Takdir Üzerine: İyilere Neden Kötülük Gelir

You have asked me, Lucilius, why, if a Providence rules the world, it still happens that many evils befall good men. This would be more fittingly answered in a coherent work designed to prove that a Providence does preside over the universe, and that God concerns himself with us. But since it is your wish that a part be severed from the whole, and that I refute a single objection while the main question is left untouched, I shall do so; the task is not difficult—I shall be pleading the cause of the gods. For the present purpose it is unnecessary to show that this mighty structure of the world does not endure without some one to guard it, and that the assembling and the separate flight of the stars above are not due to the workings of chance; that while bodies which owe their motion to accident often fall into disorder and quickly collide, this swift revolution of the heavens, being ruled by eternal law, goes on producing so many things on land and sea, so many brilliant lights shining in fixed array. This order does not belong to wandering matter, and things that came together by chance do not hang together with such artistry that the heavy weight of the earth sits motionless, watching the flight of the sky as it speeds around it, or that huge things are born from the tiniest seeds.