, though in some respects similar and like, are in others
dissimilar. For to cure one person of a disease does not cure another,
nor is one any better, when suffering from ophthalmia or fever, by
seeing another anointed or poulticed. But the punishments of evil-doers
are exhibited to everybody for this reason, that it is the function of
justice, when it is carried out as reason dictates, to check some by the
punishment of others. So that Bion did not see in what respect his
comparison touched our subject. For sometimes, when a man falls into a
grievous but not incurable malady, which afterwards by intemperance and
negligence ruins his constitution and kills him, is not his son, who is
not supposed to be suffering from the same malady but only to have a
predisposition for it, enjoined to a careful manner of living by his
medical man, or friend, or intelligent trainer in gymnastics, or honest
guardian, and recommended to abstain from fish and pastry, wine and
women, and to take medicine frequently, and to go in for training in the
gymnasiums, and so to dissipate and get rid of the small seeds of what
might be a serious malady, if he allowed it to come to a head? Do we not
indeed give advice of this kind to the children of diseased fathers or
mothers, bidding them take care and be cautious and not to neglect
themselves, but at once to arrest the first germ, of the malady, nipping
it in the bud while removable, and before it has got a firm footing in
the constitution?" "Certainly we do," said all the company. "We are not
then," I continued, "acting in a strange or ridiculous but in a
necessary and useful way, in arranging their exercise and food and
physic for the sons of epileptic or atrabilious or gouty people, not
when they are ill, but to prevent their becoming so. For the offspring
of a poor constitution does not require punishment, but it does require
medical treatment and care, and if any one stigmatizes this, because it
curtails pleasure and involves some self-denial and pain, as a
punishment inflicted by cowardice and timidity, we care not for his
opinion. Can it be right to tend and care for the body that has an
hereditary predisposition to some malady, and are we to neglect the
growth and spread in the young character of hereditary taint of vice,
and to dally with it, and wait till it be plainly mixed up with the
feelings, and, to use the language of Pindar, "produce malignant fruit
in the heart?"

Sec. XX. Or is