ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Stoic Contradictions 35 The contradictions of the Stoics, Plutarch; served verbatim
And yet he says, that God punishes vice, and does many things for the chastising of the wicked. And in his Second Book of the Gods he says, that many adversities sometimes befall the good, not as they do the wicked, for punishment, but according to another dispensation, as it is in cities. And again in these words: First we are to understand of evils in like manner as has been said before: then, that these things are distributed according to the reason of Jupiter, whether for punishment, or according to some other dispensation, having in some sort respect to the universe. This therefore is indeed severe, that wickedness is both done and punished according to the reason of Jupiter. But he aggravates this contradiction in his Second Book of Nature, writing thus: Vice, in reference to grievous accidents, has a certain reason of its own. For it is also in some sort according to the reason of Nature, and, as I may so say, is not wholly useless in respect of the universe. For otherwise also there would not be any good. Thus does he reprehend those that dispute indifferently on both sides, who, out of a desire to say something wholly singular and more exquisite concerning every thing, affirms, that men do not unprofitably cut purses, calumniate, and play madmen, and that it is not unprofitable there should be unprofitable, hurtful, and unhappy persons. What manner of God then is Jupiter,— I mean Chrysippus’s Jupiter,—who punishes an act done neither willingly nor unprofitably? For vice is indeed, according to Chrysippus’s discourse, wholly reprehensible; but Jupiter is to be blamed, whether he has made vice which is an unprofitable thing, or, having made it not un profitable, punishes it.

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

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

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)