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 thin