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Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the

many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of

most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human

life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to

God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere,

and not in him.

That appears to me to be most true, he said.

Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is

guilty of the folly of saying that two casks

'Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the

other of evil lots,'

and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two

'Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;'

but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,

'Him wild hunger drives o'er the beauteous earth.'

And again-

'Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.'