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Now then, if a city be one entire and continued
body, the same opinion is to be conceived of a race of
men, depending upon one and the same beginning, and
carrying along with it a certain power and communion of
qualities; in regard that what is begotten cannot be thought
to be severed from that which begets it, like a piece of
workmanship from the artificer; the one being begotten
of the person, the other framed by him. So that what is
engendered is a part of the original from whence it sprung,
whether meriting honor or deserving punishment. So that,
were it not that I might be thought to be too sportive in a
serious discourse, I would affirm, that the Athenians were
more unjust to the statue of Cassander when they caused
it to be melted down and defaced, and that the Syracusans
were more rigorous to the dead carcass of Dionysius when
they cast it forth of their own confines, than if they had
punished their posterity; for that the statue did no way
partake of the substance of Cassander, and the soul of
Dionysius was absolutely departed from the body deceased.
Whereas Nisaeus, Apollocrates, Antipater, Philip, and
several others descended from wicked parents, still retained
the most principal part of those who begot them, not lazily
[p. 168]
and sluggishly dormant, but that very part by which they
live, are nourished, act and move, and become rational and
sensible creatures. Neither is there any thing of absurdity,
if, being the offspring of such parents, they should retain
many of their bad qualities. In short, therefore, I affirm
that, as it is in the practice of physic, that whatever is
wholesome and profitable is likewise just, and as he would
be accounted ridiculous that should aver it to be an act of
injustice to cauterize the thumb for the cure of the sciatica,
or when the liver is imposthumated, to scarify the belly, or
when the hoofs of laboring oxen are over tender, to anoint
the tips of their horns; in the same manner is he to be
laughed at who seeks for any other justice in the punishment of vice than the cure and reformation of the offender,
and who is angry when medicine is applied to some parts
for the cure of others, as when a chirurgeon opens a vein
to give his patient ease upon an inflammation of the eyes.
For such a one seems to look no farther than what he
reaches by his senses, forgetting that a schoolmaster, by
chastising one, admonishes all the rest of his scholars, and
that a general, condemning only one in ten, reduces all the
rest to obedience. And thus there is not only a cure and
amendment of one part of the body by another; but many
times the very soul itself is inclined to vice or reformation,
by the lewdness or virtue of another, and indeed much
more readily than one body is affected by another. For, in
the case of the body, as it seems natural, the same affections and the same changes must always occur; while the
soul, being agitated by fancy and imagination, becomes
better or worse, as it is either daring and confident or
timorous and mistrustful.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 4.
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