error was punished like a crime, and the more confident you had been
that you were right, the most severe was the probable penalty. But it
was part of Fate's malignity that, though the offender was punished,
though Justice took care that her own interests were not neglected nor
her own majesty slighted, even where a humane judge would have shrunk
from inflicting a disproportionate penalty,[11] yet for the wronged
one himself she provided no remedy; he suffered at his own risk. For
falseness in friendship, for scorn of poverty, for wanton cruelty and
torture, the wheel of fortune brought round some form of retribution,
but the sufferers were like pieces swept off the board, once and for
all.

And Fate seemed to take a positive pleasure in eluding anticipation
and constructing dramatic surprises. Through all Greek literature this
feeling shows itself; and later epigrams are full of incidents of this
sort, recounted and moralised over with the wearisomeness of a tract,
stories sometimes obviously invented with an eye to the moral,
sometimes merely silly, sometimes, though rarely, becoming
imaginative. The contrast of a youth without means to indulge its
appetites and an age without appetites to exhaust its means; the story
of the poor man who found treasure and the rich man who hanged
himself; the fable of the vine's revenge upon the goat, are typical
instances of the prosaic epigram.[12] The noble lines inscribed upon
the statue of Memnon at Thebes[13] are an example of the vivid
imaginative touch lighting up a sufficiently obvious theme for the
rhetorician. Under the walls of Troy, long ages past, the son of Dawn
had fallen under Achilles' terrible spear; yet now morning by morning
the goddess salutes her son and he makes answer, while Thetis is
childless in her sea-halls, and the dust of Achilles moulders silently
in the Trojan plain. The Horatian maxim of /nulli satis cautum/ recurs