על השכר והעונש כ״גOn Rewards and Punishments 23
א׳
1[134] So greatly will the lack of necessaries prevail that dismissing all thought of them they will betake themselves to feeding on their own kind, not only on strangers outside their family but on their nearest and dearest. The father will lay his hands on the flesh of his son, the mother on the entrails of her daughter, brothers on brothers, children on parents, and always the weaker will supply an evil and accursed meal to the stronger. The story of Thyestes will be child’s play compared with the monstrous calamities which those times of terror will bring about.
ב׳
2[135] For apart from all else, just as the prosperous desire life to enjoy their blessings, so too these wretches will have firmly implanted in them a great longing for survival to experience miseries measureless and ceaseless all beyond hope of cure. For it would be a comparatively small matter in their desperation to cut short their afflictions by death, a course often taken by those who have a little sanity left. But these sufferers in their infatuation will wish to prolong their life to the utmost, and their appetite for supreme misery is never satisfied.
ג׳
3[136] Such are the natural consequences of what appears to be the lightest of the calamities promised, destitution, when it comes as a visitation of divine justice. For cold and thirst and want of food are hard to bear but may on occasions be most earnestly desired, if we feel that they will only entail undelayed annihilation, but when they linger and waste both soul and body they are bound to produce marvels of suffering worse even than those which, doubtless because they are so intensely painful, are represented on the tragic stage.
