysius had paid the penalty at the beginning of his reign, no Greek settler would have been left in Sicily, because the Carthaginians would have devastated it. So neither Apollonia, nor Anactorium, nor the Leucadian peninsula would have been occupied by Greeks if Periander had [Sidenote: F] been punished without such a long interval. I think that Cassander also had a respite in order that Thebes might be re-established. Most of the foreigners who helped to seize this temple crossed over with Timoleon into Sicily; and when they had conquered the Carthaginians, and put an end to the tyrannies, met deservedly miserable deaths themselves. Surely Heaven uses some bad men to punish others, like executioners, and afterwards crushes them, and this has been the case, I think, [Sidenote: 553] with most tyrants. For as the gall of the hyaena, the refuse of the seal, and other products of disgusting animals, have their specific use in disease, so there are some who need the sharp tooth of chastisement; on whom the God inflicts a bitter and implacable tyrant, or a harsh rough ruler, and only removes this torment when he has relieved and purged their ailment. Such a medicine was Phalaris to the Agrigentines, and Marius to the Romans. To the Sicyonians the God declared in plain terms that their state needed beadles with whips, because they had taken by force from the men of Cleonae a boy named Teletias, who was to be crowned at the Pythian games, as being their own citizen, and torn him in pieces. The Sicyonians got [Sidenote: B] Orthagoras for a tyrant, and after him Myron and Cleisthenes, who put an end to their bad ways, while the Cleonaeans, who never found such a remedy, have come to nothing. Listen to Homer,[215] who says somewhere _So sprung from meaner sire a nobler son, Skilled in all art and excellence._