על יוסף ט״וOn Joseph 15
א׳
1[80] Having sufficiently discussed these matters, let us proceed to the next. The youth who had been brought into disgrace with his master by the false charges of a lovesick woman, charges which were the counterpart of those to which she was liable herself, was carried away to gaol without even any opportunity of making his defence. In the prison he displayed such a wealth of virtue that even the vilest of the inmates were astounded and overawed, and considered that they had found in him a consolation for misfortunes and a defence against future ills.
ב׳
2[81] Everyone knows how full of inhumanity and cruelty gaolers are; pitiless by nature and casehardened by practice, they are brutalized day by day towards savagery, because they never even by chance see or say or do any kindness, but only the extremes of violence and cruelty.
ג׳
3[82] Just as men of well-built physique, if they add to this athletic training, grow sinewy and gain irresistible strength and unequalled robustness, so, whenever any uncivilized and unsoftened nature adds practice to its harshness, it becomes doubly impervious and inaccessible to the kindly and humane emotion of pity. For,
ד׳
4[83] even as those who consort with the good are improved in character by the pleasure they take in their associates, so those who live with the bad take on some impression of their vice. Custom has a wonderful power of forcing everything into the likeness of nature.
ה׳
5[84] Gaolers then spend their days with footpads, thieves, burglars, men of violence and outrage, who commit rape, murder, adultery and sacrilege, and from each of these they imbibe and accumulate something of their villainy, out of which miscellaneous amalgam they produce a single body of evil, a fusion of every sort of pollution.