On Rewards and Punishments (66-70)

Of this house therefore, as it increased and became very populous in process of time, well regulated cities were founded, being schools of wisdom, and justice, and holiness, in which also the means of acquiring all other virtue was investigated in a grave manner suited to the importance of the subject.

Therefore those rewards which were thus long since assigned to the good, both publicly and privately, have now been described though somewhat in outline, but sufficiently to enable anyone to comprehend with tolerable ease what has been omitted. We must now proceed in regular order to consider in turn the punishments appointed for the wicked, speaking of them in a somewhat general way since the time does not allow of my enumerating all the particular instances.

Now there was at the very beginning of the world when

What then could possibly have been inflicted upon him, which would have been an adequate punishment for him, who thus in one single action left no description of violence and impiety unperformed? Perhaps some one will say he should have been put to death at once; this is a human mode of reasoning, fit for one who does not consider the great tribunal of all; for men look upon death as the extreme limit of all punishments, but in the view of the divine tribunal it is scarcely the beginning of them.

Since then the action of this man was a novel one, it was necessary that a novel punishment should be devised for him; and what was it? That he should live continually dying, and that he should in a manner endure an undying and never ending death; for there are two kinds of death; the one that of being dead, which is either good or else a matter of indifference; the other that of dying, which is in every respect an evil; and the more protracted the dying the more intolerable the evil.