ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Stoic Contradictions 33 The contradictions of the Stoics, Plutarch; served verbatim
However this is but a small matter; but that which follows is greater. For there is no war amongst men without vice. But sometimes the love of pleasure, sometimes the love of money, and sometimes the love of glory and rule is the cause of it. If therefore God is the author of wars, he must be also of sins, provoking and perverting men. And yet himself says in his treatise of Judgment and his Second Book of the Gods, that it is no way rational to say that the Divinity is in any respect the cause of dishonesty. For as the law can in no way be the cause of transgression, so neither can the Gods of being impious; therefore neither is it rational that they should be the causes of any thing that is filthy. What therefore can be more filthy to men than the mutual killing of one another? —to which Chrysippus says that God gives beginnings. But some one perhaps will say, that he elsewhere praises Euripides for saying, If Gods do aught dishonest, they’re no Gods; and again, ’Tis a most easy thing t’ accuse the Gods; as if we were now doing any thing else than setting down such words and sentences of his as are repugnant to one another.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Plut. Mor., Stoic Contradictions 32 contents Plut. Mor., Stoic Contradictions 34 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Chrysippus — a candidate entry Euripides — a life

The contradictions of the Stoics, Plutarch — translated by E. Smith (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)