XIX. ‘Now Bion says that it would be more ridiculous [Sidenote: C] if God were to punish the sons of wicked men, than for a doctor to drug a descendant or a son for the disease of a grandfather or a father. But the cases are dissimilar in one respect, though closely alike in another. The treatment of one person does not relieve another from disease; no patient with eye disease or fever was ever the better for seeing an ointment or a plaster applied to another. The punishments of the wicked are exhibited to all, because the effect of the reasonable operation of justice is to restrain some through the punishment of others. But the point of resemblance between the parallel adduced [Sidenote: D] by Bion and our problem he failed to observe; it is this: when a man has fallen into a sickness which is bad but not incurable, and afterwards through intemperance and self-indulgence has surrendered his body to the malady and has died of it, then, if there be a son, not evidently diseased but only with a tendency to the same disease, a physician, or relative, or trainer, or a kind master who has learnt the state of the case, will put him upon a strict diet and remove made dishes and drinks and women, and use regular courses of physic, and harden his body by exercises, and will thus disperse and expel the symptoms, and [Sidenote: E] not allow the little seed of a great trouble to reach any size. Is not that the tone which we adopt, entreating sons of fathers or mothers with a tendency to diseases to pay attention to themselves, and to watch out, and not be careless, but to get rid at once of the first beginnings in the system, taking them in time while they are easy to move and loosely seated?’ ‘It is indeed’, they said. ‘Then we are doing nothing out of place, but a necessary act, one which is useful and not ludicrous, when we introduce the sons of epileptic or bilious or gouty sires to gymnastic exercise, diet, and drugs, not when they are [Sidenote: F] suffering from a disease but in order that they may not take it; for a body which proceeds out of a vitiated body deserves no punishment but rather medical care and watching; if any one in his cowardice and softness chooses to miscall that punishment, because it removes pleasures and applies the sharp prick of pain and trial, we have nothing more to say to him. Now then, does a body, the issue of a faulty body, deserve treatment and care, and yet we must endure to see the likeness of a kinsman’s [Sidenote: 562] vice springing up within a young character, and making its growth there, and to wait until it be spread over his system and manifest itself in his passions, _And show the evil fruit Of mind awry_, as Pindar[239] says? XX. ‘Or is the God in this to be less wise than Hesiod,[240] who exhorts and charges: _Ne’er after gloomy burial, of life Sow thou the seed, but fresh from heavenly feasts_,