XV. Having now discussed this matter at sumcient length let us see what follows next. The young man, having been calumniated to his master by his master’s wife, who was in love with him, and who had invented against him the accusation to which she herself was liable, is not allowed to make any defence, but is led away to prison. And while he was in the prison he displayed such exceeding virtue that even the most abandoned persons there marvelled and were amazed, and looked upon it as an alleviation of their calamities to have found such a man as the averter of evil from them. And of the cruelty and inhumanity of which gaolers are full there is no one who is ignorant. For they are both by nature pitiless, and also by constant practice they are made more and more brutal, and increase in ferocity day by day, never seeing or saying, or doing any good thing, but committing only acts of violence and barbarity. For as men who have very strongly knit bodies, when besides their natural strength they add to it the practice of wrestlers, become stronger still, and acquire an irresistible power and a surpassing perfection of body, so in the same manner when an untameable and implacable nature adds habit to its natural ferocity, it becomes inaccessible to, and immovable by any kind of pity or any single respectable or humane feeling. And as those who associate with good men are improved in their disposition by such association, rejoicing in the pleasant and good persons with whom they are living; so also do they who are living with the wicked take the impression of their wicked ways; for habit is a very powerful thing to put a force upon nature, and to make it resemble itself: now keepers of prisons live among thieves and robbers, and housebreakers, and men of insolence and violence, and murderers, and adulterers, and plunderers of temples, from every one of whom they contract some wickedness, and collect a sort of contribution: and from their manifold mixture, make up one thoroughly confused and wholly polluted iniquity.