Concerning Such Whom God is Slow to Punish (13-15)

These, said I, are the preliminaries, which I would have you make use of against those choleric accusers and testy snarlers of whom I have given you warning. But now to take in hand once more, as it were, the first end of the bottom of thread, in this same dark discourse of the Gods, wherein there are so many windings and turnings and gloomy labyrinths, let us by degrees and with caution direct our steps to what is most likely and probable. For, even in those things which fall under our daily practice and management, we are many times at a loss to determine the undoubted and unquestioned truth. For example, what certain reason can be given for that custom amongst us, of ordering the children of parents that die of a consumption or a dropsy to sit with both their feet soaking in the water till the dead body be burnt? For people believe, that thereby the disease is prevented from becoming hereditary, and also that it is a charm to secure those children from it as long as they live. Again, what should be the reason, that if a goat take a piece of sea-holly in her mouth, the whole herd will stand still till the goat-herd come and take it out? Other hidden properties there are, which, by virtue of certain touches and transitions, pass from some bodies into others with incredible swiftness and often to incredible distances. But we are more apt to wonder at distances of time than those of space. And yet there is more reason to wonder, that Athens should be infected with an epidemic contagion taking its rise in Ethiopia, that Pericles should die and Thucydides be smitten with the infection, than that, upon the impiety of the Delphians and Sybarites, delayed vengeance should at length overtake their posterity. For these hidden powers and properties have their sacred connections and correspondences between their utmost endings and their first beginnings; of which although the causes be concealed from us, yet silently they bring to pass their proper effects.

Not but that there is a reason ready at hand for the public punishments showered down from heaven upon particular cities. For a city is a kind of entire thing and continued body, a certain sort of creature, never subject to the changes and alterations of age, nor varying through process of time from one thing to another, but always sympathizing and in unity with itself, and receiving the punishment or reward of whatever it does or has ever acted in common, so long as the community, which makes it a body and binds it together with the mutual bands of human benefit, preserves its unity. For he that goes about of one city to make many, and perhaps an infinite number, by distinguishing the intervals of time, seems to be like a person who would make several of one single man, because he is now grown elderly who before was a young man, and before that a mere stripling. Or rather, it resembles the method of disputing amongst the Epicharmians, the first authors of that manner of arguing called the increaser. For example: he that formerly ran in debt, although he never paid it, owes nothing now, as being become another man; and he that was invited yesterday to supper comes the next night an unbidden guest, for that he is quite another person. And indeed the distinctions of ages cause greater alterations in every one of us than commonly they do in cities. For he that has seen Athens may know it again thirty years after; the present manners, motions, pastimes, serious studies, their familiarities and marks of their displeasure, little or nothing differing from what formerly they were. But after a long absence there is many a man who, meeting his own familiar friend, hardly knows him again, by reason of the great alteration of his countenance and the change of his manners, which are so easily subject to the alterations of language, labor, and employment, all manner of accidents, and mutation of laws, that even they who are most usually conversant with him admire