Between Heathenism and Christianity - College of Stoic Philosophers

The Delay of the Deity
offer supplications and intercessions for his father;
but wanting to turn about and flee, he no longer
saw his kind and familiar guide, and felt himself
urged forward by other beings horrible to look upon,
by whom he was compelled to pass among and be
hold the chastisements of others of his acquaint
ances who had openly led a wicked life, though the
shade of those who had been punished in
was less greviously tormented than the rest,
in the same way, as
the world
and not
they were merely condemned to
severe toil for the irrational nature and the pas
sions. On the other hand, those who had worn the
garb and assumed the name of virtue, but had in
secret led corrupt lives, were forced by other tor
mentors, with severe exertion and great pain, to turn
the inner parts of the soul outward; which action
being so contrary to their nature, they performed it
with wrigglings and contortions like those made by
the marine scolopendra when they have swallowed
the hook; some, their tormentors flayed and laid
open in order to show how corrupt and flecked they
were, and that their iniquity had its root in the
reason which is the noblest part of the soul.
Other
souls, he also said, he observed coiled about each other
by twos and threes and even more, gnawing one an
other on the score of old grudges for the deeds of
malice they had suffered or commited in life. And
he noticed further, some lakes alongside of each
other, one of which was of seething gold, another
of exceeding cold lead, and still another of hard iron;
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