Book 1

While there are many matters in philosophy that even now have by no means been adequately explained, the inquiry into the nature of the gods is one of peculiar difficulty and obscurity, as you, Brutus, are very well aware — an inquiry which is at once the noblest of all for the understanding of the mind and indispensable for the regulation of religion. On this subject the opinions of the most learned men are so various and so much at odds with one another that this very fact ought to be taken as strong evidence that the starting-point of philosophy lies in our want of knowledge, and that the Academics have shown good sense in withholding assent from things uncertain. For what is more shameful than rashness, and what is so reckless and so unworthy of the gravity and steadfastness of the wise man as either to hold a false opinion, or to defend without the least hesitation something that has not been grasped and understood with sufficient certainty?

In the present inquiry, for instance, most thinkers have affirmed the existence of the gods — which is most likely to be true, and to which we are all led by the guidance of Nature herself; but Protagoras declared himself in doubt, while Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene held that there are no gods at all. As for those who have affirmed that the gods exist, they differ so widely and disagree so much that it would be an endless task to enumerate their opinions. Much is said about the shapes of the gods, about their dwelling-places and abodes, and about the manner of their life, and on these points the philosophers wrangle in the bitterest disagreement. But the question that most truly contains the heart of the matter is this: whether the gods do nothing, set nothing in motion, and stand wholly aloof from all care and administration of things; or whether, on the contrary, all things were made and ordained by them from the beginning and are ruled and moved by them for endless time. On this point above all there is great disagreement, and unless it is decided men must inevitably remain in the deepest error and in ignorance of matters of the highest importance.

For there are, and have been, philosophers who hold that the gods take no thought whatever for human affairs. If their opinion is true, what room is there for piety, for holiness, for religion? All these are duties to be rendered to the divine power of the gods purely and reverently only on the supposition that the gods take notice of them, and that something has been bestowed upon the human race by the immortal gods. But if the gods can neither help us nor wish to, if they take no care for us at all and pay no heed to what we do, and if nothing can flow from them into the life of men — then what reason is there to offer the immortal gods any worship, honours, or prayers? Piety, like the other virtues, cannot exist in a mere show of feigned pretence; and with piety holiness and religion must likewise be done away, and once these are gone there follows a confounding of life and great confusion.

And I am inclined to think that, with piety toward the gods removed, good faith too, and the fellowship of the human race, and that most excellent of virtues, justice, are taken away. There are, however, other philosophers, and these great and noble men, who hold that the whole universe is administered and governed by the mind and reason of the gods; and not only this, but that the gods also take counsel and provide for the life of men. For they think that the fruits of the earth and all else that the earth brings forth, the seasons, the changing weather, and the alterations of the sky by which all that the earth produces is ripened and matured, are bestowed by the immortal gods upon the human race; and they gather many proofs, which will be set forth in these books, of a kind that make it seem the immortal gods themselves fashioned these things for the use of men. Against them Carneades argued at such length as to rouse men of any energy to a desire for discovering the truth.

For there is no subject on which not only the unlearned but even the learned disagree so much; and since their opinions are so various and so much at variance with one another, it may well be that none of them is true, while it is certainly impossible that more than one should be true. Now in this matter we may both appease the well-meaning who reproach us and confute the envious who revile us, so that the latter may repent of their censure while the former may rejoice to have learned something. For those who admonish in a friendly spirit must be instructed, while those who attack in enmity must be repelled.

I notice that much has been said about the books I have lately published in quick succession, and various has been the talk: some wondering whence this sudden zeal for philosophy had sprung up in me; others eager to know what definite views I held on each subject. To many, too, I have observed it seemed strange that I of all men should have given my approval to that philosophy which snatches away the light and pours a kind of night over things, and that I had unexpectedly taken up the defence of a school that had been abandoned and long since deserted. But in fact I did not begin to philosophise on a sudden, nor have I bestowed from my earliest years anything less than great labour and care upon this study; and it was precisely when I seemed least engaged in it that I was most a philosopher — as is shown both by my speeches, which are full of the maxims of philosophers, and by my intimacy with the most learned men, in whom my house has always abounded, and by my having been trained by those eminent teachers, Diodotus, Philo, Antiochus, and Posidonius.

And since all the precepts of philosophy are referred to the conduct of life, I think that both in public and in private affairs I have performed what reason and learning prescribe. But if anyone asks what cause has impelled me to commit these matters to writing so late in life, there is nothing I can more easily explain. For when I was languishing in idleness, and the condition of the commonwealth was such that it had necessarily to be governed by the deliberation and care of one man, I judged that, for the sake of the commonwealth itself, philosophy ought to be expounded to my countrymen, thinking it greatly to the honour and renown of the state that matters so weighty and so noble should be enshrined in Latin letters as well.

And I am the less sorry for my undertaking in that I readily perceive how many I have stirred to a zeal not only for learning but also for writing. For many who had been schooled in Greek teaching were unable to share with their fellow-citizens what they had learned, distrusting whether what they had received from the Greeks could be expressed in Latin; and in this respect we seem to have made such progress that we are not surpassed by the Greeks even in richness of vocabulary.

I was urged to turn to these studies also by a sickness of mind brought on by the great and grievous wrong that fortune had done me; and had I been able to find any greater relief from it, I should not have taken refuge in this above all. Yet I could enjoy that very relief in no better way than by devoting myself not merely to the reading of books but to the handling of the whole of philosophy. And all its parts and members are most easily come to know when whole questions are unfolded in writing; for there is a marvellous continuity and connection among things, so that one seems linked to another, and all bound and fastened together.

Those who ask what I myself think on each subject are more inquisitive than they need be; for in argument it is not so much the weight of authority as the force of reason that ought to be sought. Indeed the authority of those who profess to teach is generally a hindrance to those who wish to learn; for they cease to use their own judgement and take as settled whatever they see decided by the one they esteem. Nor am I in the habit of approving the practice we are told of among the Pythagoreans, who, when they affirmed something in argument and were asked why it was so, used to answer "He himself said it" — "he himself" being Pythagoras: so much could a preconceived opinion prevail that authority held good even without reason.

To those who wonder that I have followed this school in particular, I think a sufficient answer has been given in my four books of Academics. Nor have I taken up the defence of a forsaken and abandoned cause; for opinions do not perish with the death of their authors, though perhaps they want the light an advocate can shed. This method in philosophy, of arguing against all positions and pronouncing openly upon none, set going by Socrates, taken up again by Arcesilas and confirmed by Carneades, has flourished down to our own day; though now I perceive it to be all but orphaned in Greece itself. This I judge to have come about not through any fault of the Academy but through the dullness of men. For if it is a great thing to master single systems, how much greater to master them all — which they must do who have set themselves, for the sake of finding the truth, to speak both against all the philosophers and for them all.

I do not profess to have attained the capacity for so great and difficult a task; I do claim to have pursued it. Nor yet is it possible that those who philosophise by this method should have nothing to follow. I have indeed spoken of this matter more carefully elsewhere; but because some are too unteachable and slow, they seem to need reminding more than once. We are not men to whom nothing seems true, but men who say that to all truths certain falsehoods are joined, so like them that in them there is no sure mark for judging and assenting. From which it follows also that many things are probable which, though they are not grasped with certainty, yet, because they present an appearance distinct and clear, may guide the life of the wise man.

But now, to free myself from all reproach, I shall set out in full the opinions of the philosophers concerning the nature of the gods. And on this very point all men seem worth summoning to judge which of these opinions is true; then at last shall I think the Academy presumptuous, if either all shall agree, or someone shall be found to have discovered what is true. And so I am moved to cry out, as in the play The Comrades: "In the name of the gods, of all my countrymen, of all the young men, I call, I demand, I beseech, I implore, I lament, and I implore again your aid" — not over some trifling matter, as he there complains that capital crimes are committed in the state: "A courtesan refuses to take money from a lover who loves her" — but that men should be present, should learn, should take note of what is to be thought concerning religion, piety, holiness, ceremonies, good faith and the oath, concerning temples, shrines, and solemn sacrifices, and concerning the very auspices over which I preside (for all these matters bear upon this inquiry into the immortal gods):

for assuredly the great disagreement of the most learned men upon the greatest of subjects will compel even those who think they hold something certain to fall into doubt.

This I have often observed on other occasions, but most of all when at the house of my friend Gaius Cotta a most careful and searching discussion was held about the immortal gods. For when, during the Latin Holidays, I had come to him at his own request and summons, I found him sitting in his alcove and disputing with Gaius Velleius the senator, to whom at that time the Epicureans assigned the first place among our countrymen. Quintus Lucilius Balbus too was present, who had made such progress in Stoic doctrine as to bear comparison with the most distinguished Greeks in that school. When Cotta saw me he said: "You come most opportunely; for a great debate is just arising between Velleius and me on an important subject, and, knowing your interests, it is not amiss that you should take part."

"And indeed," said I, "I too think I have come opportunely, as you say. For you three leaders of three schools have met together. Were Marcus Piso here, no philosophy — at least of those held in honour — would lack its representative." Then said Cotta: "If the book of our friend Antiochus, lately sent by him to this Balbus, speaks truly, you have no need to miss your friend Piso; for according to Antiochus the Stoics agree with the Peripatetics in substance and differ only in words. On that book, Balbus, I should like to know what you think." "I?" said he; "I am surprised that Antiochus, an exceedingly acute man, should have failed to see that there is the widest difference between the Stoics, who distinguish the honourable from the advantageous not in name but in their whole kind, and the Peripatetics, who confound the honourable with the advantageous, so that they differ only in magnitude and as it were in degree, not in kind. This is no small disagreement about words but a very great one about things. But of this another time; now to what we had begun, if you please."

"By all means," said Cotta. "But that our newcomer here" — looking at me — "may not be in the dark as to what is afoot: we were discussing the nature of the gods, which, since it seemed to me, as it always does, exceedingly obscure, I was inquiring of Velleius what the opinion of Epicurus was. So, Velleius," said he, "if it is no trouble, take up again what you had begun." "I will take it up," said he, "although it is not for me but for you that this ally has come; for both of you," he added with a smile, "learned from the same Philo to know nothing." Then said I: "What Cotta and I have learned is his concern; but I would not have you think I have come as an ally to him rather than as a hearer, and a fair one too, of free judgement, bound by no necessity of the kind that compels me, willy-nilly, to maintain some fixed opinion."

Then Velleius, with all the confidence those people are wont to show, fearing nothing so much as to seem to be in doubt about anything, as though he had just come down from the council of the gods and the spaces between Epicurus's worlds, said: "Hear, now, opinions that are neither idle nor invented — not the god of Plato's Timaeus, the craftsman and builder of the world, nor the Stoics' soothsaying old woman Pronoia, which in Latin we may call Providence, nor yet the world itself endowed with mind and senses, a round, glowing, revolving god, the portents and marvels not of philosophers reasoning but of philosophers dreaming.

For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to behold that workshop of so vast a task, by which he makes the world to be constructed and built by a god? What was the contrivance, what the tools, the levers, the engines, who were the workmen for so great an undertaking? How could air, fire, water, and earth obey and submit to the will of the architect? And whence arose those five shapes from which the rest are formed, so aptly fitted to affect the mind and produce sensation? It would be tedious to go through it all, all of it being such as to seem rather wished for than discovered;

but here is the crowning point: that the man who introduced a world not only as having had a beginning but as having been all but made by hand should declare that it will be everlasting. Do you think that a man who supposes that anything which has had a beginning can be eternal has so much as touched the surface of natural science, that is, of the theory of nature? For what cementing is there that is indissoluble, or what is there that has some beginning but no end? As for your Providence, Lucilius, if it is the same, I ask again what I asked just now — its workmen, its engines, the whole design and apparatus of so great a work; but if it is different, why has it made the world mortal and not, like the god of Plato, everlasting?

And of both of you I ask why the world-builders should have suddenly arisen after sleeping for countless ages; for it does not follow that, because there was no world, there were no ages. I do not now mean ages such as are completed by the number of days and nights in the yearly circuits — for I grant that these could not be brought about without the revolution of the world; but there was a kind of eternity from infinite time, which no measuring-out of periods could measure, yet whose extent can be understood, since it does not even fall within thought that there should have been

a time when there was no time. In that boundless space, then, I ask, Balbus, why your Providence remained idle. Was it shrinking from toil? But toil neither touches a god nor existed at all, since all the elements of nature — sky, fires, lands, and seas — obeyed the divine will. And what was there for a god to long for, that he should adorn the world with constellations and lights, like an aedile? If it was that the god himself might dwell more comfortably, then plainly he had dwelt before, through infinite time, in darkness as in a hovel. And after that — are we to suppose he takes delight in the variety with which we see sky and earth adorned? What pleasure can that be to a god? If there were any, he could not have done without it so long.

Or were these things, as you usually say, established by the god for the sake of men? Of the wise? Then so vast a construction of things was made for the sake of a few. Or of the foolish? But, first, there was no reason for him to deserve well of the wicked; and next, what did he gain, since all fools are without doubt most wretched — most of all because they are fools (for what can we name more wretched than folly?) — and next, since there are so many evils in life that the wise soften them by setting their advantages against them, while fools can neither avoid those that approach nor bear those that are present? But as for those who said that the world itself is living and wise, they utterly failed to see into what shape the nature of an intelligent mind could fall. Of this I shall speak presently; for now, thus far:

I shall marvel at the dullness of those who would have a living, immortal, and blessed being be round, on the ground that Plato denies any shape to be fairer than that. But to me a cylinder, or a cube, or a cone, or a pyramid seems more shapely. And what life is assigned to this round god? Surely that he should be whirled about with a speed than which none, not even in thought, can be conceived; and in this I do not see where a steadfast mind and a blessed life can find a resting-place. And whereas in our own body what is felt in the least part is troublesome, why should not the same be held troublesome in a god? For the earth, since it is a part of the world, is also a part of the god; and yet we see vast regions of the earth uninhabited and untilled, part of them scorched by the sun's nearness, part frozen with snow and frost by his distant retreat — so that, if the world is a god, since these are parts of the world, the limbs of the god must be reckoned as partly burning, partly chilled.

Such, Lucilius, are your doctrines; but what those of the others are like, I will trace back from the earliest of them. Thales of Miletus, who first inquired into such matters, said that water is the beginning of things, and that god is that mind which fashioned all things out of water — if gods can exist without sensation; and why did he join mind to water, if mind itself can subsist without a body? The opinion of Anaximander is that gods are born, rising and setting at long intervals, and that they are innumerable worlds. But how can we conceive a god to be anything but everlasting?

After him Anaximenes set up air as god, and held it to be generated, and boundless and infinite, and ever in motion — as though air without any shape could be a god (especially since it becomes a god not merely to have some shape but the fairest), or as though all that has had a beginning were not followed by mortality. Then Anaxagoras, who received his teaching from Anaximenes, was the first who held that the ordering and measure of all things was designed and brought about by the force and reason of an infinite mind. In this he failed to see that there can be no motion joined to sensation and continuous over the infinite, nor any sensation at all in a nature that is not itself struck and thereby perceives. Then again, if he meant that mind to be a kind of living being, there will be something more inward, from which that living being is named; but what is more inward than mind? Let it be girt, then, with an outer body —

but since that is not to his liking, mind bare and simple, with nothing joined to it whereby it might perceive, seems to escape the grasp and conception of our understanding. Alcmaeon of Croton, who gave divinity to the sun, the moon, and the rest of the heavenly bodies, and to the soul besides, did not perceive that he was giving immortality to mortal things. As for Pythagoras, who held that soul is spread throughout the whole nature of things and passes through it, and that from it our souls are taken, he did not see that, by the tearing-asunder of human souls, the god is rent and mangled, and that when souls are wretched — as happens to most — then a part of the god is wretched, which cannot be.

And why should the soul of man be ignorant of anything, if it were a god? Moreover, how was that god, if he were nothing but soul, either fixed in the world or poured through it? Then Xenophanes, who would have all that exists, with mind added to it and being infinite, to be god, will be censured concerning the mind itself like the rest, and more vehemently concerning the infinite, in which there can be nothing either perceiving or connected. As for Parmenides, he devised something quite fanciful: he makes a thing like a crown — he calls it a stephanê — a continuous ring of glowing light girdling the sky, which he calls god; in which no one could suspect either divine shape or sensation. And there are many other monstrosities of his, since he refers to god War, Discord, Desire, and other things of that kind, which are destroyed by disease or sleep or forgetfulness or age; and the same of the heavenly bodies, which, having been censured in another, may here be passed over.

Empedocles, again, who errs in many other matters, falls most shamefully in his opinion of the gods. For he would have the four elements, out of which he holds that all things consist, to be divine; though it is plain that they both come into being and perish and are without all sensation. Nor does Protagoras, who says he has nothing clear to declare about the gods, whether they exist, do not exist, or what they are like, seem to have any conjecture about the nature of the gods. As for Democritus, who at one time reckons images and their revolutions among the gods, at another the nature that pours forth and sends out those images, at another our own thought and understanding — does he not move in the greatest error? And since the same man, on the ground that nothing ever abides in its own state, denies that anything is everlasting, does he not do away with god altogether, so as to leave no notion of him at all? And what of the air, which Diogenes of Apollonia uses as god — what sensation can it have, or what shape of a god?

It would be long to speak of Plato's inconsistency, who in the Timaeus denies that the father of this world can be named, while in the books of the Laws he holds that we ought not to inquire at all what god is. And as for his wishing god to be without any body (asomaton, as the Greeks say), it cannot be understood how that can be; for he must lack sensation, must lack also prudence, must lack pleasure — all of which we comprehend together with the notion of the gods. The same man, both in the Timaeus and in the Laws, says that the world is a god, and the sky, and the stars, and the earth, and our souls, and those gods whom we have received by the institutions of our forefathers. These statements are both plainly false in themselves and violently at odds with one another.

Xenophon too, in fewer words, errs in much the same way; for in the sayings which he reported as spoken by Socrates he makes Socrates argue that we ought not to inquire into the shape of god, and the same Socrates call both the sun and the soul a god, and speak now of one god, now of several — which fall into nearly the same mistakes as those we lay to Plato's charge.

Antisthenes too, in the book entitled Physicus, by saying that there are many gods of popular belief but one god in nature, does away with the power and the nature of the gods. And not much otherwise Speusippus, following his uncle Plato and speaking of a certain force by which all things are governed, and that an animate one, tries to root out from our minds the knowledge of the gods.

And Aristotle, in the third book of his Philosophy, throws much into confusion, dissenting from his master Plato; for now he attributes all divinity to mind, now says that the world itself is a god, now sets some other being over the world and assigns it such functions that by a kind of rolling motion it should rule and watch over the movement of the world; then he says that the heat of the heaven is a god, not perceiving that the heaven is a part of the world, which elsewhere he had himself designated as a god. And how can that divine consciousness of the heaven be preserved amid so great a speed? Where, again, are all those gods of his, if we also reckon the heaven a god? And when he likewise would have god be without a body, he strips him of all sensation, and of prudence too. Moreover, how can the world be moved if it is without a body, or how can it, while ever moving itself, be at rest and blessed?

Nor indeed is his fellow-pupil Xenocrates wiser in this kind; in whose books on the nature of the gods no divine form is described. For he says there are eight gods: five, those named among the wandering stars; one, to be reckoned a single god composed of all the fixed stars set in the sky, as out of scattered limbs; to which he joins the sun as a seventh and the moon as an eighth — though in what sense these can be blessed cannot be understood. From the same school of Plato, Heraclides of Pontus crammed his books with childish fables, and yet at one time thinks the world, at another the divine mind, to be god; he also gives divinity to the wandering stars, deprives god of sensation, will have his shape be changeable, and in the same book again reckons earth and sky among the gods.

Nor is the inconsistency of Theophrastus to be borne; for now he gives the divine sovereignty to mind, now to the sky, now to the signs and heavenly bodies. Nor is his pupil Strato — he who is called the natural philosopher — to be listened to, who holds that all divine power resides in nature, which has the causes of generating, increasing, and diminishing, but is without all sensation and shape.

Zeno, however — to come now, Balbus, to your school — holds that the natural law is divine, and that it has the power of commanding what is right and forbidding the contrary. But how he makes this law a living being we cannot understand; and a god we certainly mean to be a living being. The same man elsewhere calls the ether a god — if a god can be conceived that has no sensation, that never meets us in our prayers, our wishes, or our vows. In other books he holds that a certain reason pervading the whole nature of things is endowed with divine power. He gives this same attribute to the stars, then to the years, the months, and the changes of the seasons. And when he interprets Hesiod's Theogony — that is, the origin of the gods — he abolishes altogether the customary and received notions of the gods; for he reckons neither Jupiter, nor Juno, nor Vesta, nor anyone so named among the gods, but teaches that these names have been assigned, by a kind of symbolism, to lifeless and dumb things.

The opinion of his pupil Aristo is in no less great an error, who holds that the shape of god cannot be understood, denies that there is sensation in the gods, and is altogether in doubt whether god is a living being or not. Cleanthes, again, who studied under Zeno together with the one I just named, at one time says the world itself is a god, at another gives this name to the mind and soul of the whole of nature, at another judges that the uttermost and highest heat, poured round about on every side, embracing and enclosing all things on the outside, which is called ether, is most surely a god; and, as if raving, in the books he wrote against Pleasure, he now invents a kind of form and aspect of the gods, now assigns all divinity to the stars, now holds that nothing is more divine than reason. And so it comes about that that god whom we know by the mind and would set, as it were, in the impression of the soul as in a footprint, nowhere appears at all. But Persaeus, also a pupil of the same Zeno, held that those have been counted gods by whom some great benefit to the comforts of life had been discovered, and that useful and wholesome things themselves were called by the names of gods — so that he did not even say that those things were the discoveries of gods, but that they were themselves divine;

than which what could be more absurd, either to invest base and unsightly things with the honour of gods, or to set among the gods men already swept away by death, whose every worship would be a matter of mourning?

And now Chrysippus, who is held to be the shrewdest interpreter of the Stoics' dreams, gathers a great throng of unknown gods, and so unknown that we cannot even by conjecture form a picture of them, though our mind seems able to paint anything it pleases by thought. For he says that the divine power resides in reason and in the soul and mind of universal nature; he says the world itself is a god, and the universal diffusion of its soul; then the ruling part of that very soul, which dwells in mind and reason; then the common nature of things, universal and containing all things; then fate and the necessity of things to come; besides, fire, and that ether of which I spoke before; then the things that flow and stream by nature, such as water, earth, and air; the sun, moon, and stars, and the totality of things by which all are contained; and even those men who have attained immortality.

The same man argues that the ether is what men call Jupiter; that the air which streams through the seas is Neptune; that the earth is what is called Ceres; and in like fashion he traces out the names of the rest of the gods. The same man also says that Jupiter is the force of perpetual and eternal law, which is, as it were, the guide of life and the mistress of duties; and he calls the same the fated necessity, the everlasting truth of things to come — none of which is of such a kind that any divine power can be seen to reside in it.

And this indeed in his first book on the nature of the gods; while in the second he sets out to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer to what he himself had said in the first book about the immortal gods, so that even the most ancient poets, who never so much as suspected these things, may seem to have been Stoics. Following him, Diogenes of Babylon, in the book entitled On Minerva, by referring the birth of Jupiter and the origin of the virgin goddess to natural science, severs them from the fable.

I have now set forth, in effect, not the judgements of philosophers but the dreams of madmen. For these are scarcely more absurd than the things which, poured out in the words of the poets, have done harm by their very charm — poets who have brought in gods inflamed with anger and raging with lust, and have made us behold their wars, battles, combats, and wounds; their hatreds besides, their dissensions and discords, their births and deaths, their complaints and lamentations, their lusts let loose in every kind of intemperance, their adulteries and bonds, their unions with the human race, and mortals begotten of immortals.

With the error of the poets we may join the portents of the Magi and the madness of the Egyptians in the same kind, and then also the opinions of the common folk, which, through ignorance of the truth, dwell in the greatest inconstancy. Whoever considers how thoughtlessly and rashly these things are said ought to revere Epicurus and to reckon him among the very persons of whom this inquiry treats. For he alone saw, first, that the gods exist, because Nature herself has imprinted a notion of them in the minds of all. For what nation or what kind of men is there that does not have, without instruction, a certain anticipation of the gods — what Epicurus calls prolepsis, that is, a kind of outline of the thing grasped beforehand by the mind, without which nothing can be understood, inquired into, or argued about? The force and usefulness of this principle we have learned from that heavenly volume of Epicurus On the Standard and Judgement.

You see, then, that the foundation of this inquiry has been splendidly laid. For since the belief has been established by no convention, custom, or law, and there remains a firm agreement of all men to a man, it must be understood that the gods exist, because we have implanted, or rather inborn, notions of them; and that on which the nature of all agrees must of necessity be true. The existence of the gods, therefore, must be confessed. And since this is generally agreed not only among philosophers but among the unlearned too, we confess that this too is agreed: that we have this anticipation, as I said before, or prenotion of the gods — for to new things new names must be given, as Epicurus himself called it prolepsis,

a thing which no one before had named by that word — this anticipation, then, we have, namely that we think the gods blessed and immortal. For the same Nature that gave us the outline of the gods themselves has graven it on our minds that we should hold them eternal and blessed. And if this is so, then that maxim of Epicurus has been truly set forth: that what is blessed and eternal neither has any trouble itself nor causes any to another, and is therefore held neither by anger nor by favour, since all such things belong to weakness. If we were seeking nothing else than to worship the gods piously and to be freed from superstition, enough would have been said; for the surpassing nature of the gods would be worshipped by the piety of men, being both eternal and most blessed (for whatever excels has a just claim to reverence), and all fear of the violence and anger of the gods would have been driven off; for it is understood that both anger and favour are removed from a blessed and immortal nature, and that, these removed, no terrors hang over us from on high. But to confirm this opinion, the mind seeks both the form and the life of the gods, and the working and activity of their mind.

As to form, Nature in part admonishes us, in part reason teaches us. For from Nature we all, of all nations, have no other notion of the gods' appearance than the human; for what other form ever presents itself to anyone, whether waking or sleeping? But that all things may not be referred back to primary notions, reason itself declares the same thing.

For since it seems fitting that the most excellent nature — whether because it is blessed or because it is everlasting — should be likewise the most beautiful, what arrangement of limbs, what configuration of features, what shape, what appearance can be more beautiful than the human? You, Lucilius, are wont (for my friend Cotta does so now in one way, now in another), when you portray the divine craftsmanship and workmanship, to describe how all things in the human form are fitted not only for use but also for beauty;

and if the human shape surpasses the form of all living creatures, and god is a living creature, then surely that shape is the most beautiful of all. And since it is agreed that the gods are most blessed, and no one can be blessed without virtue, nor can virtue subsist without reason, nor reason reside anywhere but in the human shape, it must be confessed that the gods are of human appearance.

Yet that appearance is not body but as it were body, and it has not blood but as it were blood. Although these things were both discovered more acutely and stated more subtly by Epicurus than that anyone can easily grasp them, yet, relying on your understanding, I argue more briefly than the subject demands. Epicurus, who not only beholds with his mind things hidden and deeply buried but handles them as with his hand, teaches that the power and nature of the gods is such that it is perceived first not by sense but by the mind, and not by any solidity or as a single number, like the things which, because of their firmness, he calls steremnia, but by images grasped through likeness and passage; for an infinite series of like images arises from countless atoms and streams toward the gods, and our understanding, with the keenest pleasures fixing its mind upon those images, takes in what is the nature that is both blessed and eternal.

The force of infinity, indeed, is supreme and most worthy of great and careful contemplation. In it we must understand that the nature is such that all things answer to all, like to like in equal numbers; this Epicurus calls isonomia, that is, equal distribution. From this, then, it follows that, if the multitude of mortals is so great, the number of immortals is no less; and if the things that destroy are innumerable, the things that preserve must also be infinite. And you are wont to ask of us, Balbus, what the life of the gods is, and what kind of existence is led by them;

plainly such that nothing more blessed, nothing more abounding in all good things, can be conceived. For the god does nothing, is entangled in no occupations, undertakes no labours, rejoices in his own wisdom and virtue, and holds it for certain that he will be forever in pleasures the greatest and the eternal.

This god we may rightly call blessed; but yours we may call most toilsome. For if the world itself is a god, what can be less at rest than to be whirled about the axis of the sky with marvellous speed, no point of time intermitted? But unless a thing is at rest, nothing is blessed. Or if there is some god within the world itself, who rules and steers it, who preserves the courses of the stars, the changes of the seasons, the vicissitudes and orderings of things, watching over lands and seas and guarding the comforts and lives of men — surely he is entangled in troublesome and laborious affairs.

But we place the blessed life in tranquillity of mind and in exemption from all duties. For the same teacher who taught us the rest has taught us that the world was made by Nature, that there was no need of any workmanship, and that the thing is so easy, which you deny can be done without divine skill, that Nature will make, is making, and has made worlds beyond number. And because you do not see how Nature can do this without any mind, you take refuge in a god, like the tragic poets when you cannot unravel the outcome of the plot.

Whose help you would surely not require if you beheld the boundless and limitless magnitude of regions extending on every side, into which the mind, hurling and stretching itself, travels so far and wide that yet it sees no shore of an end on which it can rest. In this immensity, then, of breadths, lengths, and heights there flits an infinite force of countless atoms, which, despite the void between them, yet cohere among themselves and, catching hold one of another, are continued; from which arise those forms and shapes of things which you think cannot be made without bellows and anvils. And so you have set upon our necks an everlasting master, whom we should fear day and night. For who would not fear a god that foresees all things, ponders all, takes note of all, thinks all things his own concern — a meddlesome god full of business?

From this there first arose for you that fatal necessity which you call heimarmene, so that you say whatever happens has flowed from eternal truth and from the unbroken chain of causes. But how is that philosophy to be valued by which, as by little old women — and unlearned ones at that — all things are thought to happen by fate? And there follows your mantike, which in Latin is called divination, with which we should be so steeped in superstition, if we cared to listen to you, that we should have to pay court to soothsayers, augurs, diviners, prophets, and interpreters of dreams.

Freed from these terrors by Epicurus and claimed into liberty, we neither fear those whom we understand to make no trouble for themselves nor to seek any for another, and we worship piously and reverently a nature surpassing and excellent. But, carried away by my zeal, I fear I have been too long. Yet it was hard to leave a matter so great and so noble half-begun; though I ought to have been thinking less of speaking than of listening."

Then Cotta, courteously, as was his way, said: "And yet, Velleius, had you said nothing, you could certainly have heard nothing from me. For it usually comes into my mind more easily why a thing is false than why it is true; and this has often happened to me, and just now while I was listening to you. Ask me what I say the nature of the gods is: perhaps I should answer nothing; ask me whether I think it such as you have just set forth: I should say that nothing seems to me less likely. But before I come to grips with what you have argued, I will say what I think about you yourself.

For I seem often to have heard that friend of yours, Lucius Crassus, while he set you without doubt above all our toga-wearing countrymen and matched few of the Greek Epicureans with you — but, since I knew that he held you in wonderful affection, I supposed that out of goodwill he spoke too generously. Yet I, though I shrink from praising a man to his face, nevertheless judge that on a subject obscure and difficult you have spoken clearly, and not only with abundance of thought but with words more ornate than your school is accustomed to use.

Zeno, whom our Philo used to call the coryphaeus of the Epicureans, I often heard when I was at Athens, and indeed at Philo's own bidding — I believe so that I might judge more easily how well those doctrines could be refuted, having learned from the chief of the Epicureans how they were stated. So he spoke, not like most of them, but in your manner — distinctly, weightily, ornately. But what often befell me with him befell me just now while I listened to you: I was vexed that so great a talent (you will hear me say so by your leave) should have lighted upon opinions so trivial, not to say so absurd.

Nor shall I now myself bring forward anything better. For, as I just said, in almost all matters, but most of all in natural science, I could sooner say what a thing is not than what it is. Ask me what god is, or of what kind: I shall take Simonides for my authority, of whom, when the tyrant Hiero asked this very question, he begged one day to deliberate; when on the morrow Hiero asked the same, he sought two days; and when he kept doubling the number of days, and Hiero in surprise asked why he did so, he said, "Because the longer I consider, the more obscure the matter seems to me." But I suppose that Simonides (for he is handed down to us as not merely a charming poet but learned and wise in other respects too), because many things keen and subtle came into his mind, doubting which of them was truest, despaired of all truth.

But what does your Epicurus say (for I would rather argue with him than with you) that is worthy not merely of philosophy but of common prudence? In the inquiry concerning the nature of the gods the first question asked is whether the gods exist or not. "It is hard to deny it." I believe so, if the question were asked in a public assembly; but in talk of this kind and in a private gathering it is very easy. And so I myself, a pontiff, who hold that the public ceremonies and rites of religion must be most scrupulously maintained, should like to be convinced of this first point — that the gods exist — not by opinion only but according to the very truth. For many things occur that confound me, so that at times they seem not to exist at all.

But see how generously I deal with you: what you have in common with the other philosophers I will not touch, as this very point; for it is agreed by almost all, and by me first of all, that the gods exist. And so I do not contend on that head; yet the argument you bring forward I do not think firm enough. You said that the fact that it seems so to men of all nations and kinds is a sufficiently great proof why we should confess the gods to exist. But this is both weak in itself and also false. For, first, whence are the opinions of the nations known to you? For my part I think there are many peoples so brutalised by savagery that among them there is no notion of gods at all.

What of Diagoras, who was called the Atheist, and afterwards Theodorus — did they not openly do away with the nature of the gods? Nay, Protagoras of Abdera, of whom you made mention just now, perhaps the greatest sophist of those times, having set down at the beginning of his book "Of the gods I am not able to say either that they are or that they are not," was by decree of the Athenians banished from city and country, and his books burned in the assembly; from which I for my part suppose that many were made the slower to profess this opinion, since not even doubt could escape punishment. And what shall we say of the sacrilegious, the impious, the perjured? If Lucius Tubulus, or Lupus, or Carbo, or the son of Neptune, as Lucilius says, had ever thought there were gods, would they have been so perjured or so foul?

Your argument, then, is not so well established for confirming what you wish as it seems. But since this argument is common to other philosophers also, I will pass it over for now; I prefer to come to what is properly yours.

I grant that the gods exist; teach me, then, whence they are, where they are, what they are like in body, in soul, in life; for these things I desire to know. You make use of the realm and licence of atoms for everything; out of them you fashion and produce whatever, as the saying goes, falls to the ground. First of all, these atoms do not exist. For there is nothing void of body, and every place is besieged by bodies; so there can be no void, and nothing can be indivisible.

I now pour forth these oracles of the natural philosophers, whether true or false I know not, but more like the truth than yours. For those scandalous notions of Democritus, or even before him of Leucippus, that there are certain particles, some smooth, some rough, some round, some angular and hooked, some curved and as it were bent inward, and that of these were made the sky and the earth, with no nature compelling but by a kind of chance concourse — this opinion, Gaius Velleius, you have prolonged down to our own age, and one would sooner unseat you from every standing in life than from this authority; for you judged that you must be an Epicurean before you came to know these doctrines. Thus it was necessary either to take these scandals into your mind or to give up the name of the philosophy you had embraced.

For what would you take to cease being an Epicurean? "Nothing indeed," you say, "to make me forsake the plan of the blessed life and the truth." Is that, then, the truth? For about the blessed life I make no objection — that life which you hold not to exist even in a god unless he languishes in sheer idleness. But where is the truth? In countless worlds, I suppose, some coming to birth and some falling away at every least point of time? Or in indivisible particles fashioning so splendid a work with no Nature to guide, no reason to shape? But, forgetting that generosity which I began to show you a little while ago, I am taking in more than I need. I will grant, then, that all things consist of indivisible particles; what is that to the matter?

For it is the nature of the gods that is in question. Let them, by all means, be made of atoms; then they are not eternal. For if of atoms, then they came into being at some time; if they came into being, there were no gods before they were born; and if the gods have had a beginning, they must of necessity have an end, as you yourself argued a little while ago about Plato's world. Where, then, is that "blessed and eternal" of yours, by which two words you signify a god? And when you try to make this good, you creep into thorn-brakes. For so you said: that there is in god not body but as it were body, not blood but as it were blood.

This you very often do — that, when you say something not likely and wish to escape censure, you bring in something that cannot possibly even come to be, so that it would have been better to grant the very point at issue than to resist so shamelessly. Thus Epicurus, when he saw that, if the atoms were borne downward by their own weight, nothing would be in our power, since their motion would be fixed and necessary, found a way to escape necessity — a thing which had plainly escaped Democritus: he says that the atom, while it is carried straight downward by its weight and gravity, swerves a very little.

To say this is more shameful than to be unable to defend what he wished to maintain. The same he does against the logicians; for whereas they have handed down that in all disjunctions in which "either yes or no" is set, one or the other is true, he feared that, if anything of this kind were granted — "Epicurus will either be alive tomorrow or will not" — one or the other would become necessary; and so he denied that the whole "either yes or no" was necessary: than which what could be said more obtuse? Arcesilas pressed Zeno, since he himself said that all things that appeared to the senses were false, while Zeno said some appearances were false, not all; Epicurus feared that, if one appearance were false, none would be true: he said that all the senses are messengers of the truth. Nothing of these is anything but the height of folly; for he was receiving a heavier blow in order to ward off a lighter.

The same he does in the matter of the nature of the gods: while he avoids the concretion of indivisible bodies, lest destruction and dispersal follow, he denies that the body of the gods is body but as it were body, and that there is blood but as it were blood. It seems a wonder that one soothsayer does not laugh when he sees another; is this not more of a wonder, that you can keep from laughing among yourselves? It is not body but as it were body: I should understand what that meant if it were modelled in wax or in clay figures; but in a god what "as it were body" or what "as it were blood" may be I cannot understand. Nor can you, Velleius — but you will not own it.

For these things are given back by you as if dictated — things which Epicurus, yawning, babbled in a dream, though indeed he boasted, as we see in his writings, that he had no master. This I could readily believe even were he not to proclaim it, just as a man with a badly built house might boast that he had had no architect; for there is no smell of the Academy about him, none of the Lyceum, none even of the boys' schoolroom. He might have heard Xenocrates (and what a man, ye immortal gods!), and there are some who think he did; he himself denies it — I believe him, for he would not own a debt to anyone. He says he heard at Samos a certain Pamphilus, a pupil of Plato (for there as a young man he lived with his father and brothers, his father Neocles having gone there as a settler, but, since the little farm did not feed him sufficiently, I suppose, he was a schoolmaster);

but this Platonist Epicurus despises wonderfully: so afraid is he ever to seem to have learned anything. As for Nausiphanes the Democritean, he is caught fast: him he does not deny that he heard, yet he harasses with every kind of abuse. And yet, if he had not heard these doctrines of Democritus, what had he heard? What is there in Epicurus's natural philosophy that is not from Democritus? For though he changed some things, such as what I said a little while ago about the swerve of the atoms, yet he says most things the same: atoms, void, images, the infinity of spaces, the innumerability of worlds, their births and deaths — well-nigh everything in which the theory of nature is contained. Now this "as it were body" and "as it were blood" of yours — what do you understand by it?

For I not only confess but readily allow that you know these matters better than I; yet, once they have been stated, what is there that Velleius can understand and Cotta cannot? And so I understand what body is, what blood is, but "as it were body" and "as it were blood" I understand in no way at all. Nor do you hide it from me as Pythagoras was wont to hide things from strangers, nor do you speak obscurely on purpose like Heraclitus; but — between ourselves be it said — you yourself do not understand it either.

This I see you contending for: that there is a kind of appearance of the gods which has nothing concrete, nothing solid, nothing pressed out, nothing prominent, but is pure, light, and transparent. We shall say, then, the same as of the Venus of Cos: that yonder is not body but the likeness of body, and that the spreading red mingled with white is not blood but a kind of likeness of blood; so in the Epicurean god there is not the thing but the likenesses of things. Suppose me persuaded of that which cannot even be understood: come, give me the outlines and shapes of these shadowy gods of yours.

Here you are not without an abundance of arguments by which you would teach that the gods are of human form: first, because it is so shaped and anticipated in our minds that, when a man thinks of god, the human form presents itself; next, because, since the divine nature excels all things, it ought also to be of the most beautiful form, and none is more beautiful than the human; you bring forward a third argument, that in no other shape can mind have its dwelling.

Consider, then, each of these in turn, of what kind it is; for you seem to me to snatch up, as if by your own right, a thing in no way to be approved. First of all, who was ever so blind in contemplating things as not to see that those human forms have been transferred to the gods either by some design of wise men, that they might the more easily turn the minds of the ignorant from depravity of life to the worship of the gods, or by superstition, so that there might be images which worshippers believed they approached the very gods themselves? And the poets, painters, and craftsmen increased this same notion; for it was not easy to keep the gods, who are represented as doing and contriving something, in the imitation of other forms. There came in also this opinion, perhaps, that nothing seems to man more beautiful than man. But do you not see, as a natural philosopher, how flattering a match-maker, how, as it were, her own pander, Nature is? Do you think there is any beast on land or sea that does not take most delight in a beast of its own kind? If it were not so, why would not a bull be eager for the embrace of a mare, or a horse of a cow? Do you think an eagle, or a lion, or a dolphin prefers any shape to its own? What wonder, then, if in this same way Nature has prescribed to man that he should think nothing more beautiful than man? That is the reason why we suppose the gods like men: what do you think — if there were reason in the beasts, would they not each have assigned the most to their own kind?

But, by Hercules, I (for I will speak as I feel), much as I love myself, do not dare to say that I am more beautiful than that bull was which carried off Europa; for the question here is not of our talents or our speeches but of appearance and shape. And if we wished to invent and join shapes for ourselves, like that sea Triton who is painted riding upon swimming beasts harnessed to a human body, you would not wish to be such a thing. I am on difficult ground; for so great is the force of Nature that no man would wish to be other than like a man — and indeed an ant like an ant.

But like what man? For how few are handsome! When I was at Athens, scarcely one was found in a whole troop of youths — I see why you smiled, but the matter stands so. Then to us, who, with the leave of the old philosophers, delight in young men, even faults are often pleasing. A mole on a boy's finger pleased Alcaeus; but a mole is a blemish of the body; yet to him it seemed a beauty. Quintus Catulus, the father of our colleague and friend, loved your townsman Roscius, and even wrote of him: "I had stood by chance saluting the rising Dawn, when suddenly on my left Roscius rose. By your leave, ye heavenly ones, may I say it: the mortal seemed fairer than the god." To him fairer than a god; yet he was, as he is today, of the most distorted eyes: what does it matter, if to him this very thing seemed witty and charming?

I return to the gods. Do we think any of them — if not so cross-eyed, then at least with a cast — any with a mole, any snub-nosed, flap-eared, beetle-browed, or big-headed, as some among us are; or is everything corrected in them? Grant you that; is there also one face for all of them? For if there are several, one must be more beautiful than another, and so some god is not the most beautiful; if there is one face for all, then the Academy must flourish in heaven: for if there is no difference between god and god, among the gods there is no recognition, no perception.

What if even that, Velleius, is altogether false — that no other appearance than man's presents itself to us when we think of god: will you still defend doctrines so absurd? To us perhaps it presents itself so, as you say; for from childhood we have known Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo, and the rest of the gods by that face which painters and sculptors chose, and not only by face but by adornment, age, and dress. But not so the Egyptians, nor the Syrians, nor almost any of the barbarians; for you may see among them firmer opinions about certain beasts than among us about the most holy temples and images of the gods.

For we see many shrines despoiled and images of the gods carried off from the most sacred places by our own people; but it has never so much as been heard that a crocodile, or an ibis, or a cat was harmed by an Egyptian. What, then, do you think — does not Apis, that sacred bull of the Egyptians, seem a god to the Egyptians? Quite as much, by Hercules, as that Saviour-goddess of yours does to you. Whom you never see, even in dreams, save with a goatskin, a spear, a little shield, and upturned slippers. But such is not the Argive Juno, nor the Roman. Therefore Juno has one shape among the Argives, another among the people of Lanuvium. And indeed we have one Jupiter of the Capitol, the Africans another, Jupiter Hammon.

Is it not shameful, then, for a natural philosopher — that is, a spy and hunter of nature — to seek the witness of truth from minds steeped in habit? For in that way it will be allowed to say that Jupiter is always bearded, Apollo always beardless, that Minerva's eyes are grey, Neptune's blue. And indeed we praise the Vulcan at Athens which Alcamenes made, in which, as the god stands clothed, a slight, not unsightly limp appears: a lame god, then, we shall have, since we have received this of Vulcan. Come, and do we make the gods bear those very names by which we call them?

But first, as many as are the tongues of men, so many are the names of the gods. For Vulcan is not, as you, Velleius, the same wherever you go — the same in Italy, the same in Africa, the same in Spain. Next, the number of names is not great even in our pontifical books, while the gods are innumerable. Or are they without names? That indeed you must say; for what point is there, when the face is one, in there being several names? How much better it would have been, Velleius, to confess rather that you do not know what you do not know, than, blurting these things out, to feel sick at them and dissatisfied with yourself! Do you think a god is like me, or like you? Surely you do not. "What then? Shall I call the sun, or the moon, or the sky a god? Then also blessed: enjoying what pleasures? And wise: but how can there be wisdom in such a block?"

These are your doctrines. If, then, god is neither of human form, as I have shown, nor of some such other kind, as you are persuaded, why do you hesitate to deny that the gods exist? You do not dare. Wisely indeed, though here it is not the people you fear but the gods themselves. I have known Epicureans who worship every little image. Yet I see that to some it seems that Epicurus, lest he should fall under the displeasure of the Athenians, left the gods in word but did away with them in fact. And so in those choice and brief maxims of his which you call Kyriai Doxai, this, I think, is the first: "That which is blessed and immortal neither has trouble itself nor causes it to another."

In this maxim, as it is set forth, there are some who think that what he did from plain unskilfulness in speaking he did on purpose. They do him an injustice, a man by no means cunning; for it is doubtful whether he says that something is blessed and immortal, or that, if anything is such, it is of this kind. They do not notice that here he spoke ambiguously, but in many other places both he and Metrodorus spoke as openly as you did a little while ago. He, however, does think the gods exist; nor have I ever seen anyone who feared more the things he said were not to be feared — death, I mean, and the gods: by which ordinary men are not so very greatly moved, yet of these he cries out that the minds of all mortals are terrified. So many thousands turn to brigandage with death set before them; others plunder all the shrines they can: I suppose the fear of death drives the one, the fear of religion the other. But since you do not dare (for now I will speak with Epicurus himself) to deny that the gods exist, what is there to hinder you from setting either the sun, or the world, or some everlasting mind among the number of the gods?

"I never saw," he says, "a soul partaking of reason and counsel in any but the human shape." What — did you ever see anything like the sun, or the moon, or the five wandering stars? The sun, bounding his motion within the two extreme points of a single orbit, completes his yearly courses; the moon, kindled by his rays, fills out this same circuit in a month's space; while the five stars, keeping the same orbit, some nearer the earth, some farther, from the same starting-points complete the same spaces in unequal times. Did you, Epicurus, ever see anything like this?

Let there be, then, no sun, no moon, no stars, since nothing can exist but what we have touched or seen. What — have you yourself seen god? Why, then, do you believe he exists? Let us, on this reasoning, do away with everything that either history or some new reasoning brings us. So it comes about that the men of the interior do not believe there is a sea. What narrowness of mind is this — that, if you had been born in Seriphos and had never gone out of the island, where you had often seen little hares and foxes, you would not believe there were lions and panthers when you were told what they were like; and if anyone spoke to you of an elephant, you would think you were even being laughed at?

And you, Velleius, have wound up your opinion not in your school's manner but in the cramped argument of the logicians, a tribe your school has never come to know. You assumed that the gods are blessed: we grant it. That no one can be blessed without virtue: that too we give, and gladly. That virtue cannot subsist without reason: that too must be agreed. You add that there is no reason save in the human shape. Who, do you think, will grant you this? For if it were so, what need was there for you to arrive there step by step? You might have assumed it by your own right. But what is this "step by step"? For I see you have come by degrees from the blessed to virtue, from virtue to reason; but from reason to the human shape, how do you proceed? That is to fall headlong, not to step down.

Nor indeed do I understand why Epicurus preferred to say that the gods are like men rather than that men are like the gods. You will ask what the difference is; for if this is like that, that is like this. I see; but this I say: that the figure of their form did not come to the gods from men. For the gods always existed and were never born, if indeed they are to be eternal; but men were born; therefore the human form existed before men, and the immortal gods were of that form: it is not, then, the gods' form that is to be called human, but ours divine. But this, indeed, as you please; this I ask, what so great fortune there was (for you will have nothing in the nature of things

done by reason) — but yet what so great chance, whence so happy a concourse of atoms, that men should suddenly be born in the form of the gods? Are we to think that seeds of the gods fell from heaven upon the earth, and that thus men arose like their fathers? I could wish you said so; I would not unwillingly acknowledge kinship with the gods. You say nothing of the kind, but that it came about by chance that we are like the gods. And now arguments must be sought by which this may be refuted. Would that I could find the true as easily as I can confute the false! For you have recounted from memory and at length — so that it pleased me to wonder that there should be in a Roman so great a learning — the opinions of the philosophers concerning the nature of the gods, from Thales of Miletus onward.

Did all those seem to you to be raving who decreed that god can subsist without hands and feet? Does not even this move you, when you consider what use and what fitness there is in the limbs of man, to judge that the gods have no need of human limbs? For what need is there of feet without walking, of hands if there is nothing to be grasped, of the whole disposition of all the parts of the body, in which there is nothing idle, nothing without cause, nothing superfluous, so that no art can imitate the skill of Nature? Will god, then, have a tongue and not speak, teeth, palate, throat, to no use, and the parts which Nature has joined to the body for the sake of procreation — these too will god have to no purpose; nor the outer parts more than the inner, the heart, lungs, liver, and the rest — which, their usefulness taken away, what beauty have they (since you would have these to be in god for the sake of beauty)?

Trusting in these dreams, not only Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Hermarchus spoke against Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles, but even the little courtesan Leontium dared to write against Theophrastus — in choice and Attic style, to be sure, but yet she did: so much licence did the Garden of Epicurus possess. And yet you are wont to complain; Zeno indeed even went to law. Why should I speak of Albucius? As for Phaedrus, nothing was more elegant, nothing more humane, yet the old man was vexed if I said anything too harsh — while Epicurus assailed Aristotle most insultingly, spoke most foully of Phaedo the disciple of Socrates, cut to pieces in whole volumes Timocrates, the brother of his comrade Metrodorus, because he disagreed on some point of philosophy, was ungrateful to Democritus himself, whom he followed, and treated so ill Nausiphanes his master, from whom he had learned not a little. Zeno, indeed, not only stung with abuse those of his own time — Apollodorus, Sillis, and the rest — but even said that Socrates himself, the parent of philosophy, was, using a Latin word, an Attic buffoon, and never called Chrysippus anything but Chrysippa.

You yourself a little while ago, when you recited, as it were, a senate of philosophers, said that the greatest of men doted, raved, were out of their minds. But if none of these saw the truth about the nature of the gods, it is to be feared that there is no nature of the gods at all. For these things which you say are wholly made up, scarcely worth the lamp-oil of little old women. For you do not perceive how much you must take upon yourselves, if you should win our concession that the form of men and of gods is the same. The whole care and tendance of the body that is bestowed upon a man will have to be bestowed upon a god — walking, running, reclining, leaning, sitting, grasping, and at the last even talk and speech.

As for your saying that the gods are male and female, you see what follows. For my part I cannot sufficiently wonder whence that chief of yours came by these opinions. But you do not cease to cry out that this must be held fast: that god is blessed and immortal. Yet what stands in the way of his being blessed if he is not two-footed? Or that — whether it is to be called "beatitas" or "beatitudo" (both indeed harsh, but by use words must be softened by us) — but that, whatever it is, why can it not befall the sun, or this world, or some eternal mind void of figure and bodily limbs?

You say nothing else but "I never saw a blessed sun or world." Why — did you ever see any world but this? You will say no. Why, then, did you dare to say that there are not six hundred thousand worlds but innumerable? "Reason taught it." Then will not reason teach you this also — that, when the most excellent nature is sought, and that blessed and eternal, which alone is the divine nature, just as we are surpassed by it in immortality, so we are surpassed by it in excellence of mind, and as in mind so in body? Why, then, when we are inferior in all else, are we equal in form? For human virtue came nearer to the likeness of the gods than the human figure.

Can anything so childish be said (to press the same point a little longer) as if we should say that those kinds of beasts which are born in the Red Sea or in India do not exist? And yet not even the most inquisitive of men can, by searching, hear of so many things as there are that come to be on land, sea, marshes, and rivers; shall we deny that they exist because we have never seen them? But that very likeness which delights you most — how little it bears on the matter! Is not a dog like a wolf (and, as Ennius says, "How like to us, that foulest of beasts, the ape!"); yet the characters of each are unlike. None of the beasts is more sagacious than the elephant;

but for shape, what is more uncouth? I speak of beasts; but among men themselves, are there not, even with the most similar forms, unlike characters, and, with like characters, unlike shapes? For if once, Velleius, we take up this kind of argument, mark whither it creeps. You assumed that reason cannot reside save in the human shape; another will assume that it cannot save in an earthly being, save in one that has been born, save in one that has grown up, save in one that has learned, save in one that consists of soul and a body frail and weak, in short, save in a man and a mortal. But if you stand against all these, why does shape alone confound you? For when all those things which I have set forth are added, you saw that there is reason and mind in man; with these taken away, you say you nevertheless know god, so long as the outlines remain. This is not to consider, but as it were to draw lots, what you say.

Unless perhaps you do not even attend to this — that not only in man but even in a tree whatever is superfluous or has no use is a hindrance. How troublesome it is to have one finger more than usual! Why so? Because the five neither need nor have use for another in respect of appearance or service. But your god is overstocked not with one finger only, but with head, neck, shoulders, sides, belly, back, knees, hands, feet, thighs, legs. If it is that he may be immortal, what have these limbs to do with life, what the face itself? Rather those — the brain, heart, lungs, liver: for these are the seats of life; the cast of the countenance has nothing to do with the maintenance of life.

And you blamed those who, from works grand and glorious — when they had beheld the world itself, its members the sky, lands, and seas, and the chief ornaments of these, the sun, moon, and stars, and when they had come to know the ripenings, changes, and vicissitudes of the seasons — suspected that there was some surpassing and excellent nature which had made these things, and moved, ruled, and governed them. These men, even if they wander from the truth in their conjecture, yet I see what they are following: but you, what great and notable work have you that seems wrought by a divine mind, from which you suspect the gods to exist? "I had," you say, "a certain idea of god implanted in my mind." And of a bearded Jupiter, too, and a helmeted Minerva: do you, then, think them such?

How much better in this the unlearned multitude, who give to god not only the limbs of man but also the use of his limbs; for they give him bow, arrows, spear, shield, trident, thunderbolt; and though they do not see what the actions of the gods are, yet they cannot conceive a god doing nothing at all. Even the Egyptians, who are mocked, consecrated no beast save for some usefulness which they got from it; the ibises, for instance, destroy a great host of serpents, being tall birds with stiff legs and a horny, long beak; they ward off pestilence from Egypt when they kill and consume the winged snakes borne in from the wastes of Libya by the African wind, so that those serpents harm not by their bite while alive nor by their stench when dead. I could speak of the usefulness of the ichneumons, of the crocodiles, of the cats, but I do not wish to be long. I will conclude, then, thus: that beasts have been consecrated by the barbarians for a benefit, but that of your gods not only is there no benefit forthcoming, but not even any deed at all.

"He has," he says, "no business." Truly Epicurus, like some pampered child, thinks nothing better than idleness. Yet boys themselves, even when they idle, take delight in some sport or game: do we wish god to lie thus benumbed in holiday idleness, so that, if he stir himself, we should fear he cannot be blessed? This doctrine not only strips the gods of motion and divine activity, but also makes men slothful, since not even a god can be blessed if he is doing anything.

But let it be granted, as you wish, that god is the likeness and image of man: what is his dwelling, what his seat, what his place; what, next, the action of his life, by what things he is, as you would have it, blessed? For he who is to be blessed must use and enjoy his own goods. As for place, even those natures which are without souls have each its own proper place — so that earth holds the lowest, water floods over this, the air the region above, and the highest tracts are given to the ethereal fires; while of living creatures some are of the land, some of the water, some, as it were, amphibious, living in either abode; and there are some thought to be born in fire, and they often appear flitting in burning furnaces.

I ask, then, of your god, first, where he dwells; next, what cause moves him from his place, if indeed he ever moves; then, since it is proper to living things to desire something fitted to their nature, what your god desires; for what purpose, finally, he uses the motion of mind and reason; lastly, how he is blessed, how eternal. For whichever of these you touch is a sore: a doctrine so ill founded cannot find an outlet.

For you said that the appearance of god is perceived by thought, not by sense; that it has no solidity in it, nor abides as one in number; and that its vision is such as to be discerned by likeness and passage, and that the accession of like things from the infinite bodies never fails, and that from this it comes about that our mind, fixed upon these, deems that nature blessed and everlasting. This — by the very gods of whom we speak — what kind of thing is it after all? For if they avail only for thought and have no solidity nor prominence, what difference is there whether we think of a hippocentaur or of a god? For every such shaping of the mind the other philosophers call an empty motion, but you call it the arrival and entrance of images into our minds.

Thus, when I seem to see Tiberius Gracchus haranguing on the Capitol and bringing forward the voting-urn against Marcus Octavius, I call that an empty motion of the mind; but you say that the images of Gracchus and Octavius remain, which, when they have reached the Capitol, are then referred to my mind — and that the same happens with god, by whose frequent appearance our minds are struck, whence the gods are understood to be blessed and eternal.

Grant that there are images by which our minds are struck: still, only a kind of appearance is presented; is there any reason why it should be blessed, why eternal? But these images of yours — what are they, and whence? This licence comes wholly from Democritus; but he too was censured by many, nor do you find a way out, and the whole matter wavers and limps. For what is less to be approved than that the images of all men fall upon me — Homer, Archilochus, Romulus, Numa, Pythagoras, Plato — and not in the form they had: how, then, were they? And of whom are these images: Aristotle teaches that the poet Orpheus never existed, and the Pythagoreans say that this Orphic poem was the work of a certain Cercon; yet Orpheus — that is, his image, as you would have it — often runs into my mind.

And what of the fact that different images of the same man fall upon mine, others upon yours? What of those things that never existed at all and could not exist, such as Scylla, or the Chimaera? What of men, places, and cities that we have never seen? What of the fact that the moment I please, the image is at hand? What of the fact that they come even uninvited to a sleeping man? The whole matter, Velleius, is a trifle. Yet you cram images not only into our eyes but even into our minds: such is the impunity of prattling. And how loosely you talk!

"A passage of streaming visions takes place frequently, so that out of many one is seen." I should be ashamed to say I do not understand, if you yourselves who defend these things understood them. For how do you prove that the images are borne continuously, or, if continuously, how eternally? "The innumerability of atoms," he says, "supplies it." Will then this same innumerability make all things everlasting? You take refuge in equilibrium (for so let us call isonomia, if you please) and say that, since there is a mortal nature, there must also be an immortal one. In that way, since men are mortal, let there be some immortal men, and since they are born on land, let them be born in water too. "And because there are things that destroy, let there be things that preserve." Let there be, by all means; but let them preserve things that exist; that those gods of yours exist I do not perceive.

Yet how does all that semblance of things arise out of indivisible bodies? Which, even if they existed — and they do not — might perhaps push and stir one another by their concourse, but could not form, fashion, colour, or animate. In no way, then, do you produce an immortal god. Let us now look to the blessed. Without virtue, certainly, in no way; but virtue is active; and your god does nothing; he is therefore without virtue;

and so not even blessed. What life, then, is his? "A supply," you say, "of goods with no intervention of evils." Of what goods, pray? Of pleasures, I suppose — those, of course, that belong to the body; for you have known no pleasure of the mind that does not set out from the body and return to the body. I do not suppose you wish to be like the rest of the Epicureans, who are ashamed of certain sayings of Epicurus, in which he testifies that he cannot even understand any good that is severed from delicate and obscene pleasures — which indeed, without blushing, he pursues all of them by name.

What food, then, or what drinks, or what varieties of sounds or flowers, what touches, what scents will you set before the gods to flood them with pleasures? The poets, indeed, provide nectar, ambrosia, banquets, and Youth or Ganymede to serve the cups; but you, Epicurus, what will you do? For I do not see whence your god is to have these things, nor how he is to use them. The nature of men, then, is richer for living blessedly than that of the gods, since it enjoys more kinds of pleasures.

But you reckon these the lighter pleasures, those by which, as it were, a tickling (for this is Epicurus's word) is applied to the senses. How far will you carry your jesting? For even our Philo could not endure that the Epicureans should make light of soft and delicate pleasures. For with the greatest memory he used to recite very many of Epicurus's maxims in the very words in which they were written. And of Metrodorus, who is Epicurus's colleague in wisdom, he used to quote many things still more shameless; for Metrodorus accuses his brother Timocrates, because he hesitates to measure all that pertains to the blessed life by the belly — and he says this not once but often. I see you nodding, for these things are known to you; I would produce the books if you denied it. Nor do I now blame you for referring all things to pleasure (that is another question), but I show that your gods are without pleasure, and so, by your own judgement, not even blessed. "But they are free from pain."

Is that enough for that life most blessed and abounding in goods? "He thinks," they say, "continually that he is blessed; for he has nothing else to busy his mind with." Grasp, then, with your mind and set before your eyes a god thinking nothing else through all eternity but "it is well with me" and "I am blessed." Nor yet do I see how this blessed god of yours does not fear that he will perish, since without any pause he is struck and stirred by the everlasting onset of atoms, and since images are forever streaming off from him. So your god is neither blessed nor eternal.

"But Epicurus actually wrote books on holiness and on piety toward the gods." But in what manner does he speak in them? So that you would say you were listening to Tiberius Coruncanius or Publius Scaevola, chief pontiffs, not to a man who has utterly done away with all religion and overthrown the temples and altars of the immortal gods, not with hands, like Xerxes, but with arguments. For what reason is there for you to say that the gods are to be worshipped by men, when the gods not only do not regard men but care for nothing at all and do nothing?

"But theirs is a certain pre-eminent and surpassing nature, such as ought of itself to draw the wise man to worship it." Can there be anything pre-eminent in a nature which, rejoicing in its own pleasure, is never going to do anything, nor does, nor has done? Moreover, what piety is owed to one from whom you have received nothing, or how can anything at all be owed to one who has done no service? For piety is justice toward the gods; but what claim of right can there be between us and them, when there is no fellowship of man with god? And holiness is the science of worshipping the gods; but why they are to be worshipped I do not understand, when no good is either received from them or hoped for.

And what reason is there to revere the gods out of admiration for a nature in which we see nothing excellent? For from superstition, of being freed from which you are wont to boast, it is easy to be free when you have done away with all the power of the gods. Unless perhaps you think that Diagoras, or Theodorus, who denied the gods altogether, could have been superstitious; I should not think even Protagoras, who was free to say neither that the gods exist nor that they do not. For the opinions of all these not only do away with superstition, in which there is an empty fear of the gods, but also with religion, which consists in the pious worship of the gods.

And those who said that the whole belief in the immortal gods was invented by wise men for the sake of the commonwealth, that those whom reason could not lead might be led to duty by religion — did they not utterly do away with all religion? And Prodicus of Ceos, who said that the things which were of use to the life of men had been reckoned among the gods — what religion, pray, did he leave?

And those who hand down that brave, or famous, or powerful men have after death come to be gods, and that these are the very ones whom we are wont to worship, pray to, and revere — are they not devoid of all religion? This theory was handled chiefly by Euhemerus, whom our Ennius above all others both translated and followed; but Euhemerus sets forth the deaths and the burials of the gods: does he, then, seem to have confirmed religion, or to have utterly done away with the whole of it? I pass over Eleusis, that holy and august shrine, "where the nations at the world's edge are initiated"; I leave aside Samothrace and those mysteries of Lemnos, "approached by night, in secret worship, thick-set with woodland hedges" — which, when unfolded and brought back to a rational account, teach us rather the nature of things than the nature of the gods.

[A passage is here lost from the text.]

To me indeed even Democritus, a man great above all others, from whose springs Epicurus watered his little gardens, seems to waver on the nature of the gods. For at one time he holds that images endowed with divinity reside in the universe of things; at another, that the principles of mind which are in that same universe are gods; at another, that animate images, which are wont either to do us good or to harm us, are gods; at another, certain images so vast and so great as to embrace the whole world from without. All which are worthier of the fatherland of Democritus than of Democritus himself; for who can grasp those images in his mind, who admire them, who judge them worthy of worship or of religion? Epicurus, however, has plucked up religion by the roots from the minds of men, since he has done away with both the help and the favour of the immortal gods. For while he says that the nature of god is best and most excellent, he denies at the same time that there is favour in god: he takes away that which is most proper to a nature best and most excellent. For what is better or what more excellent than goodness and beneficence? And since you would have god lack this, you would have no one — neither god nor man — dear to god, no one loved by him, no one cherished: so it comes about that not only are men neglected by the gods, but the gods themselves, one by another. How much better the Stoics, who are blamed by you! For they hold that the wise are friends to the wise even though unknown to one another; for nothing is more lovable than virtue, and he who has attained it, wherever in the world he is, will be loved by us.

But you — what mischief you do, when you set kindness and goodwill in weakness! For, to say nothing of the power and nature of the gods, do you not hold that not even men, unless they were weak, would have been beneficent and kind? Is there no natural affection among the good? The very word "dear" belongs to love, from which the name of friendship is derived; and if we refer it to our own profit, not to the advantage of him whom we love, that will be no friendship but a kind of trafficking in our own interests. Meadows and fields and herds of cattle are loved in that fashion, because profit is got from them; but the affection and friendship of men is freely given. How much more, then, that of the gods, who, needing nothing, both love one another and take thought for men! And if it were not so, why do we revere and pray to the gods, why do pontiffs preside over rites and augurs over auspices, what do we ask of the immortal gods, what do we vow? "But there is even a book of Epicurus on holiness."

We are mocked by a man not so much witty as free in the licence of his writing. For what holiness can there be if the gods take no care for human things, and what nature is there that, being animate, cares for nothing? Truer, then, no doubt, is that which Posidonius, the familiar friend of us all, set forth in the fifth book of his work On the Nature of the Gods: that Epicurus thinks there are no gods, and that what he said about the immortal gods he said to avert odium from himself; for he could not have been so senseless as to fashion a god like a little man — only in the outermost outlines, not in solid frame, endowed with all the limbs of a man yet without the least use of those limbs, a thin and transparent thing, granting nothing to anyone, doing no favour, caring for nothing at all, doing nothing. Such a nature, first, cannot exist; and Epicurus, seeing this, in fact does away with the gods while in word he leaves them;

and next, if god is most certainly such that he is held by no favour and no love of men, then farewell to him — for why should I say "may he be propitious"? For he can be propitious to no one, since, as you say, all favour and love are bound up with weakness.'"