XVI. ‘But if a city is a thing one and continuous, I take it that a family also depends from a single origin which assures [Sidenote: D] a certain pervading force of association. An offspring is never separated from its begetter, as is a piece of man’s handicraft; it has been made out of him, not by him; thus it has in itself some permanent portion of him, and whether it be punished or honoured, receives what is its due. If it were not that I might seem to trifle, I would say that graver injustice was done to the statue of Cassander when it was melted down by the Athenians, and to the corpse of Dionysius when it was thrust out beyond the frontier by the Syracusans, than to the descendants of those men in the punishments which they received. For there is nothing of the nature of Cassander in the statue, and the soul [Sidenote: E] of Dionysius has quitted the corpse; whereas in Nisaeus, and Apollocrates, and Antipater and Philip, and similarly in the other sons of bad men, the determining part of their parents is inborn in them, and is there; it is not quiescent or inactive, since by it they live and are nourished, are directed, and think. There is nothing strange or remarkable if, being of them, they have what was theirs. In a word, as in Medicine, what is [Sidenote: F] serviceable is also just. It is ridiculous to talk of the injustice of cauterizing the thumb when the pain is in the hip, or scarifying the region of the stomach for a tumour inside the liver, or of oiling the ends of the horns of cattle, if there is softening of the hoofs. So it is with punishments; to think that there is any other justice than what heals the mischief, or to be indignant if the treatment be applied to one set of persons through another set (as in opening a vein to relieve weak eyes) is to see nothing beyond the range of sense, to fail [Sidenote: 560] to remember that a schoolmaster who chastises one boy teaches a lesson to many boys, and that a general who executes one man in ten, brings all to their duty. And thus not only one part through another part, but also soul through soul receives certain dispositions, be they of deterioration or amendment, in a truer sense than body through body. In the case of body, the affection arising must be the same, and the alteration produced must be the same; whereas soul is led by its own imaginings in the way of assurance or fear, and so becomes permanently worse or else better.’