ars
and griefs and gloomy memories, and suspicions about the future, and
distrust about the present. Thus we hear Ino, repenting for what she had
done, saying on the stage,

"Dear women, would that I could now inhabit
For the first time the house of Athamas,
Guiltless of any of my awful deeds!"[835]

It is likely that the soul of every wicked person will meditate in this
way, and consider how it can escape the memory of its ill-deeds, and lay
its conscience to sleep, and become pure, and live another life over
again from the beginning. For there is no confidence, or reality, or
continuance, or security, in what wickedness proposes to itself, unless
by Zeus we shall say that evil-doers are wise, but wherever the greedy
love of wealth or pleasure or violent envy dwells with hatred and
malignity, there will you also see and find stationed superstition, and
remissness for labour, and cowardice in respect to death, and sudden
caprice in the passions, and vain-glory and boasting. Those that censure
them frighten them, and they even fear those that praise them as wronged
by their deceit, and as most hostile to the bad because they readily
praise those they think good. For as in the case of ill-tempered steel
the hardness of vice is rotten, and its strength easily shattered. So
that in course of time, understanding their real selves, they are vexed
and disgusted with their past life and abhor it. For if a bad man who
restores property entrusted to his care, or becomes surety for a friend,
or contributes very generously and liberally to his country out of love
of glory or honour, at once repents and is sorry for what he has done
from the fickleness and changeableness of his mind; and if men applauded
in the theatres directly afterwards groan, their love of glory subsiding
into love of money; shall we suppose that those who sacrificed men to
tyrannies and conspiracies as Apollodorus did, or that those who robbed
their friends of money as Glaucus the son of Epicydes did,[836] never
repented, or loathed themselves, or regretted their past misdeeds? For
my part, if it is lawful to say so, I do not think evil-doers need any
god or man to punish them, for the marring and troubling of all their
life by vice is in itself adequate punishment."

Sec. XII. "But consider now whether I have not spoken too long." Then Timon
said, "Perhaps you have, considering what remains and the time it will
take. For now I am going to start the