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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

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Book I Chapter 3

37 Sophocles, Ajax

Justice’s golden eye keeps watch, and repays the unjust.¹³²

38 Hesiod, Theogony

And she bore the Fates and the Dooms, ruthless in punishment, who pursue the transgressions of men and gods; never do the goddesses cease from their terrible anger until they pay back bitter retribution to whoever does wrong.¹³³

39 Euripides, Polyidus

No lawbreaker has security against the gods.

40 ⟨Euripides⟩

Do you think the gods are forgiving when someone wishes, by an oath, to escape death, imprisonment, or violent harm from enemies, or shares a home with his children’s killers? Then either they have less understanding than mortals, or they put leniency before justice.¹³⁴

41 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Justice alone cannot be entreated by human beings.

42 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Do not make your song too childish; for the god, though standing far away, hears from close at hand.

43 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Whoever speaks evil while thinking well groans in silence.¹³⁵

44 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

The divine brings the wicked to justice.

45 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Great is the gods’ power over human beings; foolish are all who hide what is just beneath an unjust way of life. For great is the eye of divine powers: to them wrongdoers pay requital for their evils.¹³⁶

46 ⟨Homer⟩

And Zeus, angry with those men, rages who violently give crooked judgments in the assembly.¹³⁷

47 ⟨Euripides, Archelaus⟩

Do you think you will ever defeat the gods’ wise designs, and that Justice has moved far away from mortals? She is close at hand: unseen, she sees, and knows whom she must punish. But you do not know when she will suddenly arrive and destroy the wicked.¹³⁸

48a ⟨Sophocles⟩

If you have done terrible things, you must also suffer terrible things.¹³⁹

48b ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

And the divine light of Justice shone forth.

49 Demosthenes

One cannot acquire lasting power by injustice, perjury, and lies. Such things hold up for a single occasion and a short time; they may even flourish greatly in the hopes they raise. But in time they are exposed and collapse upon themselves.¹⁴⁰

50 From the Recollections of Epictetus

“But I see,” someone says, “good and honorable people perishing from hunger and cold.” And do you not see those who are neither good nor honorable perishing from luxury, pretension, and lack of refinement? “But it is shameful to be fed by someone else.” And who, poor fellow, nourishes himself from his own resources, other than the cosmos?

Anyone who complains against providence that the wicked go unpunished because they are strong and rich is doing much the same as if, after they had lost their eyes, he said they had not been punished because their nails were sound. For I maintain that virtue surpasses vice far more than eyes surpass nails.¹⁴¹

51 ⟨Herodotus⟩

On the night before the Panathenaea, Hipparchus dreamed that a tall and handsome man stood beside him and spoke these enigmatic verses:

“Endure, lion, unbearable suffering with an enduring heart; no human being who does wrong will fail to pay retribution.”¹⁴²

52 Hermes

For a very great divine spirit has been appointed, my child, revolving at the center of the universe and surveying everything human beings do on earth. ⟨For⟩ just as providence and necessity have been appointed over the divine order, so Justice has been appointed over human beings, carrying out the same functions as they do. The former maintains the order of beings as divine, neither willing nor able to err: for the divine cannot go astray, and so it remains without error. Justice, however, has been appointed to punish those who do wrong on earth.¹⁴³

For the human race is ⟨liable to error⟩, being mortal and constituted of bad matter. It is especially those without a capacity to behold God who stumble, and over them Justice chiefly holds sway. They are subject to fate through the operations of coming-to-be, and to Justice through their wrongdoings in life.¹⁴⁴

53 Hierocles (1)

Hierocles, from How One Should Deal with the Gods.

We must also understand this about the gods: they are unchanging and firm in their judgments, so that they never depart from what they decided at the outset. Constancy and steadfastness are themselves among the virtues; it is reasonable that these should be present above all in the gods, giving settled stability to what they have once decided. It follows that the punishments which the divine has judged fit to impose on particular people are unlikely to be remitted.

For it is also easy to reason that, if the gods change their judgments and release unpunished someone they decided to punish, they ⟨would⟩ neither govern the affairs of the cosmos well and justly nor be able to give a reasonable account of their change of mind.¹⁴⁵

53 Hierocles (2)

Poetry seems to say such things offhand and with no real object in view:

“And ⟨indeed them⟩, with sacrifices and gentle prayers, with libation and the savor of burnt offerings, human beings turn aside by entreaty, whenever someone transgresses and does wrong”;¹⁴⁶

and the line:

“Even the gods themselves can be turned,”

and, in general, anything said in a similar way.

54 In the same work

Yet this too must not be passed over: although the gods are not responsible for evils, they do attach some things of that sort to certain people and subject those who deserve it to bodily losses and losses of external goods. They do this not out of malice, or because they think they ought deliberately to harm a human being, but by way of punishment.¹⁴⁷

For plagues and droughts, excessive rains and earthquakes, and everything of that kind mostly occur through other, more natural causes, but sometimes also through the gods, when it is time for the transgressions of many to be punished publicly and collectively. In the same way the gods sometimes employ bodily losses and losses of external goods against an individual: ⟨for⟩ his punishment, but for the correction and better choice of others.

55a Plato, Laws

God, as the ancient saying has it, holds the beginning, the end, and the middle of all things, and brings his course straight to its fulfillment as he makes his circuit according to nature. Justice always follows him, punishing those who fall away from divine law. Anyone who is to prosper holds fast to her and follows humbly [and in orderly conduct].¹⁴⁸

But someone lifted up by boastfulness, elated by wealth, honors, or bodily beauty, along with youth and folly, burns in his soul with insolence. Thinking he needs neither ruler nor guide, but is himself fit to lead others, he is left deserted by God. Once deserted, he takes others like himself along and runs riot, throwing everything into confusion. Many thought him someone of importance; but before long, after undergoing a punishment that Justice cannot be blamed for, he has utterly overturned himself, his household, and his city.

132.The heading “Ajax” and the fragment reference are retained as printed in the base edition; no line-location in the surviving play is supplied there.

133.Theogony 217 and 220–222, as identified in the printed heading. The mother is Night in the poem’s surrounding genealogy. “Dooms” renders Kēres, personified powers of death and destruction; the excerpt’s selection skips the intervening lines.

134.The argument is compressed and textually disputed. The line about sharing a home with one’s children’s killers was suspected by Hense of being an interpolation, but Wachsmuth retains it. The English follows the printed question and its ensuing alternatives without reconstructing a lost dramatic exchange.

135.The printed phrase “evil while thinking well” is a conjectural repair of the manuscript wording. Its precise situation is no longer clear. The English preserves the contrast rather than supplying an imagined speaker or motive.

136.The relative ois, “to whom,” is taken with the divine powers; “wrongdoers” makes explicit the human subject understood with tinousi, “pay.” The ending describes their payment of requital for their evils, while the opening stresses the gods’ power.

137.Iliad 16.386–387, in the adapted wording printed here. “Crooked” judgments are rulings that bend what is right.

138.The first three lines are identified as belonging to Euripides’s Archelaus by the parallel cited in Wachsmuth’s apparatus. The English preserves the abrupt change from Justice’s knowledge to the addressee’s ignorance.

139.Wachsmuth supplies Sophocles from Theophilus, but explains that the earlier assignment of this line to Ajax arose from a displaced heading. The facing heading therefore names only the poet.

140.Demosthenes, Second Olynthiac 10, as identified in the printed reference. The passage concerns the instability of power obtained through wrongdoing.

141.The argument treats moral degradation itself as a greater loss than bodily or financial harm. “Lack of refinement” renders apeirokalia, literally inexperience of what is fine. Wachsmuth flags kakias, “vice,” in the last sentence as corrupt, while retaining it; the English follows that printed comparison.

142.Herodotus V.56. The Panathenaea was an Athenian festival. The quotation is a dream-message in the historian’s narrative; the repeated language of endurance is preserved.

143.The feminine description of the “divine spirit” introduces Justice. The reference to “the former” follows the Greek’s singular pronoun after its mention of both providence and necessity; their joint ordering function is the contrast with human wrongdoing.

144.Wachsmuth supplies hamartōlon, “liable to error” or “sinful.” The final distinction assigns different functions to fate and Justice. “Bad matter” is the fragment’s own characterization of humanity’s material constitution.

145.The title is translated from the Greek heading. The argument makes divine consistency the ground for the certainty of punishment. The following poetic quotations are cited by Hierocles as statements he rejects, not as supporting authorities.

146.Iliad 9.499–501 and 497, as quoted here. The supplied pronoun “them” refers to the gods. The phrase kat’ oudenos in the prose is difficult; “with no real object in view” takes it to deny a valid application to the gods, rather than silently supplying a new argument.

147.Hierocles distinguishes evil from bodily and external losses, which may serve as punishment; disasters, he says, mostly have natural causes. This gives no test for interpreting an individual case. The supplied te and tōn are absorbed into “bodily losses and losses of external goods”; es is marked as “for.”

148.Laws IV, 715e–716b. Wachsmuth brackets “and in orderly conduct” as wording rejected by the editor Schanz. The translation preserves the brackets. Eudaimonēsein, rendered “prosper,” concerns living well, not merely acquiring wealth, which the next sentence treats as a possible occasion of arrogance.