_The parents trip upon their offspring turned By Heav’n’s high hand._[241] If a good son be born of a bad sire, as a healthy child of a sickly parent, he is relieved from the penalty of race, saved by adoption out of vice. But the young man who throws back to the likeness of a tainted race ought, surely, to take to the debts on his inheritance, that is, to the punishment due to wickedness. Antigonus was not punished because of Demetrius, nor—to go back to the heroes of old—Phyleus for Augeas, nor Nestor [Sidenote: 563] for Neleus. These all came of bad sires, but were good. But where natural disposition has embraced and adopted the family failing, in those cases Justice pursues and visits to the uttermost the likeness in vice. For as warts and spots and moles of parents disappear in their children, but return on the persons of grandchildren; as again a Greek woman had borne a black child, and when charged with adultery, discovered that she was of Ethiopian parentage in the fourth degree; and as, yet again, out of the sons of Nisibeus, lately dead, who was reported to be related to the “Sown Men” of Thebes, one reproduced [Sidenote: B] the mark of a spear on his body—family likeness re-emerging from the depths, after such long intervals—, even so it is often the case that characteristics and affections of the soul are concealed and submerged in the early generations, but afterwards break out again in later individuals, and Nature restores the familiar type, for vice or for virtue.’