shut up in life as in a prison from which there is no egress
or escape, and though doubtless during his life he has much feasting and
business and gifts and favours and amusement, yet, just like people
playing at dice or draughts in a prison, the rope is all the time
hanging over his head."[830]

Sec. X. "And indeed what prevents our asserting that people in prison under
sentence of death are not punished till their heads are cut off, or that
the person who has taken hemlock, and walks about till he feels it is
getting into his legs, suffers not at all till he is deprived of
sensation by the freezing and curdling of his blood, if we consider the
last moment of punishment all the punishment, and ignore all the
intermediate sufferings and fears and anxiety and remorse, the destiny
of every guilty wretch? That would be arguing that the fish that has
swallowed the hook is not caught, till we see it boiled by the cook or
sliced at table. For every wrong-doer is liable to punishment, and soon
swallows the pleasantness of his wrong-doing like a bait, while his
conscience still vexes and troubles him,

"As through the sea the impetuous tunny darts."

For the recklessness and audacity of vice is strong and rampant till the
crime is committed, but afterwards, when the passion subsides like a
storm, it becomes timid and dejected and a prey to fears and
superstitions. So that Stesichorus in his account of Clytaemnestra's
dream may have represented the facts and real state of the case, where
he says, "A dragon seemed to appear to her with its lofty head smeared
all over with blood, and out of it seemed to come king Orestes the
grandson of Plisthenes." For visions in dreams, and apparitions during
the day, and oracles, and lightning, and whatever is thought to come
from the deity, bring tempests of apprehension to the guilty. So they
say that one time Apollodorus in a dream saw himself flayed by the
Scythians, and then boiled, and that his heart out of the caldron spoke
to him in a low voice and said, "I am the cause of this;" and at another
time he dreamed that he saw his daughters running round him in a circle
all on fire and in flames. And Hipparchus the son of Pisistratus, a
little before his death, dreamt that Aphrodite threw some blood on his
face out of a certain phial. And the friends of Ptolemy Ceraunus dreamed
that he was summoned for trial by Seleucus, and that the judges were
vultures and wolves, who tore his flesh a