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Not but that there is a reason ready at hand for the
public punishments showered down from heaven upon
particular cities. For a city is a kind of entire thing and
continued body, a certain sort of creature, never subject to
the changes and alterations of age, nor varying through
process of time from one thing to another, but always
sympathizing and in unity with itself, and receiving the
punishment or reward of whatever it does or has ever
acted in common, so long as the community, which makes
it a body and binds it together with the mutual bands of
human benefit, preserves its unity. For he that goes about
of one city to make many, and perhaps an infinite number,
by distinguishing the intervals of time, seems to be like a
person who would make several of one single man, because
he is now grown elderly who before was a young man, and
before that a mere stripling. Or rather, it resembles the
method of disputing amongst the Epicharmians, the first
authors of that manner of arguing called the increaser.
For example: he that formerly ran in debt, although he
never paid it, owes nothing now, as being become another
man; and he that was invited yesterday to supper comes
the next night an unbidden guest, for that he is quite
another person. And indeed the distinctions of ages cause
greater alterations in every one of us than commonly they
do in cities. For he that has seen Athens may know it
again thirty years after; the present manners, motions,
pastimes, serious studies, their familiarities and marks of
their displeasure, little or nothing differing from what formerly they were. But after a long absence there is many
a man who, meeting his own familiar friend, hardly knows
him again, by reason of the great alteration of his countenance and the change of his manners, which are so easily
subject to the alterations of language, labor, and employment, all manner of accidents, and mutation of laws, that
even they who are most usually conversant with him admire
[p. 167]
to see the strangeness and novelty of the change; and
yet the man is reputed still to be the same from his birth
to his decease. In the same manner does a city still remain the same; and for that reason we think it but justice,
that a city should as well be obnoxious to the blame and
reproach of its ancient inhabitants, as participate the glory
of their former puissance and renown; else we shall throw
every thing before we know it into the river of Heraclitus,
into which (he says) no one can step twice,1 since Nature
by her changes is ever altering and transforming all things.
1 Referring to the doctrine of Heraclitus, that all Nature is moving onward, and nothing is the same two successive moments. ‘You cannot step twice into the same river,’ he says. See Plat. Cratyl. p. 402 A. (G.)
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