Between Heathenism and Christianity - College of Stoic Philosophers

The Delay of the Deity
Sikyonians also the god declared explicitly that their
city needed a scourge for taking away from the
Kleonians the boy Teletias, crowned in the Pythian
games, as their own fellow=citizen, and putting him
to death. So, sure enough, when Orthagoras had be
come tyrant of Sikyon, and after him Myron and
Kleisthenes, he and his successors made an end
their lasciviousness; the Kleonians, however, not
ceiving such curative treatment, sank into insignifi
cance. You know that Homer somewhere says, From
him, a far baser father, was born a son better in all
manner of excellence ; yet that son of Kopreus per
formed no brilliant or even noteworthy exploit. But
the descendants of Sisyphus and of Autolycus and
of Phlegyas were conspicuous for the deeds and vir
of
re
tues of great kings. Pericles of Athens, also sprang
from a house on which rested a curse; while in Rome,
Pompey the Great was the son of Strabo whose
corpse the Roman people, in their hatred, cast out
and trampled under foot. Why should it then be
as the husbandman does not
thought strange, if, just
dig up the thorns lest he destroy the asparagus, and
the Lydians do not burn the shrub until they have
from it; so God should in like man
gathered the gum
ner delay to extirpate the evil arid corrupt root of an
illustrious and kingly house until the proper fruit has
grown
from it? It was better for the Phokians to
lose the countless herds of kine and horses belonging
to Iphitus, as also that much gold and silver should
be taken from Delphi, than not to
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have had Ulysses