The contradictions of the Stoics (33)

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;[*]