od men also judge the gods
according to virtue and strength; so that they do no more aid men than
they are aided by them.

Now Chrysippus neither professes himself nor any one of his disciples
and teachers to be virtuous. What then do they think of others, but
those things which they say,--that they are all mad fools, impious,
transgressors of laws, and in the most degree of misery and unhappiness?
And yet they say that our affairs, though we act thus miserably, are
governed by the providence of the gods. Now if the gods, changing their
minds, should desire to hurt, afflict, overthrow, and quite crush us,
they could not put us in a worse condition than we already are; as
Chrysippus demonstrates that life can admit only one degree either of
misery or of unhappiness; so that if it had a voice, it would pronounce
these words of Hercules:

I am so full of miseries, there is
No place to stow them in.
(Euripides, "Hercules Furens," 1245.)

Now who can imagine any assertions more repugnant to one another than
chat of Chrysippus concerning the gods and that concerning men; when he
says, that the gods do in the best manner possible provide for men, and
yet men are in the worst condition imaginable?

Some of the Pythagoreans blame him for having in his book of Justice
written concerning cocks, that they are usefully procreated, because
they awaken us from our sleep, hunt out scorpions, and animate us to
battle, breeding in us a certain emulation to show courage; and yet that
we must eat them, lest the number of chickens should be greater than
were expedient. But he so derides those who blame him for this, that he
has written thus concerning Jupiter the Saviour and Creator, the father
of justice, equity, and peace, in his Third Book of the Gods: "As cities
overcharged with too great a number of citizens send forth colonies into
other places and make war upon some, so does God give the beginnings of
corruption." And he brings in Euripides for a witness, with others who
say that the Trojan war was caused by the gods, to exhaust the multitude
of men.

But letting pass their other absurdities (for our design is not
to inquire what they have said amiss, but only what they have said
dissonantly to themselves), consider how he always attributes to
the gods specious and kind appellations, but at the same time cruel,
barbarous, and Galatian deeds. For those so great slaughters and
earnages, as were the productions of