he matter
before the king, and the affair was inquired into, and Bessus punished."

Sec. IX. "These cases," I continued, "we cite supposing, as has been laid
down, that there is a deferring of punishment to the wicked; and, for
the rest, I think we ought to listen to Hesiod, who tells us--not like
Plato, who asserts that punishment is a condition that follows
crime--that it is contemporaneous with it, and grows with it from the
same source and root. For Hesiod says,

"Evil advice is worst to the adviser;"[827]

and,

"He who plots mischief 'gainst another brings
It first on his own pate."[828]

The cantharis is said to have in itself the antidote to its own sting,
but wickedness, creating its own pain and torment, pays the penalty of
its misdeeds not afterwards but at the time of its ill-doing. And as
every malefactor about to pay the penalty of his crime in his person
bears his cross, so vice fabricates for itself each of its own torments,
being the terrible author of its own misery in life, wherein in addition
to shame it has frequent fears and fierce passions and endless remorse
and anxiety. But some are just like children, who, seeing malefactors in
the theatres in golden tunics and purple robes with crowns on and
dancing, admire them and marvel at them, thinking them happy, till they
see them goaded and lashed and issuing fire from their gaudy but cheap
garments.[829] For most wicked people, though they have great households
and conspicuous offices and great power, are yet being secretly punished
before they are seen to be murdered or hurled down rocks, which is
rather the climax and end of their punishment than the punishment
itself. For as Plato tells us that Herodicus the Selymbrian having
fallen into consumption, an incurable disease, was the first of mankind
to mix exercise with the art of healing, and so prolonged his own life
and that of others suffering from the same disease, so those wicked
persons who seem to avoid immediate punishment, receive a longer and not
slower punishment, not later but extending over a wider period; for they
are not punished in their old age, but rather grow old in perpetual
punishment. I speak of course of long time as a human being, for to the
gods all the period of man's life is as nothing, and so to them 'now and
not thirty years ago' means no more than with us torturing or hanging a
malefactor in the evening instead of the morning would mean; especially
as man is