e for a
haven and place of refuge, may rise to the difficulty with greater
confidence basing itself on probability. Consider then first that,
according to Plato, god, making himself openly a pattern of all things
good, concedes human virtue, which is in some sort a resemblance to
himself, to those who are able to follow him. For all nature, being in
disorder, got the principle of change and became order[817] by a
resemblance to and participation in the nature and virtue of the deity.
The same Plato also tells us that nature put eyesight into us, in order
that the soul by beholding and admiring the heavenly bodies might
accustom itself to welcome and love harmony and order, and might hate
disorderly and roving propensities, and avoid aimless reliance on
chance, as the parent of all vice and error. For man can enjoy no
greater blessing from god than to attain to virtue by the earnest
imitation of the noblest qualities of the divine nature. And so he
punishes the wicked leisurely and long after, not being afraid of error
or after repentance through punishing too hastily, but to take away from
us that eager and brutish thirst for revenge, and to teach us that we
are not to retaliate on those that have offended us in anger, and when
the soul is most inflamed and distorted with passion and almost beside
itself for rage, like people satisfying fierce thirst or hunger, but to
imitate the mildness and long-suffering of the deity, and to avenge
ourselves in an orderly and decent manner, only when we have taken
counsel with time long enough to give us the least possible likelihood
of after repentance. For it is a smaller evil, as Socrates said, to
drink dirty water when excessively thirsty, than, when one's mind is
disturbed and full of rage and fury, before it is settled and becomes
pure, to glut our revenge on the person of a relation and kinsman. For
it is not the punishment that follows as closely as possible upon
wrong-doing, as Thucydides said,[818] but that which is more remote,
that observes decorum. For as Melanthius says of anger,

"Fell things it does when it the mind unsettles,"[819]

so also reason acts with justice and moderation, when it banishes rage
and passion. So also people are made milder by the example of other men,
as when they hear that Plato, when he held his stick over his slave to
correct him, waited some time, as he himself has told us, to compose his
anger; and that Archytas, having learned of some