So that what should hinder me from asserting, that
they who are condemned to die and shut up in prison are
not truly punished till the executioner has chopped off
their heads, or that he who has drunk hemlock, and then
walks about and stays till a heaviness seizes his limbs, has
suffered no punishment before the extinction of his natural
heat and the coagulation of his blood deprive him of his
senses,—that is to say, if we deem the last moment of the
punishment only to be the punishment, and omit the commotions, terrors, apprehensions, and embitterments of repentance,
[p. 156]
with which every malefactor and all wicked men
are teased upon the committing of any heinous crime?
But this is to deny the fish to be taken that has swallowed the hook, before we see it boiled and cut into pieces
by the cook; for every offender is within the gripes of the
law, so soon as he has committed the crime and has swallowed the sweet bait of injustice, while his conscience
within, tearing and gnawing upon his vitals, allows him no
rest:
Like the swift tunny, frighted from his prey,
Rolling and plunging in the angered sea.
For the daring rashness and precipitate boldness of iniquity
continue violent and active till the fact be perpetrated;
but then the passion, like a surceasing tempest, growing
slack and weak, surrenders itself to superstitious fears and
terrors. So that Stesichorus may seem to have composed
the dream of Clytemnestra, to set forth the event and truth
of things:
Then seemed a dragon to draw near,
With mattery blood all on his head besmeared;
Therefrom the king Plisthenides appeared.
For visions in dreams, noon-day apparitions, oracles, descents into hell, and whatever objects else which may be
thought to be transmitted from heaven, raise continual
tempests and horrors in the very souls of the guilty. Thus
it is reported that Apollodorus in a dream beheld himself
flayed by the Scythians and then boiled, and that his heart,
speaking to him out of the kettle, uttered these words, I
am the cause thou sufferest all this. And another time,
that he saw his daughters run about him, their bodies
burning and all in a flame. Hipparchus also, the son of
Pisistratus, had a dream, that the Goddess Venus out of a
certain phial flung blood in his face. The favorites of
Ptolemy, surnamed the Thunderer, dreamed that they saw
their master cited to the judgment-seat by Seleucus, where
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wolves and vultures were his judges, and then distributing
great quantities of flesh among his enemies. Pausanias,
in the heat of his lust, sent for Cleonice, a free-born virgin
of Byzantium, with an intention to have enjoyed her all
night; but when she came, out of a strange sort of jealousy and perturbation for which he could give no reason,
he stabbed her. This murder was attended with frightful
visions; insomuch that his repose in the night was not
only interrupted with the appearance of her shape, but
still he thought he heard her uttering these lines:
To judgment-seat approach thou near, I say;
Wrong dealing is to men most hurtful aye.
After this the apparition still haunting him, he sailed to
the oracle of the dead in Heraclea, and by propitiations,
charms, and dirges, called up the ghost of the damsel;
which, appearing before him, told him in few words, that
he should be free from all his affrights and molestations
upon his return to Lacedaemon; where he was no sooner
arrived, but he died.
