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ὑπερβαίνοντες καὶ ἁμαρτάνοντες are subordinate to λισσόμενοι: “by praying when we transgress and sin, we shall persuade them,” etc. There is again a reference to λισσόμενοι ὅτε κέν τις ὑπερβήῃ καὶ ἁμάρτῃ quoted in 364 E. The position of the participles is justified by the allusion to this line.

-- . It was a common Greek belief that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children: see the passages cited by Nägelsbach Nachhom. Theol. pp. 34 ff. If we take Plato at his word, Adimantus represents this vicarious punishment as extending even to the other world.

παῖδες παίδων. Baiter conjectures < παῖδες> παῖδες παίδων, and so I formerly printed. But παῖδες παίδων means little more than ‘descendants’ (cf. Laws 927 B), and the text may stand. Similarly in Ruskin Modern Painters Ch. 1 “all those labours which men have given their lives and their sons' sons' lives to complete.”

φίλε -- λογιζόμενος . φίλε is the objector who urges ἀλλὰ γὰρπαίδων. In φήσει Plato recurs to the singular of 365 B λέγοι γὰρ ἂν κτλ. λογιζόμενος is not ‘reasoning,’ but ‘making his calculation,’ ‘calculos subducens’: such a man's morality is nothing but a balancing of profit and loss. Hermann's devotion to Paris A led him to conjecture ἀλλ᾽ ὠφελήσουσιν ἁγνιζομένους αἰ τελεταί rather than admit a simple case of omission arising from homoioteleuton: see cr. n. Vermehren proposes ἀλλ᾽ ὠφελήσουσιν αἱ νομιζόμεναι τελεταί (Plat. Stud. p. 90), but we should certainly follow Π here. See also Introd. § 5.

λύσιοι: ‘givers of absolution’: cf. 364 E. Certain Chthonian deities of the Orphic theology are meant, such as Hecate, Demeter, Dionysus λύσιος or λυσεύς, and above all Ζεὺς μειλίχιος. See Lobeck Aglaoph. p. 303.

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