Plato on the Problem of Evil

Plato anticipates the contemporary effort (a series of footnotes?) to argue that the existence of God is consistent with the existence of evil since God is not the cause of evil.

Consider this inference by Socrates in Republic, Book II:

Socrates: God is always to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given.

Adeimantus: Right.

S: And is he not truly good? And must he not be represented as such?

A: Certainly

…

S: 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.