By what logic are descendants liable for their ancestors? Do they not inherit their estates, and the gold and silver so often accumulated from unjust sources? That's sufficient cause, indeed the main cause for their liability. Their tribulations are shared with their ancestors' shades, who suffer along with them.
It is right for descendants to pay ancestral penalties, for it is into just such families that people worthy of their sufferings are born. Methodically, justly, and transcendently are all things woven together by Providence, divine Nature, and the gods guided by Fate! For there is a certain unity to be observed within a family. Among the seeds and principles of growth [of any type of plant] there is a commonality, and it is analogous to the commonality of souls in families like these, and the ills and blessings they incur. If, when we went to bed, we were to forget our lives of the previous day, then the life of one person—which might go on for seventy or eighty years—would seem to us to contain many lives. In families like these, there is a similar kind of coherence that is beyond our view, though it is certainly evident to the gods whom Fate guides, and to the spirits assigned by Chance to each of these families. And just as doctors don't rush into surgery to treat the malady threatening an individual patient's life, but wait until that patient is ready to go through it, neither do the spirits that oversee one family—quite the way Herodotus narrates that the penalty of the Lydian [tyrant Gyges] was expiated by his descendants five generations later.
Accursed deeds of long ago: To remedy a recent sin is relatively easy, but those committed long ago are harder to wash away, and cannot be cleansed without theurgic action. This too may be observed in medical practice, where maladies of recent origin are easier to recover from when they've only just struck, as long as the patient attends proactively to their care. Left to fester over time, the evil sets into the system like an indurated scar, becoming as it were a second nature. It is the same is with unjust deeds. A remorseful wrongdoer, who makes amends straightaway to the wronged party, thereby dissolves the unjust deed and becomes free of liability for the penalty. And when someone undoes the wrong committed by their father—by giving back a field he seized, let's say—not only is that person's liability removed, but the soul of the one who seized it is uplifted and relieved. And theurgic action is also helpful in such a case.
But take the case of a man who keeps a field he seized from those who cleared it. If it the property stays in his family, and his descendants continue to use it, the injustice becomes less obvious and harder to redress, and over time the evil is naturalized, so to speak. That is why the gods often issue prophetic commands [for those who petition the oracle] to go to this or that place and apologize to a certain person previously unknown to them, and to make amends to that person in order to recover their health, and put an end to their sufferings and pursuit by Furies. The gods issue this kind of prophecy not to abrogate justice, but in order to effect just outcomes and rectify our ways of life.
Theurgy, then, wherever it arises, restores the mad to health, and through them it saves many others. [The way it works is] like what they say about the man who was cutting down an oak tree, and when a nymph begged him to stop, he spared not the oak but cut it down, and was thereafter subjected to the Furies' retribution and afflicted with want of sustenance. Anything that fell into his hands was taken away, until an initiate told him to set up an altar to the same nymph, and with that his disasters came to an end. Another man, a matricide, was told by the god to find a land other than land that exists, and go live there. When he put together that this signified an island newly risen from the stream, he went and made his home upon it, and his castigation by the Furies came to an end.
From the Commentary on Plato's Phaedrus (244de) by
Hermeias of Alexandria
