and take it that we too who have so far been silent adopt his arraignment. If, on the one hand, the doers paid the penalty [Sidenote: F] themselves, then there is no need to punish those who did no wrong, seeing that justice does not allow even the doers to be punished twice for the same offences. If, on the other, the Gods, out of indolence, have allowed the punishment to drop, as against the wicked, and then exact it late in the day from the guiltless, the set-off of tardiness against injustice is all wrong. You will remember the story of what happened to Aesop in this place; how he came with gold from Croesus, to sacrifice to the God magnificently, and make a distribution among the Delphians, four minae apiece. There was some angry difference, it appears, between him and the brotherhood; so he [Sidenote: 556] performed the sacrifice, but sent the money back to Sardis, judging the men unworthy of the bounty. They worked up a charge of sacrilege against him, thrust him down from the rock called Hyampeia, and killed him. Then, in his wrath at this, the God brought sterility on their land, and every form of strange disease; so that they went round the Assemblies of the Greeks asking by repeated proclamation that any who chose to come forward should punish them on Aesop’s behalf. In the third generation, Iadmon,[228] a Samian, came, no blood relation of Aesop, but a descendant of those who had bought him at Samos; and to him they paid certain penalties, and [Sidenote: B] were set free from their troubles. From that time the punishment of sacrilegious criminals was transferred to Nauplia from Hyampeia. Not even those most devoted to Alexander, among whom we reckon ourselves, commend him for throwing the city of Branchidae into ruins, and putting its inhabitants to the sword, because of the treacherous surrender by their forefathers of the temple at Miletus. Then Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, derided with open laughter the Corcyraeans who asked “why he plundered their island?” “Because, of course,” he said, “your fathers sheltered Ulysses.” And, in like manner, when the Ithacans complained of his soldiers taking their sheep, “Why, [Sidenote: C] your king”, he said, “came to us, and blinded the shepherd too!”[229] Now is it not even more monstrous of Apollo to destroy the Pheneatae[230] of the present day, by blocking the pit which took their water, and deluging all their land, because, a thousand years ago, as the story goes, Hercules snatched away the prophetic tripod and brought it to Pheneus? And what of his promise to the Sybarites of release from their troubles when they should have propitiated the wrath of the Leucadian Hera “by three destructions”? Again, it is not long since the [Sidenote: D] Locrians have ceased to send those maidens to Troy, _Who with no trailing robes, feet bared, as slaves, At early dawn must sweep Athene’s fane, No veils, though grievous eld were drawing near_,[231]