[70]
The state of the Athenians is
said to have been the wisest while it enjoyed the supremacy. Moreover of that state they
say that Solon was the wisest man, he who made the laws which they use even to this day.
When he was asked why he had appointed no punishment for him who killed his father, he
answered that he had not supposed that any one would do so. He is said to have done
wisely in establishing nothing about a crime which had up to that time never been
committed, lest he should seem not so much to forbid it as to put people in mind of it.
How much more wisely did our ancestors act! for as they understood that there was
nothing so holy that audacity did not sometimes violate it, they devised a singular
punishment for parricides in order that they whom nature herself had not been able to
retain in their duty, might be kept from crime by the enormity of the punishment. They
ordered them to be sown alive in a sack, and in that condition to be thrown into the
river.
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