X. ‘Yet where are we to stop? Are we to say that prisoners [Sidenote: E]
awaiting execution are not under punishment until the axe shall fall?
Nor he who has drunk the hemlock, and is walking about while he waits to
feel the heaviness in the legs which precedes the chill and stiffness of
approaching insensibility? Yet we must say so, if we think that the last
moment of the punishment is the punishment, and leave out of account the
sufferings of the intervening time, the fears, and forebodings, and
movements of [Sidenote: F] remorse, in which every sinner is involved.
This would be like saying that a fish when he has swallowed the hook has
not been caught until he has been roasted by the cook, or at least
sliced up, before our eyes. Every man is in the grasp of Justice when he
has done a wrong, he has nibbled away the sweets of Injustice which are
the bait; but he has the hook of conscience sticking there and, as it
pays him out,[221]
_Like spear-struck thunny makes the ocean boil._
For the forwardness and the audacity of vice of which we hear [Sidenote:
555] are strong and ready till the crimes are committed, then passion
fails them like a dying breeze, and leaves them weak and abject, a prey
to every fear and superstition. Thus the dream of Clytaemnestra in
Stesichorus[222] is fashioned true to the reality of what happens. It
was like this:
_She thought a serpent came on her, his crest
Dabbled with gore, and, lo, from out it peered,
Child of the race of Pleisthenes, the King._
For phantoms of dreams, and visions of midday, and oracles, and
thunderbolts, and whatever has the appearance of being caused by a God,
bring storms and terrors upon those who are in such a mood. So it is
told that Apollodorus, in his sleep, saw [Sidenote: B] himself being
flayed by Scythians and then boiled, and that his heart murmured out of
the cauldron the words, “I am the cause of this to thee.” And, again, he
saw his daughters all on fire, and running around him with their bodies
burning. Then Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, a little before his death,
saw Aphrodite throwing blood at his face out of a sort of bowl. The
friends of Ptolemy “Thunderbolt”[223] beheld him called to justice by
Seleucus before a jury of vultures and wolves, and [Sidenote: C] dealing
out large helpings of flesh to his enemies. Pausanias had wickedly sent
for Cleonice at Byzantium, a maiden of free birth, that he might enjoy
her person in the night, then, as she approached, he killed her out of
some panic or suspicion; and he would often see her in his dreams,
saying to him:
_To judgement go; man’s lust works woe to man._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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