[Footnote 262: Plato, _Leges_, ix. 854 _sqq._ Plato makes an exception for those whose fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers have successively undergone the penalty of death: "Such persons the city shall send away with all their possessions to the city and country of their ancestors, retaining only and wholly their appointed lot" (_ibid._ ix. 856). But this enactment had no doubt a purely utilitarian foundation, the offspring of a thoroughly wicked family being considered a danger to the city.] [Footnote 263: _Digesta_, xlviii. 19. 26. _Cf._ _ibid._ xlviii. 19. 20.] [Footnote 264: Seneca, _De ira_, ii. 34. _Cf._ Cicero, _De officiis_, i. 25.] [Footnote 265: _Deuteronomy_, xxiv. 16. _Cf._ _2 Kings_ xiv. 6.] [Footnote 266: _Koran_, xvii. 35.] [Footnote 267: _Laws of Edmund_, ii. 1.] [Footnote 268: Nordström, _Bidrag till den svenska samhälls-författningens historia_, ii. 103, 334, 335, 399. Wilda, _op. cit._ p. 174.] [Footnote 269: Kovalewsky, _Coutume contemporaine_, p. 248. In Montenegro it was enjoined by Daniel I. (Post, _Anfänge des Staats- und Rechtsleben_, p. 181).] Passing to the vengeance of gods: according to the Atharva-Veda, Agni, who forgives sin committed through folly and averts Varuna's wrath, also frees from the consequence of a sin committed by a man's father or mother.[270] Theognis asks, "How, O king of immortals, is it just that whoso is aloof from unrighteous deeds, holding no transgression, nor sinful oath, but being righteous, should suffer what is not just?"[271] According to Bion, the deity, in punishing the children of the wicked for their fathers' crimes, is more ridiculous than a doctor administering a potion to a son or grandson for a father's or grandfather's disease.[272] The early Greek notion of an inherited curse was modified into the belief that the curse works through generations because the descendants each commit new acts of guilt.[273] The persons who prohibited the sons of such as had been proscribed by Sylla, from standing candidates for their fathers' honours, and from being admitted into the senate, were supposed to have been punished by the gods for this injustice:--"In process of time," says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, "a blameless punishment, the avenger of their crimes, pursued {72} them, by which they themselves were brought down from the greatest height of glory, to the lowest degree of obscurity; and none, even, of their race are now left, but women."[274] Among the Hebrews, Jeremiah and Ezekiel broke with the old notion of divine vengeance. The law of individual responsibility, which had already previously been laid down as a principle of human justice, was to be extended to the sphere of religion.[275] "Every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge."[276] "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall