Kitap 2
379
And I replied, Adeimantus, we are not poets,The poet, like the rhetorician (Politicus 304 D), is a ministerial agent of the royal or political art. So virtually Aristotle, Politics 1336 b. you and I at present, but founders of a state. And to founders it pertains to know the patterns on which poets must compose their fables and from which their poems must not be allowed to deviate; but the founders are not required themselves to compose fables. Right, he said; but this very thing—the patterns or norms of right speech about the gods, what would they be? Something like this, I said. The true quality of God we must always surely attribute to him whether we compose in epic, melic, or tragic verse. We must. And is not God of courseThe γε implies that God is good ex vi termini. good in reality and always to be spoken ofIt is charcteristic of Plato to distinguish the fact and the desirability of proclaiming it. The argument proceeds by the minute links which tempt to parody. Below τὸ ἀγαθόν, followed by οὐδ’ ἄρα . . . ὁ θεός, is in itself a refutation of the ontological identification in Plato of God and the Idea of Good. But the essential goodness of God is a commonplace of liberal and philosophical theology, from the Stoics to Whittier’s hymn, The Eternal Goodness. as such? Certainly. But further, no good thing is harmful, is it? I think not. Can what is not harmful harm? By no means. Can that which does not harm do any evil? Not that either. But that which does no evil would not be cause of any evil either? How could it? Once more, is the good beneficent? Yes. It is the cause, then, of welfare? Yes. Then the good is not the cause of all things, but of things that are well it the cause—of things that are ill it is blameless. Entirely so, he said. Neither, then, could God, said I, since he is good, be, as the multitude say, the cause of all things, but for mankind he is the cause of few things, but of many things not the cause.Anticipates the proclamation of the prophet in the final myth, 617 E: αἰτία ἑλομένου· θεὸς ἀναίτιος. The idea, elaborated in Cleanthes’ hymn to Zeus, may be traced back to the speech of the Homeric Zeus in Odyssey i. 33 ἐξ ἡμεῶν γάπ φασι κάκ’ ἔμμεναι. St. Thomas distinguishes: Deus est auctor mali quod est poena, non autem mali quod est culpa. For good things are far fewerA pessimistic commoplace more emphasized in the Laws than in the Republic. Cf. Laws 896 E, where the Manichean hypothesis of an evil world-soul is suggested. with us than evil, and for the good we must assume no other cause than God, but the cause of evil we must look for in other things and not in God. What you say seems to me most true, he replied. Then, said I, we must not accept from Homer or any other poet the folly of such error as this about the gods when he says Two urns stand on the floor of the palace of Zeus and are filled with Dooms he allots, one of blessings, the other of gifts that are evil, Hom. Il. 24.527-8 and to whomsoever Zeus gives of both commingled— Now upon evil he chances and now again good is his portion, Hom. Il. 24.530 but the man for whom he does not blend the lots, but to whom he gives unmixed evil— Hunger devouring drives him, a wanderer over the wide world, Hom. Il. 24.532 nor will we tolerate the saying that Zeus is dispenser alike of good and of evil to mortals. The line is not found in Homer, nor does Plato explicitly say that it is. Zeus is dispenser of war in Hom. Il. 4.84.
