In the 1998 film Fallen, one of the characters intones an ominous motto:  “What goes around, really goes around.”  This is a more emphatic version of the old adage, “What comes around, goes around.”  In both cases the meaning is the same:  he who spreads iniquity and evil, will eventually be himself visited by iniquities and evils of even greater magnitude.

I am convinced of the truth of this saying.  It may not always be fulfilled, or seem to be fulfilled; but statistical aberrations do not negate its essential truth.  The Roman military historian Frontinus (IV.7.17) relates the following anecdote:

Paches the Athenian guaranteed that if the enemy were to lay down their steel, they would not be harmed.  When all of them submitted to these conditions, he ordered them to be put to death, since they had steel clasps on their cloaks.

Who was this treacherous Athenian commander Paches, who saw fit to employ a shabby pretext to murder unarmed men?  He was an Athenian general of the Peloponnesian War who captured Mytilene and Lesbos in 427 B.C.; we find him mentioned in Thucydides (III.18—48), Plutarch (Aristides 26 and Nicias 6), and by a few lesser-known writers.  Thucydides identifies his father as a man named Epicurus.  His conduct during the successful Mytilene campaign was characterized by both perfidy and cruelty.  At the city of Notium, located on the Anatolian coast, he invited an opposing leader named Hippias to a truce meeting, and guaranteed his safe passage. 

Paches also told Hippias that if the negotiations did not lead to a resolution of the issues between them, then he would be permitted to return to his own men.  When the unfortunate Hippias arrived at the meeting, Paches had him immediately arrested, and then ordered his men to launch a surprise attack on Hippias’s garrison.  Hippias himself was dragged to a secluded place and murdered by being shot with arrows.  Another incident during the campaign gives a very clear picture of Paches’s character.  After the surrender of Mytilene, he fixed his attentions on two beautiful women of the city, named Hellanis and Lamaxis.  That they were married proved to be no impediment to his lustful designs, for he had both husbands murdered.   

Yet Fortune would eventually make her own rendez-vous with Paches.  It was an inevitability.  Word of his conduct found its way to Athens, and he was recalled to the city to face a tribunal.  It is a pity that a detailed account of the trial and his testimony has not survived.  We do know, however, his ultimate fate.  It is the fate of all such men, who cannot bear to be called to account for their murderous cruelties.  As he faced his judges, he pulled out an edged weapon he had concealed, and killed himself.          

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Be sure to take a look at the new, annotated translation of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations.