cities. For any one would recognize Athens again if he had not seen it for thirty years, for the present habits and feelings of the people there, their business, amusements, likes and dislikes, are just what they were long ago; whereas a man's friend or acquaintance meeting him after some time would hardly recognize his appearance, for the change of character easily introduced by every thought and deed, feeling and custom, produce a wonderful strangeness and novelty in the same person. And yet a man is reckoned to be the same person from birth to death, and similarly we think it right for a city always remaining the same to be liable to reproach for the ill deeds of its former inhabitants, on the same principle as it enjoys its ancient glory and power; or shall we, without being aware of it, throw everything into Heraclitus' river, into which he says a person cannot step twice,40 since nature is ever changing and altering everything?"
§ xvi. "If then a city is one continuous entity, so of course is a race that starts from one beginning, that can trace back intimate union and similarity of faculties, for that which is begot is not, like some production of art, unlike the begetter, for it proceeds from him, and is not merely produced by him, so that it appropriately receives his share, whether that be honour or punishment. And if I should not seem to be trifling, I should say that the bronze statue of Cassander melted down by the Athenians, and the body of Dionysius thrown out of their territory by the Syracusans after his death, were treated more unjustly than punishing their posterity would have been. For there was none of the nature of Cassander in the statue, and the soul of Dionysius had left his dead body before this outrage, whereas Nysæus and Apollocrates,41 Antipater and Philip,42 and similarly other sons of wicked parents had innate in them a good deal of their fathers, and that no listless or inactive element, but one by which they lived and were nourished, and by which their ideas were controlled. Nor is it at all strange or absurd that some should have their fathers' characteristics. And to speak generally, as in surgery whatever is useful is also just, and that person would be