[Greek: all' egêrasan kolazomenoi].[1] The conclusion which Plutarch arrives at by considering this aspect of the case is that "there is no necessity for any god, or any man, to inflict punishment on evildoers, but it is sufficient that their whole life is tormented and destroyed by their sense of their impiety;" and that the time cannot but come when the glamour and the tinselled glory of successful crime will be torn away, and nothing shall remain but the base and dreadful memory to torture awakening conscience with the pangs of an unquenchable remorse.[2]
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.[3] 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?"[4] Plutarch
- ↑ 554 D. Literally, "they were not punished when they grew old, but grew old in punishment."
- ↑ 555 E, F.
- ↑ Stobæus: Anthologion, Tit. 79, 15.
- ↑ 557 D. Cf. the sarcasm of the Academic Cotta in the De Natura Deorum, iii. 38: "Dicitis eam vim Deorum esse ut, etiam si quis morte pœnas sceleris effugerit, expetantur eæ pœnæ a liberis, a nepotibus, a posteris. O miram æquitatem Deorum!"
