POLITEIA (Republic) by Plato - Complete text

Part 2 Page 4

Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.

That appears to me to be most true, he said.

Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of the folly of saying that two casks "lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil lots", and that "he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two / Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good", but that "he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill, / Him wild hunger drives o'er the beauteous earth". And again - "Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us."

And if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which was really the work of Pandarus, was brought about by Athene and Zeus, or that the strife and contention of the gods was instigated by Themis and Zeus, he shall not have our approval; neither will we allow our young men to hear the words of Aeschylus, that "God plants guilt among men when he desires utterly to destroy a house."

And if a poet writes of the sufferings of Niobe —the subject of the tragedy in which these iambic verses occur— or of the house of Pelops, or of the Trojan war or on any similar theme, either we must not permit him to say that these are the works of God, or if they are of God, he must devise some explanation of them such as we are seeking; he must say that God did what was just and right, and they were the better for being punished; but that those who are punished are miserable, and that God is the author of their misery —the poet is not to be permitted to say; though he may say that the wicked are miserable because they require to be punished, and are benefited by receiving punishment from God; but that God being good is the author of evil to any one is to be strenuously denied, and not to be said or sung or heard in verse or prose by any one whether old or young, in any well-ordered commonwealth. Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious.

I agree with you, he replied, and am ready to give my assent to the law.

Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform —that God is not the author of all things, but of good only.

That will do, he said.

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Plato : POLITEIA

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