[482] The attitude of the later philosophers toward the notion that the gods are envious is fairly represented by Plato’s protest: “He [the Creator] is good, and no goodness can have any jealousy of anything” (Timæus, tr. Jowett, 29).
[483] “The dispensation which takes the aspect of divine envy to mortals might, it seems, from a higher point of view, be discerned as the very opposite; human vicissitude is the result of a divine love anxious to share the true blessedness which comes in the form of sorrow.”—Wedgwood, The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 112.
[484] Taylor, Ancient Ideals (1896), vol. i, p. 227.
[485] Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1891), vol. i, p. 129.
[486] Republic, tr. Jowett, x. 613.
[487] See James Adam, The Vitality of Platonism (1911), chap. v, “Ancient Greek Views of Suffering and Evil.”
[488] When we contrast with this Sophocles’ treatment of the same theme in Antigone we realize how great an advance during the interval the Greeks had made in humanitarian feeling.
[489] See Thucyd. iii. 53–59.
[490] The Spartan admiral Callicratides (the successor of Lysander, 406 B.C.) refused to sell his Greek prisoners of war as slaves, but he stood almost or quite alone in this. See Xen. Hellen. i. 6, 14.
[491] Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 235.