XV. ‘Not but that the public visitations of cities by the wrath of Heaven can be readily accounted for on the score of [Sidenote: 559] justice. A city is a thing one and continuous, like an animal, which does not cease to be itself in the changes due to growth, nor become, as time goes on, different from what it was; it is always consentaneous and at one with itself, and awaits all the consequences, whether censure or gratitude, of what it does or did, so long as the association, which makes it one and complex, preserves its unity. To divide it, according to time, into many cities, or, rather, into an infinite number of them, is like making many men out of one, because he is now elderly, was formerly younger, and, still further back, was a boy. Or [Sidenote: B] rather, the whole idea is like those tricks of Epicharmus out of which the “Increasing Fallacy” of the Sophists sprang. The man who formerly received the loan does not own it now, for he has become a different person. The man who was asked to dinner yesterday, comes an unbidden guest to-day, for he is some one else. Yet the stages of growth produce greater variations in each one of ourselves than they do in cities as wholes. Any one who had seen Athens thirty years ago would recognize it to-day; manners, movements, amusements, business, popular gratitude, and resentments, all quite as of old. Whereas a man would hardly be recognized in figure by friend or relation who should meet him after an interval, while the changes in character so easily produced by anything—a word, an [Sidenote: C] exertion, a feeling, a law—produce an effect of strangeness and novelty even to one always in his company. Yet he is spoken of as one man from birth to the end; and we insist that a city, which remains the same in exactly the same sense, is liable for the reproaches incurred by ancestors, by the same title as it claims their reputation and power. Otherwise we shall have everything, before we know it, in the river of Heraclitus,[237] which he says a man cannot enter twice, because Nature disturbs and alters all things in her own changes.