so also reason acts with justice and moderation, when it banishes rage and passion. So also people are made milder by the example of other men, as when they hear that Plato, when he held his stick over his slave to correct him, waited some time, as he himself has told us, to compose his anger; and that Archytas, having learned of some wrong or disorderly action on the part of some of his farm labourers, knowing that at the time he was in a very great rage and highly incensed at them, did nothing to them, but merely departed, saying, "You may thank your stars that I am in a rage with you." If then the remembrance of the words and recorded acts of men abates the fierceness and intensity of our rage, much more likely is it that we (observing that the deity, though without either fear or repentance in any case, yet puts off his punishments and defers them for some time) shall be reserved in our views about such matters, and shall think that mildness and long-suffering which the god exhibits a divine part of virtue, reforming a few by speedy punishment, but benefiting and correcting many by a tardy one.
§ vi. Let us consider in the second place that punishments inflicted by men for offences regard only retaliation, and, when the offender is punished, stop and go no further; so that they seem to follow offences yelping at them like a dog, and closely pursuing at their heels as it were. But it is likely that the deity would look at the state of any guilty soul that he intended to punish, if haply it might turn and repent, and would give12 time for reformation to all whose vice was not absolute and incurable. For knowing how great a share of virtue souls come into the world with, deriving it from him, and how strong and lasting is their nobility of nature, and how it breaks out into vice against its natural disposition through the corruption of bad habits and companions, and afterwards in some cases reforms itself, and recovers its proper position, he does not inflict punishment on all persons alike; but the incorrigible he at once removes from life and cuts off, since it is altogether injurious to others, but most of all to a man's own self, to live in perpetual vice, whereas to those who seem to have fallen into wrong-doing, rather from ignorance