(no subject)

[timelets]

Reflecting on this episode, no one could fail to conclude that men’s souls are even more liable than their bodies to suffer from lesions and malignant tumours, that spread in them and grow in malignancy until they become utterly incurable. In the case of ulcers, even treatment may sometimes inflame them and make them spread more rapidly, while the effect of leaving them untreated, to do what they naturally do, is that they go on eating away at the surrounding flesh until nothing substantial remains.

Something similar happens in men’s souls too, where livid and putrid growths often make people more baleful and cruel than any beast. Kind and merciful treatment is taken by such people to amount to fraudulent scheming, and they become increasingly suspicious of and hostile towards their benefactors. But vengeful retaliation arouses in them such a rabid desire to win that there is nothing, however taboo or terrible, that they do not tolerate, and think the better of themselves for behaving with such boldness. In the end, they become so malignant and cruel that they might as well not be human.

--- Polybius, The Histories.