A fresh perplexity as to the goodness and justice of God is here raised by Timon, who cannot see that it is in harmony with these divine qualities that the sins of the fathers should, as Euripides complained, be visited upon the children.[222] The punishment of the innocent is no compensation for the escape of the guilty. God, in this case, would be like Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, who ravaged Corcyra because the Homeric Corcyreans had given a welcome to Odysseus, and retorted the blinding of the mythical Cyclops upon the Ithacensians when they complained that his soldiers had looted their sheepfolds. “Where, indeed,” asks Timon, “is the reason and justice of this?”[223] Plutarch can only reply that, if the descendants of Hercules and Pindar are held in honour on account of the deeds of their progenitors, there is nothing illogical in the descendants of a wicked stock being punished. But he knows that he is on difficult ground, and repeats the Academic caution against too much dogmatism in these intricate matters. He falls back upon natural causes here, as if seeking to exonerate the Deity from direct responsibility for a striking injustice. An hereditary tendency to physical disease is possible, and may be transmitted from ancestors who lived far back in antiquity. Why should we marvel more at a cause operating through a long interval of time, than through a long interval of space? If Pericles died, and Thucydides fell sick, of a plague that originated in Arabia, why is it strange that the Delphians and Sybarites should be punished for the offences of their ancestors?[224] Moreover, a city is a continuous entity with an abiding personality; just as child, and boy, and man are not different persons, but are unified by the consciousness of identity;—nay, less marked changes take place in a city than in an individual. A man would know Athens again after thirty years of absence, but a far shorter period serves to obliterate the likenesses of our personal acquaintance. A city rejoices in the glory and splendour of its ancient days; it must also bear the burden of its ancient ignominies. And if a city has this enduring personality which makes it a responsible agent throughout its existence, the members of the same family are much more intimately connected. There would, therefore, have been less injustice inflicted had the posterity of Dionysius been punished by the Syracusans than was perpetrated by their ejection of his dead body from their territories. For the soul of Dionysius had left his body, but the sons of wicked fathers are often dominated by a good deal of their parents’ spirit.[225]