§ 1. The dialogue opens with comments on the cavils against the Divine Providence by a person who is supposed to have just departed.

2. The alleged encouragement to the guilty by the delay of punishment, while the sufferers by the guilt of others are disheartened by failing to see the wrong-doers duly punished.

3. The guilty themselves, it is said, do not recognize punishment when it comes late, but think it mere misfortune.

4. Plutarch answers the objections to the course of Providence. In the first place, man must not be too confident of his ability to pass judgment on things divine. There are many things in human legislation undoubtedly reasonable, yet with no obvious reason. How much more in the administration of the universe by the Supreme Being!

5. God by the delay of punishment gives man the example of forbearance, and rebukes his yielding to the first impulses of anger and of a vindictive temper.

6. God has reference, in the delay of punishment, to the possible reformation of the guilty, and to the services which, when reformed, they may render to their country or their race. Instances cited.

7. The wicked often have their punishment postponed till after they have rendered some important service in which they are essential agents, and sometimes that, before their own punishment, they may serve as executioners for other guilty persons or communities.

8. There is frequently a peculiar timeliness and appropriateness in delayed punishment.

9. Punishment is delayed only in appearance, but commences when the guilt is incurred, so that it seems slow because it is long.

10. Instances of punishment in visions, apprehensions, and inward wretchedness, while there was no outward infliction of penalty.

11. There is really no need that punishment be inflicted; guilt is in the consciousness of the guilty its own adequate punishment.

12. Objection is made by one of the interlocutors to the justice of punishing children or posterity for the guilt of fathers or ancestors, and he heaps up an incongruous collection of cases in which he mingles confusedly the action of the Divine Providence and that of human caprice or malignity.

13. In answer to the objection, Plutarch first adduces as a precisely parallel order of things, with which no one finds fault, that by which children or posterity derive enduring benefit and honor from a parent’s or ancestor’s virtues and services.

14. There are alike in outward and in human nature occult and subtle transmissions of qualities and properties, both in time and in space. Those in space are so familiar that they excite no wonder; those in time, though less liable to attract notice, are no more wonderful.

15. A city has a continuous life, a definite and permanent character, and an individual unity, so that its moral responsibility may long outlast the lives of those who first contracted a specific form of guilt.

16. The same is to be said of a family or a race; and, moreover, the punishment for inherited guilt may often have a curative, or even a preventive efficacy, so that children or posterity may refrain from guilt because the ancestral penalty falls upon them before they become guilty.

17. The immortality of the soul asserted, on the ground that God would not have deemed a race doomed to perish after a brief earthly life worth rewarding or punishing.

18. Punishments in a future state of being are out of sight, and are liable to be disbelieved. Therefore it is necessary, in order to deter men from guilt, that there should be visible punishments in this life.

19. The remedial efficacy of the penal consequences of parental or ancestral guilt reaffirmed, and illustrated by analogies in the treatment of disease.

20. God often punishes latent and potential vice, visible only to Omniscience.

21. If a child has no taint of a father’s vices, he remains unpunished. But moral qualities, equally with physical traits, often lapse in the first generation, and reappear in the second or third, and even later.

22. The story of Thespesius, who—apparently killed, but really in a trance, in consequence of a fall—went into the infernal regions, beheld the punishments there inflicted, and came back to the body and its life, converted from a profligate into a man of pre-eminent virtue and excellence.