himself and does not cause doom to hang over his dear progeny later, while
another is not overtaken by justice; before that, ruthless death settles on his
eyelids, bringing doom.’’ This possibility of deferred retribution gives some
hope to those who are thwarted in their revenges (Theognis 337–50; Lysias
6.19–20). Andocides’ going about his business unpunished is seen indeed as
evidence of his very brazenness, his life in advance of punishment full of ‘‘terrors
and dangers’’; similarly a fragment of Lysias portrays a man guilty of sacrilege as
having been singled out – because of the extraordinary nature of his crimes – for
a living death of near-endless illness (fr. 9.4 Albini [Against Cinesias],apud
Athenaeus 551a–552b). Even theanticipationof ultimate punishment is con-
sidered enough of an interim punishment by Clearchus in Xenophon’sAnabasis,
so certain is the fact of retribution (2.5.7–8).
Delay in punishment can, of course, extend beyond the lifetime of the perpet-
rator of the crime. The punishment of children in place of their parents is
something about which a wide range of ancient authors – at one level at least –
apparently felt no qualms (contrast Theognis 731–52). As the orator Lycurgus
proclaims, in the context of a famous passage on the importance of the oath, ‘‘If
the perjured man does not suffer himself, at least his children and all his family are
overtaken by dire misfortunes’’ (Leocrates79; cf. Demosthenes 57.27). As this last
passage suggests, however, for one’s punishment to fall on one’s children is a kind
of longstop rather than the preferred outcome (cf. Isocrates,Peace120). Punish-
ment may also be inflicted on the perpetrator himself after his death. The idea that
unjust or impious actions in life might be, indeedwillbe, punished after death is
common not only in Platonic texts – in the descriptions of the different routes to
Hades of pure and impure souls in thePhaedo(107d–108c), for example, or of the
judgment of those near death in theGorgias(523a–524b) – but also in forensic
oratory (Demosthenes 25.53, 24.104) or in the words of the semi-philosophical
Isocrates (Isocrates,Peace33–4; cf. Isocrates,Antidosis282): ‘‘those who live a
life of piety and justice pass their days in security for the present and have sweeter
hopes for all eternity [tou sumpantos aio ̄nos]’’; the immediate pleasure of those
who take something that belongs to others is like the pleasure of an animal that has
been ‘lured by a bait’: Isocrates,Peace33–4; cf.Antidosis282).
The gods or the divine are not always just; people do not always get what they deserve.
While misfortunes are frequently seen as evidence of divine justice, they can also
be seen as the work of a capricious and essentially amoral divine; human fortune
(in general seen as coming from the gods) is by definition changeable and
unpredictable. This is an extraordinarily common idea over a wide period,
reflected in a set of related aphorisms or gnomic pronouncements repeated
throughout Greek literature: that one can never know the outcome of any matter
until the end; that human knowledge is never certain; that the gods raise men up
and cast them down; that fortune passes from one man to another; that human
fortune is always mixed (or more darkly that suffering is inevitable, or that death
comes to all men (so leveling their worldly prosperity) (for references see, e.g.,
Harrison 2000:38–9). Such expressions might seem to modern readers to be
mere empty proverbs (indeed they were seen as well-worn lines by contempor-
aries: Andocides 2.5–6; Herodotus 7.51.3); they remained in currency, however,
throughout the classical period.378 Thomas Harrison