Plutarch: That God sanctions wars

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Greek and Roman writers on war and peace

Plutarch: Selections on war and peace

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Plutarch
Stoic Self-Contradictions
Translation by Harold Cherniss

(Chrysippus wrote) the following in the third book on the Gods about Zeus the Saviour and Sire, the father of Right, of Order, and of Peace: “as states, when they have become too populous, move the masses off into colonies or begin wars against someone, so god gives occasions for destruction to begin;” and he calls Euripides to witness and the rest who say that the Trojan war was brought about by the gods for the purpose of draining off the surplus population.

Never mind the other absurdities in these remarks…but observe that, while his epithets for god are always fair and humane, the deeds which he imputes to god are harsh, barbarous, and Galatian. For there is no resemblance to colonization in the destruction and annihilation of human beings to the extent wrought by the Trojan war and again by the Persian and Peloponnesian, unless the Stoics know of some cities colonized in Hades and beneath the earth. No, it is the Galatian Deiotarus that Chrysippus makes god resemble, Deiotarus who, since he had got many sons and wished to bequeath his realm and household to one, slaughtered all the rest just as if he had pruned and cut back the shoots of a vine in order that one, the one he had spared, might grow large and strong….

…no war springs up among men without vice but one breaks out from lust for pleasure, another from greed, and still another from a lust for glory or for power. Well then, if god induces wars, he induces vices too by inciting and perverting human beings….What, then, is more shameful for human beings than their destruction of one another…?