WORKS.
29
The fool by suffering his experience buys;[1]
The penalty of folly makes him wise.
With crooked judgments, lo! the oath's dread God
Avenging runs, and tracks them where they trod:
Rough are the ways of Justice as the sea;
Dragg'd to and fro by men's corrupt decree:
Bribe-pamper'd men! whose hands perverting draw
The right aside, and warp the wrested law.
Though, while corruption on their sentence waits,
They thrust pale Justice from their haughty gates;
Invisible their steps the virgin treads,
And musters evils o'er their sinful heads.
She with the dark of air her form arrays
And walks in awful grief the city-ways:[2]
The penalty of folly makes him wise.
With crooked judgments, lo! the oath's dread God
Avenging runs, and tracks them where they trod:
Rough are the ways of Justice as the sea;
Dragg'd to and fro by men's corrupt decree:
Bribe-pamper'd men! whose hands perverting draw
The right aside, and warp the wrested law.
Though, while corruption on their sentence waits,
They thrust pale Justice from their haughty gates;
Invisible their steps the virgin treads,
And musters evils o'er their sinful heads.
She with the dark of air her form arrays
And walks in awful grief the city-ways:[2]
- ↑ The fool by suffering his experience buys.] Παυων δε τε νηπιος εγνω. This seems to have been a national proverb. Homer has a similar apophthegm: Il. 17. 33.Plato uses the same proverbial sentiment:Ευλαβηθῆναι και μη, κατα την παροιμιαν, ωσπερ νηπιον παθονται γνωναι.Beware lest, after the proverb, you get knowledge like the fool, by suffering.μηδ’ αντιος ισταθ’ εμειο
Πριν τι κακον παθεειν· ρεχθεν δε τε νηπιος εγνω.
Confront me not, lest some sore evil rise:
The fool must rue the act that makes him wise. - ↑ Walks in awful grief the city-ways.] Something similar is the prosopopæia of Wisdom in the Proverbs of Solomon, ch. viii.
