Plut. Mor., Stoic Contradictions 40 — The contradictions of the Stoics

Plut. Mor., Stoic Contradictions 40 — The contradictions of the Stoics, Plutarch; served verbatim

Secondly, the conception of the Gods contains in it felicity, blessedness, and self-perfection. Wherefore also Euripides is commended for saying: For God, if truly God, does nothing want, And all these speeches are but poets’ cant. But Chrysippus in the places I have alleged says, that the World only is self-sufficient, because this alone has in itself all things it needs. What then follows from this, that the World alone is self-sufficient? That neither the Sun, Moon, nor any other of the Gods is self-sufficient, and not being self-sufficient, they cannot be happy or blessed.

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 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)