The Father — child-making the most pious act, childlessness the great impiety
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Hermes — ἡ δὲ ἑτέρα προσηγορία ἐστὶν ἡ τοῦ πατρός, πάλιν διὰ τὸ ποιητικὸν πάντων. πατρὸς γὰρ τὸ ποιεῖν· διὸ καὶ μεγίστη ἐν τῷ βίῳ σπουδὴ καὶ εὐσεβεστάτη τοῖς εὖ φρονοῦσίν ἐστιν ἡ παιδοποιΐα· καὶ μέγιστον ἀτύχημα καὶ ἀσέβημά ἐστιν, ἄτεκνόν τινα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ἀπαλλαγῆναι· καὶ δίκην οὗτος δίδωσι μετὰ θάνατον τοῖς δαίμοσιν. ἡ δὲ τιμωρία ἐστὶν ἥδε· τὴν τοῦ ἀτέκνου ψυχὴν εἰς σῶμα καταδικασθῆναι μήτε ἀνδρὸς μήτε γυναικὸς φύσιν ἔχοντος, ὅπερ ἐστὶ κατηραμένον ὑπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου. τοιγαροῦν, ὦ Ἀσκληπιέ, μηδενὶ ὄντι ἀτέκνῳ συνησθῇς, τοὐναντίον δὲ ἐλέησον τὴν συμφοράν, ἐπιστάμενος οἵα αὐτὸν μένει τιμωρία. τοσαῦτά σοι καὶ τοιαῦτα λελέχθω, ὦ Ἀσκληπιέ, προγνωσία τις τῆς τῶν πάντων φύσεως.
And the other name is that of the Father, again because of his creative power over all; for a father's part is the making. Wherefore the greatest and most pious concern in life, for those who are right-minded, is child-making; and the greatest misfortune and impiety is for someone to depart from among men childless — and this one pays a penalty after death to the daemons. And the punishment is this: the soul of the childless is condemned into a body having the nature neither of man nor of woman, a thing accursed under the sun. Therefore, O Asclepius, do not congratulate anyone who is childless; but, on the contrary, pity his misfortune, knowing what sort of punishment awaits him. Let so much and such be said to you, O Asclepius, as a kind of foreknowledge of the nature of all things.
The treatise closes. God's other name is the Father, again because of his creative power over all — for making belongs to a father. Wherefore the greatest and most pious concern in life, for the right-minded, is the begetting of children; and the greatest misfortune and impiety is for someone to depart from among men childless — such a one pays a penalty after death to the daemons. And the punishment is this: the childless soul is condemned into a body having the nature neither of man nor of woman, a thing accursed under the sun. Therefore, Asclepius, do not congratulate the childless, but rather pity their misfortune, knowing what punishment awaits. Let so much and such be said to you, Asclepius, as a kind of foreknowledge of the nature of all things.
The treatise ends by naming God's second title and drawing an ethics straight out of theology. If God is the Good (II.16), he is equally the Father — 'because of the creative power of all (διὰ τὸ ποιητικὸν πάντων),' for 'a father's part is the making (πατρὸς… τὸ ποιεῖν).' The interlinear keeps ποιητικόν and ποιεῖν adjacent because the whole ethic hangs on that root: to beget is to imitate the God who makes. So παιδοποιΐα, child-making, becomes 'the greatest and most pious concern in life,' and its refusal 'the greatest misfortune and impiety' — ἀτύχημα and ἀσέβημα in one breath, mischance and sacrilege together.
Then the treatise's darkest and strangest turn: the childless soul is 'condemned (καταδικασθῆναι) after death into a body of neither man's nor woman's nature, accursed under the sun.' It is a doctrine of punitive reincarnation into a sterile, sexless frame — the failure to generate answered by rebirth into what cannot generate. A modern reader should meet this on its own terms: it reflects an ancient world in which lineage was a sacred duty and childlessness a spiritual catastrophe, and its harshness toward those 'of neither man's nor woman's nature' is of its time, not a truth the page endorses. Hermes' own closing counsel softens the severity in a very human direction — 'do not congratulate the childless, but pity (ἐλέησον) his misfortune': the right response to the doomed is compassion, not envy of their apparent ease. The last words frame the entire dialogue with modest grandeur: let all this stand 'as a kind of foreknowledge (προγνωσία τις) of the nature of all things' — the physics of motion and place, the plenist cosmos, the incorporeal God who is Good and Father, offered not as the whole of wisdom but as a foretaste of the science of everything that is. So the second treatise of the Corpus closes, having carried the reader from a question about how bodies move to the two names by which the Maker of all is rightly revered.
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