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Sallustius or Sallust (Σαλούστιος) was a 4th-century Latin writer, a friend of the Roman Emperor Julian. He wrote the treatise On the Gods and the Cosmos, which owes much to the work of Iamblichus of Chalcis, who synthesized Platonism with Pythagoreanism and theurgy, as well as to Julian's own philosophical writings.
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One may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden.
Those who wish to hear about the Gods should have been well guided from childhood, and not habituated to foolish beliefs.
To say that God turns away from the evil is like saying that the sun hides himself from the blind.
May these explanations of the myths find favour in the eyes of the Gods themselves and the souls of those who wrote the myths.
The divine itself is without needs, and the worship is paid for our own benefit. The providence of the Gods reaches everywhere and needs only some congruity for its reception.
Of the Gods some are of the world, cosmic, and some above the world, hypercosmic. … Of the hypercosmic Gods some create essence, some mind, and some soul.
There is a certain force, less primary than being but more primary than the soul, which draws its existence from being and completes the soul as the sun completes the eyes.
If punishment followed instantly upon sin, men would act justly from fear and have no virtue.
The cosmos itself must of necessity be indestructible and uncreated.
The Gods being good and making all things, there is no positive evil, it only comes by absence of good; just as darkness itself does not exist, but only comes about by absence of light.
It is the natural duty of souls to do their work in the body; are we to suppose that when once they leave the body they spend all eternity in idleness?
Everything made is made either by art or by a physical process or according to some power.
The doctrine of virtue and vice depends on that of the soul.
All this care for the world, we must believe, is taken by the Gods without any act of will or labor.
But to attribute men's acts of injustice and lust to fate, is to make ourselves good and the Gods bad.
Just as it happens that the Sun, which is good for all, may be injurious to persons with ophthalmia or fever.
Since god is intellectual, and all intellect returns into itself, this myth expresses in allegory the essence of god.
Everything that is destroyed is either destroyed by itself or by something else.
After this inexpressible power come the orders of the Gods.
Everything that is created is subject to destruction.
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