Book 1

1.1 Many matters in philosophy have still received no adequate explanation; but the question of the nature of the gods, Brutus—as you know very well—is especially difficult and obscure, though supremely rewarding for the mind to understand and essential to the proper ordering of religion. The profound differences and disagreements among the most learned men on this subject should themselves furnish powerful evidence that the starting point of philosophy […] knowledge, and that the Academics were wise to withhold assent where things are uncertain. For what is more shameful than rashness? And what is so rash, so unworthy of a wise man’s dignity and steadfastness, as either holding a false belief or defending without any hesitation something not sufficiently examined, apprehended, and understood?

1.2 In this inquiry, for instance, most thinkers have affirmed that gods exist: that is the most probable view, and the one to which we all come †under nature’s guidance. Protagoras said that he was uncertain; Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene thought that no gods existed at all. Yet those who affirmed their existence differ and disagree so greatly that it would be an endless undertaking to enumerate their opinions. Many accounts are given of the gods’ forms, their dwelling places and abodes, and their manner of life, and philosophers dispute these matters with the sharpest disagreement. Above all, on the point that contains the heart of the question—whether the gods do nothing, undertake nothing, and remain wholly free of the care and management of affairs, or whether, on the contrary, they made and established everything at the beginning and govern and move everything through infinite time—the disagreement is profound. Unless this is settled, humanity must remain in the deepest error and in ignorance of the most important things.

1.3 For there are, and have been, philosophers who believe that the gods exercise no care whatever over human affairs. If their opinion is true, what place can there be for piety, holiness, or religion? All these must be offered in purity and innocence to the divine power, but only if the gods notice them and if the immortal gods have bestowed something upon the human race. If, however, the gods neither can nor wish to help us, take no interest in us at all, do not observe what we do, and can impart nothing to human life, why should we offer the immortal gods any worship, honors, or prayers? Piety, like the other virtues, cannot exist in the outward show of a false pretense; and with it holiness and religion must also disappear. Their removal brings disorder and great confusion into life;

1.4 and I am inclined to think that removing piety toward the gods would also remove good faith, the fellowship of the human race, and justice, the one preeminent virtue. But there are other philosophers, great and distinguished men, who believe that the whole universe is ordered and governed by divine intelligence and reason. Nor is that all: they also believe that the gods take thought for human life and provide for it. Crops and everything else the earth produces, the weather and the changing seasons, the alterations of the sky through which everything born of the earth ripens and matures—all these, they think, are the immortal gods’ gifts to humanity. They assemble many other arguments, to be discussed in these books, of such a kind that the immortal gods seem almost to have fashioned these very things for human use. Against these thinkers Carneades argued at such length as to awaken in anyone not altogether sluggish a passion to investigate the truth.

1.5 For on no subject do not only the unlearned but even the learned disagree so greatly. Their opinions are so various and so much at odds that it is certainly possible that none of them is true, but certainly impossible that more than one is.

On this issue we can both reconcile our well-disposed critics and refute our malicious detractors, so that the latter regret their attacks and the former rejoice in having learned something. Those who offer friendly warnings deserve instruction; those who pursue us with hostility must be repelled.

1.6 I see that much discussion has arisen about the several books I have published in a short time. Some wonder where this sudden enthusiasm for philosophy came from; others want to know what settled opinions I hold on each subject. Many, I have noticed, also find it surprising that I have chosen above all a philosophy that takes away the light and seems to spread a kind of night over things, and that I have unexpectedly undertaken the defense of a school deserted and long abandoned. But I did not suddenly begin to philosophize. From my earliest years I have devoted no small measure of effort and attention to that pursuit, and I was philosophizing most when I seemed to be doing so least. My speeches, filled with philosophers’ thoughts, bear witness to this, as do my friendships with the learned men whose company has always enriched my house, and those eminent teachers under whom I studied: Diodotus, Philo, Antiochus, and Posidonius.

1.7 And if all the precepts of philosophy concern life, I believe that in both public and private affairs I have practiced what reason and learning prescribed. But if anyone asks what prompted me to commit these matters to writing so late, nothing is easier for me to explain. When enforced inactivity had left me dispirited, and the condition of the republic was such that it had necessarily to be governed by the counsel and care of a single man, I thought, first, that for the republic’s own sake I should explain philosophy to our people. I considered it of great importance to our country’s dignity and renown that matters so weighty and so noble should also find expression in Latin literature.

1.8 I regret this undertaking all the less because I readily perceive how many people I have inspired not merely to study but to write. Many men educated in Greek learning could not share what they had learned with their fellow citizens, because they doubted that what they had received from the Greeks could be expressed in Latin. In this field we seem to have made such progress that the Greeks do not surpass us even in richness of vocabulary.

1.9 Another impulse toward this work was the anguish of mind caused by a great and grievous blow of fortune. Had I been able to find some greater relief, I would not have sought refuge chiefly here. Yet there was no way I could better enjoy that very relief than by devoting myself not merely to reading books but to a thorough study of the whole of philosophy. All its parts and branches are most easily understood when entire questions are unfolded in writing. For there is a wonderful continuity and sequence in these matters: one seems linked to another, and all fitted and bound together.

1.10 Those who ask what I myself think about each subject show more curiosity than they need. In argument we should seek the weight of reasons, not of authority. Indeed, the authority of those who profess to teach often harms those who wish to learn: they cease to exercise their own judgment and take as settled whatever they see has been decided by the person they approve. Nor do I commend the practice attributed to the Pythagoreans. When they asserted something in discussion and were asked why it was so, they reportedly used to answer, “He himself said it”; “he himself” was Pythagoras. So powerful was a preconceived opinion that authority prevailed even without reason.

1.11 As for those surprised that I have chosen this particular school, I think I have answered them adequately in my four books on Academic philosophy. Nor have I undertaken the defense of something deserted and abandoned. Opinions do not perish when their authors die, though perhaps they miss the illumination of a great exponent. Thus this philosophical method of arguing against every position and passing no explicit judgment on anything, which began with Socrates, was revived by Arcesilaus, and strengthened by Carneades, flourished down to our own age. I understand that in Greece itself it is now almost orphaned. This, I think, has happened through human sluggishness, not through any fault of the Academy. For if mastering a single school is a great achievement, how much greater to master them all! Yet this is necessary for those whose purpose is to speak both against and for every philosopher in order to discover the truth.

1.12 I do not claim to have attained the capacity for an undertaking so great and difficult; I openly acknowledge that I have pursued it. Nor, however, can those who philosophize by this method have nothing to follow. I have discussed this subject more carefully elsewhere, but some people are so slow and unwilling to learn that they seem to need repeated reminders. We are not people who think nothing true, but people who maintain that every truth has certain falsehoods attached to it, so similar that they provide no sure mark by which to judge and assent. From this follows the further conclusion that many things are probable: although they cannot be grasped with certainty, they have a distinctive and vivid appearance, and the wise man’s life may be guided by them.

1.13 But now, to free myself from all ill will, I shall set the philosophers’ opinions on the nature of the gods before the public. Here, surely, everyone should be summoned to judge which of these opinions is true. Only then will the Academy seem presumptuous to me—if all agree, or if someone is found who has discovered what is true. And so I feel like crying out, as in The Young Companions:To the good faith of the gods, all my fellow citizens, all the young,

I cry, appeal, implore, entreat, weep, and plead!Not over some utterly trivial matter, as when the character complains that capital crimes are being committed in the city: “A courtesan refuses money from her devoted lover”;

1.14 but so that they may attend, examine, and consider what we should think about religion, piety, holiness, ceremonies, good faith, and the oath; about temples, shrines, and solemn sacrifices; about the auspices themselves, over which we preside. All these matters must be referred to this inquiry into the immortal gods. Surely so great a disagreement among the most learned men on a matter of supreme importance will force even those who think they possess certainty to feel some doubt.

1.15 I have often noticed this, but never more clearly than when the immortal gods were discussed with remarkable care and precision at the house of my friend Gaius Cotta. During the Latin Festival I went there at his invitation and request, and found him sitting in a recess, debating with the senator Gaius Velleius, whom the Epicureans then regarded as the foremost Roman of their school. Quintus Lucilius Balbus was also present. He had made such progress in Stoicism that he could be compared with the outstanding Greeks in that field.

When Cotta saw me, he said, “You have come at just the right moment. A dispute on a great subject is arising between Velleius and me, and in view of your interests it is fitting that you should take part.”

1.16 “Yes,” I said, “I too think I have arrived at the right moment, as you say. Here are three leading representatives of three schools. If Marcus Piso were here, no philosophy—at least none of those held in honor—would lack a place.”

“If the book our friend Antiochus recently sent to Balbus speaks the truth,” Cotta replied, “you have no reason to miss your friend Piso. Antiochus thinks the Stoics and Peripatetics agree in substance and differ only in words. I should like to know what you think of that book, Balbus.”

“What do I think?” he said. “I am surprised that Antiochus, a man of exceptional acuteness, failed to see the immense difference between the Stoics, who separate moral goodness from advantages not in name but in their entire nature, and the Peripatetics, who blend moral goodness with advantages, making them differ in magnitude and, so to speak, degree rather than in kind. This is no small disagreement about words, but an enormous disagreement about things. However, another time for that; now, if you please, let us return to what we began.”

1.17 “By all means,” said Cotta. Then, looking at me: “But so that our new arrival may know what is being discussed, our subject was the nature of the gods. Since it seemed to me profoundly obscure, as it always does, I was asking Velleius for Epicurus’s opinion. So, Velleius, if it is no trouble, repeat what you had begun.”

“Certainly I shall, though this man has come to help you, not me. Both of you,” he added with a smile, “learned from the same Philo to know nothing.”

Then I said, “Let Cotta answer for what we learned. But do not suppose I have come as his supporter rather than as a listener—and an impartial listener, free to judge, bound by no obligation to defend a fixed opinion whether I wish to or not.”

1.18 Then Velleius, with all the confidence his school customarily displays, fearing nothing so much as the appearance of doubt on any subject, and sounding as though he had just descended from the council of the gods and Epicurus’s spaces between worlds, began: “Listen, not to idle inventions of opinion; not to Plato’s god from the Timaeus, that craftsman and builder of the universe; not to the Stoics’ prophetic old woman Pronoia, whom we may call Providence in Latin; nor to the universe itself, endowed with mind and senses, that round, burning, revolving god. These are prodigies and marvels dreamed by philosophers, not reasoned out by them.

1.19 “With what eyes of the mind could your Plato have viewed that workshop for so great a construction, in which he has his god put together and build the universe? What were the labors, the tools, the levers, the machines, the assistants for so great an undertaking? How could air, fire, water, and earth obey and submit to the architect’s will? Where did those five forms originate from which everything else is shaped, falling together so aptly as to affect the mind and produce sensations? It would take too long to discuss every detail of a scheme that seems more a matter of wishes than discoveries.

1.20 “But the crowning touch is this: after presenting the universe not merely as something born, but as something almost made by hand, he declared that it would last forever. Do you think a man has tasted even the first drop of natural philosophy—that is, the account of nature—if he thinks anything that has come into being can be eternal? What combination cannot be dissolved? What has a beginning but no end? And if your Providence, Lucilius, is the same as his, I ask for what I asked just now: the assistants, the machines, the entire plan and equipment of the whole enterprise. If it is different, why did it make the universe mortal, rather than everlasting, as Plato’s god did?”

1.21 “Of both I ask why they suddenly emerged as builders of the universe, after sleeping through countless ages. For the absence of a universe did not mean the absence of ages. By ages I do not now mean those completed by the tally of days and nights and the yearly courses; I admit that these could not have existed without the revolution of the universe. But there was an eternity stretching back through infinite time, measured by no division of time, yet intelligible in its extent. For we cannot even conceive that there was

1.22 a time when there was no time. In that immeasurable expanse, then, I ask you, Balbus, why was your Providence idle? Was it avoiding labor? But labor does not touch a god; nor was there any, when all nature—heaven, fires, lands, and seas—obeyed the divine will. And why should a god desire to adorn the universe with figures and lights, like an aedile decorating the city? To improve his own dwelling? Evidently, then, he had previously spent infinite time in darkness, as though in a hovel. And afterward? Are we to suppose he delighted in the variety with which we see heaven and earth adorned? What pleasure could that give a god? If it could, he could not have gone without it so long.

1.23 “Or was all this established by god for humanity’s sake, as you generally say? For the wise? Then this vast construction was undertaken for a handful of people. For fools? In the first place, there was no reason to do good to the wicked. And then, what did he accomplish? All fools are undoubtedly utterly wretched, first because they are fools—for what can we call more wretched than folly?—and then because life contains so many hardships that the wise soften by balancing them against its advantages, while fools can neither avoid those approaching nor endure those present. As for those who declared the universe itself a living and wise being, they utterly failed to see what sort of form could accommodate an intelligent mind. I shall speak of that shortly; for now I shall say only this:

1.24 “I marvel at the dullness of those who insist that a living being, immortal and blessed, is round because Plato says no shape is more beautiful. To me, a cylinder, a square, a cone, or a pyramid seems more beautiful. And what life is assigned to this round god? Naturally, he is to whirl at a speed whose equal cannot even be imagined. Amid this I cannot see where a steadfast mind or blessed life could find a footing. And if something would be painful when manifested in the smallest part of our bodies, why should it not also be considered painful in a god? The earth, after all, being part of the universe, is also part of the god. Yet we see immense regions of the earth uninhabitable and uncultivated: some are scorched by the sun’s approach, others frozen with snow and frost by its distant withdrawal. If the universe is a god, these regions, being parts of the universe, must be regarded as limbs of the god, some burning, others chilled.

1.25 “So much for your doctrines, Lucilius. As for the character of […] I shall begin with the earliest of the predecessors. Thales of Miletus, the first to inquire into such matters, said that water was the origin of things and god the mind that fashioned everything from water—if gods can exist without sensation! And why did he attach mind to water, if mind itself can subsist without a body? Anaximander’s opinion was that the gods are born, rising and passing away at long intervals, and that they are innumerable worlds. But how can we conceive a god who is not eternal?

1.26 “After him Anaximenes declared air to be god, saying that it comes into being, is immeasurable and infinite, and is always in motion—as though air without any shape could be a god, especially when a god ought to possess not merely some form but the most beautiful; or as though mortality did not follow everything that has had a birth. Next Anaxagoras, who learned from Anaximenes, was the first to maintain that the ordering and arrangement of all things were designed and accomplished by the power and reason of an infinite mind. He failed to see that in the infinite there can be no continuous movement joined to sensation, and indeed no sensation at all unless nature itself is struck and feels the impact. Besides, if he intended this mind to be a kind of living creature, it must contain something within that would make it a living creature. But what could lie farther within than mind? Then let it be enclosed by an external body.

1.27 “Since that does not please him, a bare and simple mind, with nothing attached to it, capable of sensation, seems beyond the reach of our understanding and conception. Alcmaeon of Croton, who assigned divinity to the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies, and also to the soul, did not perceive that he was granting immortality to mortal things. Pythagoras, who thought a soul extended and moved throughout all nature, from which our souls were plucked, did not see that the detachment of human souls would tear and rend the god; and that when souls were unhappy, as happens to most, part of the god would be unhappy—which is impossible.

1.28 “And why should a human soul be ignorant of anything if it were a god? Again, how could that god, if it were nothing but soul, be fixed in the universe or poured through it? Xenophanes held that, besides attaching mind to it, all that is infinite is god. On mind he will incur the same criticism as the others; on infinity a still sharper one, for in it nothing can have either sensation or coherence. Parmenides invented something quite imaginary: a crownlike structure—he calls it a stephanē, a wreath—an unbroken ring of blazing light encircling heaven, which he calls god. No one can suspect either a divine form or sensation in it. He has many other monstrosities of the same sort, since he refers war, discord, desire, and the like to divinity, though these are destroyed by sickness, sleep, forgetfulness, or time. His similar doctrines about the stars have already been criticized in another thinker; let them pass here.

1.29 “Empedocles, wrong on many other matters, goes most shamefully astray in his opinion of the gods. He holds that the four elements of which he thinks everything composed are divine, although it is plain that they come into being, perish, and lack all sensation. Protagoras, too, who declares that he has no clear knowledge at all about the gods—whether they exist or not, or what they are like—seems not to have the faintest idea of their nature. And Democritus? He numbers among the gods now images and their movements, now the substance that pours out and emits those images, now our own thought and understanding. Is he not deeply mistaken? Moreover, when he denies that anything is everlasting, on the ground that nothing always remains in the same condition, does he not abolish god altogether, leaving no conception of him remaining? And what sensation or divine form can air possess, the god adopted by Diogenes of Apollonia?

1.30 “It would take too long to discuss Plato’s inconsistency. In the Timaeus he denies that the father of this universe can be named; in the Laws he thinks we ought not to inquire at all what god is. Moreover, he wants god to be without any body—incorporeal, as the Greeks say—but what such a being could be is unintelligible. It must lack sensation, practical wisdom, and pleasure, all of which we include in our conception of the gods. Yet both in the Timaeus and in the Laws he says that the universe, heaven, the stars, the earth, souls, and those gods handed down by ancestral tradition are divine. These assertions are plainly false in themselves and violently at odds with one another.”

1.31 “Xenophon, too, makes almost the same mistakes in fewer words. In his account of Socrates’ sayings he has Socrates argue that we should not inquire into god’s form, and yet call both the sun and the soul god, speaking now of one god and now of several. These involve nearly the same errors as those I mentioned in Plato.

1.32 “Antisthenes, in the book entitled On Nature, says there are many gods of popular belief but one god of nature, thereby doing away with the power and nature of the gods. Much the same is true of Speusippus, who follows his uncle Plato: by declaring that a certain animate power governs everything, he tries to uproot the knowledge of the gods from our minds.

1.33 “Aristotle, in the third book of On Philosophy, introduces much confusion in disagreeing with his master Plato. At one time he assigns all divinity to mind; at another he calls the universe itself god; at another he places someone else over the universe, assigning him the task of governing and maintaining its motion by a kind of reverse rotation. Then he calls the heat of heaven god, not realizing that heaven is part of the universe, which he himself elsewhere designated god. How can that divine consciousness of heaven be preserved at such speed? And where are all those other gods, if we count heaven too as a god? When, again, he makes god incorporeal, he deprives him of all sensation, and of wisdom too. Besides, how can the universe move without a body, or how can it be tranquil and blessed if it is always moving?

1.34 “His fellow student Xenocrates is no wiser in this matter. His books On the Nature of the Gods describe no divine form. He says there are eight gods: five are those called wandering stars; one is to be regarded as a single god formed from all the fixed stars in heaven, like scattered limbs; he adds the sun as the seventh and the moon as the eighth. What sensation could make these blessed is incomprehensible. Heraclides of Pontus, from the same school of Plato, filled his books with childish fables. Yet he considers now the universe, now mind divine; he also grants divinity to the wandering stars, deprives god of sensation, and makes his form changeable. In the same book he again counts earth and heaven among the gods.

1.35 “Theophrastus’s inconsistency is intolerable as well. At one time he assigns divine sovereignty to mind, at another to heaven, and then to the constellations and stars. Nor should we listen to his student Strato, called the natural philosopher. He holds that all divine power resides in nature, which contains the causes of birth, growth, and diminution, but lacks all sensation and form.

1.36 “Zeno—to come now to your people, Balbus—thinks natural law divine, possessing the power to command right actions and forbid their opposites. How he makes this law a living being we cannot understand; yet we certainly want a god to be alive. Elsewhere the same man calls the ether god—if a god without sensation is conceivable, one who never comes before our minds in prayers, wishes, or vows. In other books he considers a certain reason permeating the whole natural world to be endowed with divine power. He attributes the same to the stars, then to years, months, and the changing seasons. When he interprets Hesiod’s Theogony, or Birth of the Gods, he entirely removes our familiar, established conceptions of the gods. For he does not count Jupiter, Juno, Vesta, or anyone bearing such names among the gods, but teaches that these names have been assigned, with a certain symbolic meaning, to lifeless and speechless things.

1.37 “His pupil Aristo’s opinion is no less deeply mistaken. He holds that god’s form cannot be conceived, denies sensation to the gods, and doubts altogether whether god is alive. Cleanthes, who attended Zeno along with the man I just mentioned, now calls the universe itself god, now assigns the name to the mind and soul of all nature, now judges that the ultimate, highest fire, spread around everything, encircling and embracing everything at its outermost limit—the fire called ether—is most certainly god. In the books he wrote against pleasure he seems delirious: now he invents a certain shape and appearance for the gods, now assigns all divinity to the stars, now thinks nothing more divine than reason. Thus the god whom we recognize in thought, and wish to lodge in the mind’s conception as though in his proper resting place, appears nowhere at all. Persaeus, another pupil of Zeno, says that those who discovered something greatly useful for civilized life were regarded as gods, and that useful and beneficial things themselves were called by divine names. He would not even say that these were discoveries of the gods, but that they were themselves divine.

1.38 “What could be more absurd than either honoring shabby and ugly things as gods or placing among the gods men already destroyed by death, whose entire worship would consist of mourning?

1.39 “Chrysippus, considered the shrewdest interpreter of Stoic dreams, assembles a great crowd of unknown gods—so unknown that we cannot even frame a conjectural image of them, though our minds seem able to picture anything in thought. He says divine power resides in reason and in the soul and mind of universal nature. He calls the universe itself god, and the whole diffusion of its soul; then its ruling principle, residing in intelligence and reason; the universal common nature that embraces all things; then the fated †shadow and necessity of future events; and fire, and the ether I mentioned earlier. Then he includes the things that naturally flow and spread—water, earth, and air—the sun, moon, stars, and the totality in which everything is contained; and also those men who have attained immortality.

1.40 “He further argues that the ether is what people call Jupiter; that the air flowing through the seas is Neptune; and that the earth is what is called Ceres. He works through the names of the other gods in a similar fashion. He also says that Jupiter is the force of perpetual and eternal law, a kind of guide to life and teacher of duties, and calls this same force fated necessity, the everlasting truth of future events. None of these things is such that divine power can be seen to reside in it.”

1.41 “So much for his first book On the Nature of the Gods. In the second he tries to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer to his own statements about the immortal gods in the first, so that even the most ancient poets, who never so much as dreamed of these doctrines, should appear to have been Stoics. Following him, Diogenes of Babylon, in his book entitled On Minerva, transfers Jupiter’s labor in childbirth and the maiden’s birth to natural philosophy and detaches them from myth.

1.42 “What I have set out is, for the most part, not philosophers’ judgments but the dreams of madmen. Nor are the stories poured out by the poets, whose very sweetness has done harm, much more absurd. They have introduced gods inflamed with anger and maddened by desire, and made us see their wars, battles, fights, and wounds; their hatred, separations, and discord; their births and deaths, complaints and lamentations; their desires unleashed in every kind of excess, their adulteries and chains, their couplings with human beings, and mortal children born of an immortal parent.

1.43 “With the poets’ error we may associate the monstrous tales of the Magi and the Egyptians’ madness in the same field, as well as popular opinions, which waver in the deepest inconsistency and ignorance of truth.

“Anyone considering how thoughtlessly and rashly these claims are made should revere Epicurus and count him among those very beings who are the subject of this inquiry. For he alone saw, first, that gods exist, because nature herself had impressed the conception of them on everyone’s mind. What nation, what race of people, lacks without instruction a certain anticipation of the gods? Epicurus calls this prolēpsis: a conception of something already present in the mind, without which nothing can be understood, investigated, or discussed. The force and usefulness of this principle we have learned from that heavenly book of Epicurus on the standard and criterion of judgment.

1.44 “You see, then, how splendidly the foundation of this inquiry has been laid. Since the belief was established by no convention, custom, or law, and the agreement of everyone without exception remains firm, we must understand that gods exist, because we possess implanted—or rather innate—knowledge of them. What everyone’s nature agrees on must be true; therefore we must admit that gods exist. And since this is agreed by almost everyone, not only philosophers but also the unlearned, we acknowledge another agreed point: we possess this anticipation, as I called it before, or preconception of the gods. New things require new names: Epicurus himself called it prolēpsis,

1.45 “a word no one had used for it before. This, then, is our preconception: we consider the gods blessed and immortal. The same nature that gave us a conception of the gods themselves also engraved upon our minds the conviction that they are eternal and blessed. If that is so, Epicurus rightly stated this doctrine: whatever is blessed and eternal neither has any trouble itself nor causes any to another, and so is subject neither to anger nor to favor, since everything of that kind belongs to weakness.

“If we sought nothing but to worship the gods with piety and to free ourselves from superstition, enough would have been said. For the preeminent nature of the gods, being both eternal and supremely blessed, would receive humanity’s pious worship—whatever excels rightly deserves reverence—and all fear of divine power and anger would have been dispelled. We understand that anger and favor alike are excluded from a blessed and immortal nature; remove them, and no terrors threaten us from above. But to confirm this belief, the mind inquires into god’s form, life, and the activity and movement of his intelligence.

1.46 “As for form, nature partly instructs us, and reason partly teaches us. By nature, all of us in every nation conceive the gods in no form but the human. For what other form ever appears to anyone, awake or asleep? But lest everything be referred to our primary notions, reason itself demonstrates the same conclusion.

1.47 “For it seems fitting that the most excellent nature, whether by virtue of its blessedness or its eternity, should also be the most beautiful. What arrangement of limbs, what configuration of features, what shape or appearance can be more beautiful than the human? You Stoics, Lucilius—my friend Cotta takes now one side, now the other—when you portray divine workmanship and construction, regularly describe how everything in the human figure is adapted not only to use but also to beauty.

1.48 “If the human figure surpasses the form of all living creatures, and god is a living creature, surely his figure is the most beautiful of all. And since it is agreed that the gods are supremely blessed, while no one can be blessed without virtue, virtue cannot exist without reason, and reason can reside nowhere except in a human form, we must acknowledge that the gods have a human appearance.

1.49 “Yet this appearance is not body but something like body; it has not blood but something like blood. Although Epicurus’s discoveries here are too acute, and his account too subtle, for just anyone to grasp, I rely on your intelligence and discuss them more briefly than the subject requires. Epicurus, who not only sees hidden and deeply concealed things in his mind but handles them as though with his hand, teaches that the gods’ power and nature are perceived not by the senses but by the mind; not as something solid or numerically individual, like the things he calls solid bodies because of their firmness, but through images perceived in similarity and succession. An infinite appearance of closely similar images arises from innumerable indivisible particles and flows toward the gods; our mind, fixed and intent upon those images with the greatest pleasure, attains an understanding of what a blessed and eternal nature is.

1.50 “The supreme power of infinity is vast indeed, and most worthy of deep and attentive contemplation. We must understand its nature to be such that everything has its counterpart in a corresponding equal. Epicurus calls this isonomia, or equal distribution. From it follows this conclusion: if the multitude of mortals is so great, that of immortals is no smaller; and if the things that destroy are innumerable, those that preserve must also be infinite.

“You regularly ask us, Balbus, what the gods’ life is like and how they pass their time.”

1.51 “Clearly, it is a life than which nothing happier or richer in every blessing can be conceived. A god does nothing, is entangled in no occupations, undertakes no labor. He rejoices in his own wisdom and virtue, and knows with certainty that he will always enjoy pleasures at once supreme and eternal.

1.52 “We could rightly call this god blessed, but yours is burdened with work. If the universe itself is god, what can be less restful than revolving around the axis of heaven at astonishing speed without a moment’s interruption? Yet nothing without rest is blessed. Or if there is some god within the universe to direct and govern it, maintaining the courses of the stars, the changes of the seasons, the succession and order of events, watching over land and sea to safeguard human lives and interests, he is certainly entangled in troublesome and laborious business.

1.53 “We, however, place the blessed life in peace of mind and freedom from every duty. The same teacher who taught us everything else taught us that the universe was produced by nature, with no need of a builder. This thing that you deny can be accomplished without divine skill is so easy that nature will produce, is producing, and has produced innumerable worlds. Because you cannot see how nature can accomplish this without some intelligence, like tragic poets unable to unravel their plot, you take refuge in a god.

1.54 “You would certainly not require his services if you saw the immensity of space, unbounded and limitless in every direction. Launching and stretching itself into that space, the mind travels so far and wide, yet never sees a final shore on which it can come to rest. In this immensity of breadth, length, and height, an infinite host of innumerable atoms flies about. Though void lies between them, they nevertheless cling to one another, catching hold and forming connections. From these arise the shapes and forms of things that you think cannot be produced without bellows and anvils. And so you have imposed upon our necks an everlasting master whom we must fear day and night. Who would not fear a god who foresees, thinks about, and observes everything, considers everything his concern, and is inquisitive and full of business?

1.55 “From this arose, first, your fated necessity, which you call heimarmenē: you say that whatever happens has flowed from eternal truth and an unbroken chain of causes. What value should we place on a philosophy that, like little old women—and uneducated ones at that—thinks everything happens by fate? Next comes your mantikē, called divination in Latin. If we were willing to listen to you, it would steep us in such superstition that we would have to revere inspectors of entrails, augurs, soothsayers, prophets, and interpreters of dreams.

1.56 “Freed by Epicurus from these terrors and restored to liberty, we do not fear beings whom we understand neither to devise any trouble for themselves nor to seek it for others; and we worship their excellent and preeminent nature with piety and holiness.

“But my enthusiasm has carried me away, and I fear I have spoken too long. Still, it was difficult to leave so great and splendid a subject unfinished once begun—though I should have thought less about speaking than about listening.”

1.57 Then Cotta, with his customary courtesy, said, “But, Velleius, if you had not said something, you certainly could have heard nothing from me. The reason something is true does not usually occur to me as readily as the reason it is false. That has often happened, and it happened just now as I listened to you. Ask me to describe the nature of the gods, and perhaps I shall give no answer. Ask whether I think it such as you have just described, and I shall say that nothing seems to me less likely.

“But before I approach the arguments you advanced, I shall tell you what I think of you yourself.

1.58 “I believe I often heard your friend Lucius Crassus place you unquestionably above all Romans, and compare few Greek Epicureans with you. But knowing how wonderfully fond of you he was, I thought his affection had made him speak too generously. Now, although I am reluctant to praise someone to his face, I judge that you have spoken clearly about an obscure and difficult subject, not merely with an abundance of thoughts but with a greater elegance of language than your school generally displays.

1.59 “When I was at Athens, I frequently heard Zeno, whom our friend Philo used to call the leader of the Epicurean chorus. Indeed, Philo himself advised me to do so—so that, I suppose, after hearing the leading Epicurean explain how their doctrines were argued, I could judge more easily how well they were refuted. He spoke not like most of them, but as you do: distinctly, weightily, elegantly. Yet what often happened with him happened again just now as I listened to you: I was distressed that so great a talent—forgive my saying so—had fallen upon opinions so trivial, not to say so foolish.

1.60 “Nor shall I myself now offer anything better. As I said just now, on almost every subject, but especially in natural philosophy, I could more readily say what is not so than what is. Ask me what god is, or what he is like, and I shall take Simonides as my authority. When the tyrant Hiero asked him that very question, he requested one day to consider it. Asked again the next day, he requested two. When he repeatedly doubled the number of days and Hiero, in astonishment, asked why, he answered, ‘Because the longer I consider it, the more obscure the prospect seems to me.’ Simonides, I think—tradition makes him not only a delightful poet but in other respects learned and wise—had so many acute and subtle thoughts occur to him that, doubting which was truest, he despaired of finding truth at all.”

1.61 “But your Epicurus—for I prefer to debate with him rather than you—what does he say worthy not merely of philosophy but even of ordinary good sense?

“In an inquiry into the nature of the gods, the first question is whether gods exist or not. ‘It is difficult to deny it.’ I grant that, if the question is asked before a public assembly; but in a conversation like this, in a gathering of friends, it is very easy. Thus I myself, a pontiff who believes that public ceremonies and religious observances must be guarded with the utmost reverence, should like to be thoroughly convinced of this first point, that gods exist, not merely as a matter of opinion but as an established truth. For many disturbing considerations arise, so that at times there seem to be no gods.

1.62 “But see how generously I deal with you. I shall not touch doctrines you share with other philosophers, such as this very one. Almost everyone, and I myself above all, believes that gods exist. So I do not contest it; nevertheless, I think the reasoning you offer insufficiently strong. You said that the belief of people of every nation and race was a powerful enough argument for admitting the gods’ existence. But that claim is not only weak in itself; it is also false. In the first place, how do you know the opinions of the nations? I believe there are many peoples so brutalized by savagery that they have no inkling of gods.

1.63 “Did not Diagoras, called the Atheist, and later Theodorus openly abolish divine existence? As for Protagoras of Abdera, whom you just mentioned, perhaps the greatest sophist of his time, he began a book with these words: ‘Concerning the gods, I cannot say either that they exist or that they do not exist.’ By order of the Athenians he was banished from their city and territory, and his books were burned in the assembly. This, I think, made many people more reluctant to profess such a view, since even doubt could not escape punishment. What shall we say of the sacrilegious, the impious, and the perjurers?If ever Lucius Tubulus,

“If Lupus, Carbo, or Neptune’s son,“as Lucilius says, had thought there were gods, would he have been so perjured or so corrupt?

1.64 “So this argument is not as well established as it seems for confirming your position. But since other philosophers share it, I shall leave it aside for the present. I would rather come to doctrines peculiar to your school.

1.65 “I grant that gods exist. Teach me, then, where they come from, where they are, what they are like in body, mind, and life; these are the things I want to know. For every purpose you abuse the sovereign freedom of your atoms. From them you fashion and produce whatever comes into your head, as the saying goes. But in the first place there are no atoms. For nothing […] is empty of body, and every place is occupied by bodies; thus there is no void, and nothing can be indivisible.

1.66 “I am now pouring out the oracles of natural philosophers. Whether they are true or false I do not know, but they are nevertheless more like the truth than yours. Those scandalous claims of Democritus—or of Leucippus before him—that there are tiny bodies, some smooth, others rough, some round, others angular and hooked, some curved and, as it were, crooked; and that heaven and earth were produced from these, with no compelling natural power, but through a kind of chance collision: this is the opinion you, Gaius Velleius, have maintained to your present age. Anyone would sooner dislodge you from the whole settled course of your life than from that authority. For you decided that you ought to be an Epicurean before you learned these doctrines. Thus you had either to take these scandals into your mind or surrender the name of the philosophy you had adopted.

1.67 “What reward would induce you to stop being an Epicurean? ‘None,’ you say, ‘that would make me abandon the principle of a happy life and the truth.’ So this is the truth? About the happy life I make no objection, though you think even a god cannot have one unless he positively languishes in idleness. But where is the truth? In the innumerable worlds, I suppose, some coming into being and others falling apart at every tiniest instant of time? Or in indivisible particles shaping such magnificent works with no directing nature, no reason? But I am forgetting the generosity with which I began to treat you just now, and taking in too much. Let me grant, then, that everything consists of indivisible particles. What follows for our subject?

1.68 “For our inquiry concerns the nature of the gods. Let them be made of atoms, by all means; then they are not eternal. †Whatever is made of atoms came into being at some time. If the gods came into being, there were no gods before they were born; and if gods have a beginning, they must also have an end, as you yourself argued just now about Plato’s universe. Where, then, is your ‘blessed and eternal,’ the two words by which you define god? When you try to establish this, you crawl into a thicket. For you said that in god there is not body but something like body, not blood but something like blood.

1.69 “You very often do this: when you say something improbable and wish to escape criticism, you introduce something that cannot possibly happen at all. It would have been better to concede the very point in dispute than to resist so shamelessly. Thus Epicurus saw that if atoms moved downward by their own weight, nothing would be in our power, since their motion would be fixed and necessary. He discovered a way to escape necessity, something Democritus had evidently overlooked: an atom, he said, while carried straight downward by its weight and heaviness, swerves a little.

1.70 “It is more disgraceful to say this than to be unable to defend the position he wants. He does the same against the logicians. They teach that in every disjunction of the form ‘either yes or no,’ one alternative is true. He feared that if some statement such as ‘Epicurus will either be alive tomorrow or not be alive’ were granted, one alternative would become necessary; so he denied the necessity of the entire ‘either yes or no.’ What could be more obtuse? Arcesilaus pressed Zeno, maintaining himself that all sensory appearances were false, while Zeno said some appearances were false, not all. Epicurus feared that if one appearance were false, none would be true, and declared all the senses messengers of truth. None of this, except †very much; he took a heavier blow to ward off a lighter one.”

1.71 “He does the same with the nature of the gods. To avoid a combination of indivisible bodies, lest dissolution and dispersal follow, he denies that the gods have body, giving them something like body, and not blood but something like blood. People think it remarkable that one inspector of entrails does not laugh when he sees another. Is that more remarkable than your ability to keep from laughing among yourselves? ‘It is not body, but something like body.’ I could understand what that meant if it were modeled in wax or clay figures; what something like body or something like blood means in a god I cannot understand. Neither can you, Velleius; you merely refuse to admit it.

1.72 “You repeat like dictated lessons the things Epicurus dreamed up while yawning, though he boasted, as we see in his writings, that he had no teacher. I should readily believe that even without his boasting, just as I would believe the owner of a badly built house who boasted that he had employed no architect. For there is not a trace here of the Academy, not a trace of the Lyceum, not even of a child’s schooling. He could have heard Xenocrates—what a man, immortal gods!—and some think he did. He himself denies it; I believe him—I could believe no one more. He says he heard a certain Pamphilus, a pupil of Plato, at Samos. As a young man he lived there with his father and brothers, because his father Neocles had gone there to obtain an allotment of land; but since the little farm did not support him adequately, I suppose, he became a schoolmaster.

1.73 “But Epicurus treats this Platonist with extraordinary contempt, so afraid is he of seeming ever to have learned anything. In Nausiphanes, the follower of Democritus, he is caught: though he does not deny having heard him, he assails him with every insult. Yet if he had not heard these doctrines of Democritus, what had he heard? What in Epicurus’s natural philosophy does not come from Democritus? Though he changed certain things, such as the swerve of atoms I mentioned a little while ago, he repeats most of the same doctrines: atoms, void, images, infinite space, innumerable worlds, their birth and destruction—almost everything that constitutes an account of nature.

“Now what do you understand by that ‘something like body’ and ‘something like blood’?

1.74 “I not only acknowledge that you know these things better than I do; I willingly accept it. But once they have been stated, why should Velleius be able to understand what Cotta cannot? I understand what body is, what blood is; what something like body and something like blood are, I do not understand in the least. You are not hiding it from me as Pythagoras used to hide things from outsiders, or deliberately speaking obscurely like Heraclitus. Between ourselves, you do not understand it either.

1.75 “I see that you struggle to establish some appearance of the gods that has nothing compact, solid, defined, or projecting, but is pure, smooth, and translucent. We shall therefore say the same as of the Venus of Cos: that is not a body but a likeness of a body, and the blush spread there and mingled with white is not blood but a kind of likeness of blood. So too in Epicurus’s god there are not realities but likenesses of realities.

“Suppose I am persuaded of something that cannot even be understood. Give me the outlines and forms of those shadowy gods of yours.

1.76 “You have no shortage of arguments here to prove that the gods’ forms are human. First, our minds have received the conception and anticipation that when a person thinks of god, a human form occurs to him. Next, since divine nature excels everything, its form too must be the most beautiful, and no form is more beautiful than the human. Your third argument is that no other figure can house a mind.

1.77 “First, then, consider the worth of each argument. You seem to seize as though by right upon something in no way probable.

“To begin with, who was ever so blind in contemplating things as not to see that these human appearances were assigned to the gods either by a deliberate plan of wise men, to turn the minds of the ignorant more easily from a corrupt life to divine worship, or through superstition, so that people might have images whose veneration they believed brought them into the presence of the gods themselves? Poets, painters, and craftsmen strengthened the practice: it was not easy to represent gods acting and undertaking things while maintaining the likeness of other forms.

“Perhaps the belief that nothing seems more beautiful to a human being than another human being also contributed. But do you not see, as a natural philosopher, what a flattering matchmaker nature is, almost a procurer on her own behalf? Do you think there is any beast on land or sea that does not take greatest pleasure in a beast of its own kind? Otherwise, why does a bull not yearn to touch a mare, a horse a cow? Do you think an eagle, a lion, or a dolphin prefers any figure to its own? What wonder, then, if nature has taught human beings in the same way to think nothing more beautiful than a human being? […] that this is why we thought the gods resembled humans. What do you think? If beasts possessed reason, would not each kind have assigned the highest rank to its own species?

1.78 “Yet, by Hercules, I myself—to speak my mind—however much I love myself, do not dare say I am more beautiful than the bull that carried Europa. For we are not now discussing our intellectual gifts or our speeches, but appearance and shape. But if we chose to invent and combine forms, like that sea creature Triton in the paintings, borne along with swimming beasts joined to his human body, you would not want to be one. I am in a difficult position: nature’s power is so great that no human wishes to resemble anything but a human—and no ant anything but an ant.

1.79 “Yet what human? How few are beautiful! When I was in Athens, scarcely one could be found in each company of young men. I see why you smiled, but that is nevertheless the truth. Besides, we who, with the approval of ancient philosophers, take delight in young men, often find even their defects pleasing. Alcaeus delights in a mole on a boy’s knuckle. But a mole is a blemish on the body; to him, nevertheless, it seemed a beauty mark. Quintus Catulus, father of our friend and colleague, loved your fellow townsman Roscius, and wrote these lines about him:I stood, by chance, greeting the rising Dawn,

“When suddenly, at my left, Roscius arose.

“With your permission, heavenly ones, let me say it:

“A mortal seemed more beautiful than a god.“To him, more beautiful than a god; yet Roscius then had, as he has today, the most badly crossed eyes. What did it matter, if that very feature seemed piquant and charming to Catulus?

1.80 “I return to the gods. Do we think any of them, if not so cross-eyed, at least slightly squinting? Do any have a mole, a snub nose, drooping ears, a bulging forehead, a big head—features found among us? Or is everything in them flawless? Let that be granted. But do they also all have one face? If there are several, one must be more beautiful than another, and therefore some god is not supremely beautiful. If they all have one face, the Academy must flourish in heaven: for if god differs in no respect from god, the gods possess no knowledge, no certain apprehension.”

1.81 “But what if that claim of yours is completely false, Velleius—that when we think about god no form but the human comes before us? Will you still defend such absurdities? Perhaps the thought does occur to us as you say. From childhood we have known Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo, and the other gods with whatever faces painters and sculptors chose to give them; and not faces alone, but adornment, age, and dress. Yet this is not true of the Egyptians, the Syrians, or almost the whole non-Greek world. You would find their beliefs about certain beasts more firmly held than ours about the most sacred temples and images of the gods.

1.82 “We see many shrines plundered and images of gods removed by our people from their holiest sites; but no one has ever even heard of an Egyptian harming a crocodile, an ibis, or a cat. What do you think, then? Does not Apis, the Egyptians’ sacred bull, seem a god to the Egyptians? By Hercules, just as surely as your own Juno the Savior seems one to you. You never see her, even in dreams, without a goatskin, spear, little shield, and shoes with upturned toes. Yet neither Argive nor Roman Juno is like that. Thus the Argives have one image of Juno and the people of Lanuvium another. We too have one image of Capitoline Jupiter, and the Africans another of Jupiter Ammon.

1.83 “Is a natural philosopher, an observer and tracker of nature, not ashamed to seek testimony to truth from minds steeped in habit? On that principle we could say that Jupiter is always bearded, Apollo always beardless, Minerva’s eyes gray-blue, and Neptune’s blue. We also praise the Vulcan made by Alcamenes at Athens: in that standing, clothed figure, his lameness is slightly apparent but not ugly. Shall we therefore have a lame god because that is the account of Vulcan we have received? Come, do we also make the gods bear the names we use for them?

1.84 “In the first place, there are as many divine names as human languages. Unlike you, who are Velleius wherever you go, Vulcan does not have the same name in Italy, Africa, and Spain. Then again, the number of names is not great even in our pontifical books, whereas the gods are innumerable. Are they nameless? You must certainly say so. What point is there in several names when there is only one face? How much better, Velleius, to admit that you do not know what you do not know, rather than pour out this nonsense until you feel sick and disgusted with yourself! Do you think god resembles me or you? Surely you do not.

“‘What, then? Am I to call the sun, moon, or heaven a god? Then it is also blessed: what pleasures does it enjoy? And wise: how can wisdom exist in a lump like that?’

1.85 “Those are your arguments. If, then, neither in human […] as I have shown, nor in some such form, as you are convinced, why hesitate to deny that gods exist? You do not dare. Sensibly enough—though here you fear not the people but the gods themselves. I have known Epicureans who revered every little image. Yet I see that some think Epicurus left the gods in place in words, to avoid offending the Athenians, but abolished them in reality. Thus, among those selected, brief pronouncements of his that you call kyriai doxai, or Principal Doctrines, the first, I believe, is this: ‘Whatever is blessed and immortal neither has any trouble nor causes any to anyone.’ Some think he deliberately worded this pronouncement as he did, though he did so simply from an inability to express himself.

1.86 “They judge badly of a man who was anything but cunning. It is uncertain whether he says that something blessed and immortal exists, or that if something does exist, it has that character. They fail to observe that, although he spoke ambiguously here, in many other places both he and Metrodorus spoke as openly as you did a little while ago. He really does believe gods exist; and I have never seen anyone more afraid of the very things he said should not be feared—I mean death and the gods. Ordinary people are not greatly disturbed by them, yet he cries out that they terrify every mortal mind. So many thousands practice robbery with death before their eyes, while others plunder every shrine they can: presumably fear of death terrifies the former, and fear of religion the latter!

“But since you do not dare—for now I shall address Epicurus himself—to deny that gods exist, what prevents you from numbering the sun, the universe, or some eternal mind among the gods?

1.87 “‘I have never seen,’ he says, ‘a soul possessing reason and judgment in any form but the human.’ Well, have you seen anything like the sun, the moon, or the five wandering stars? The sun completes its yearly courses, bounding its movement by the two extremes of a single circuit. The moon, kindled by its rays, completes the same circuit within a month. The five planets, keeping to the same circuit, some nearer the earth and others farther away, cover the same distances from the same starting points in unequal times. Have you seen anything like that, Epicurus?

1.88 “Then let there be no sun, moon, or stars, since nothing can exist except what we have touched or seen. What about god himself? Have you seen him? Why, then, believe he exists? Let us abolish everything new that history or reason brings before us. On that principle, inland peoples must not believe the sea exists. Such narrowness of mind means that if you had been born on Seriphos and had never left the island, where you had often seen little hares and foxes, you would not believe in lions and panthers when told what they were like; and if someone spoke of an elephant, you would even think you were being mocked.

1.89 “You, Velleius, did not follow your school’s practice, but that of the logicians—a tribe of whom your people know absolutely nothing—and drew your conclusion through a tightly constrained argument. You assumed that the gods are blessed: we grant it. That no one can be blessed without virtue: we grant that too, and willingly. That virtue cannot exist without reason: that too must be agreed. You add that reason exists only in human form. Who do you think will grant you that? If that were so, why did you need to reach it step by step? You could have assumed it on your own authority. And what sort of step-by-step argument is this? I see that you came by steps from blessedness to virtue, from virtue to reason. But how do you get from reason to human form? That is plunging headlong, not descending a stair.

1.90 “Nor do I understand why Epicurus preferred to say that gods resemble humans rather than humans gods. You will ask what difference it makes: if this resembles that, that resembles this. I see the point, but what I mean is that the design of the form did not pass from humans to gods. The gods have always existed and were never born, if indeed they are to be eternal; humans, however, were born. Thus human form existed before humans, and the immortal gods possessed that form. Their form should therefore not be called human; ours should be called divine.

“But let that be as you please. My question is this: what extraordinary stroke of luck—for you maintain that nothing in nature”

1.91 “was made by reason—yet what vast accident, what fortunate collision of atoms, caused humans suddenly to be born in the form of gods? Are we to think that divine seeds fell from heaven to earth, and humans arose resembling their fathers? I wish you would say so; I would gladly acknowledge kinship with the gods. You say nothing of the kind, but that chance made us resemble the gods. And now we must seek arguments to refute this! If only I could discover truths as easily as I can expose falsehoods!

“You listed from memory, and at length, the philosophers’ opinions on the nature of the gods from Thales of Miletus onward, so that I was delighted to marvel at such learning in a Roman.

1.92 “Did all those who held that god could exist without hands and feet seem mad to you?

“Does not even consideration of the usefulness and fitness of human limbs lead you to judge that the gods have no need of human limbs? What use are feet without walking, hands if nothing needs grasping, or the rest of that arrangement of all the bodily parts, in which nothing is idle, causeless, or superfluous? No art can imitate nature’s skill. Shall god then have a tongue and never speak, teeth, palate, and throat for no use, and those parts nature attached to the body for procreation to no purpose? The same applies no less to the internal than to the external organs: heart, lungs, liver, and the rest. Apart from their usefulness, what beauty do they possess, since you insist that they exist in god for beauty’s sake?

1.93 “Relying on dreams like these, not only did Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Hermarchus argue against Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles, but even the little courtesan Leontium dared to write against Theophrastus—in polished Attic, certainly, but still! Such license prevailed in Epicurus’s Garden. And you people are always complaining. Zeno even used to quarrel; why mention Albucius? Nothing could be more refined or gracious than Phaedrus, yet the old man would grow angry if I said anything rather sharp. All this when Epicurus assailed Aristotle with the most insulting abuse, reviled Phaedo the Socratic most shamefully, and devoted whole volumes to tearing apart Timocrates, brother of his companion Metrodorus, because he differed on some point of philosophy! He was ungrateful to Democritus himself, whom he followed, and treated his teacher Nausiphanes, from whom he had learned something, so badly. Zeno struck with insults not only his contemporaries, Apollodorus Sillis and the rest, but Socrates himself, the father of philosophy: using a Latin word, he called him an Attic buffoon, and he never called Chrysippus anything but ‘Chrysippa.’

1.94 “You yourself just now, while reciting what was almost a senate of philosophers, called the greatest men fools, madmen, lunatics. If none of them saw the truth about divine nature, we must fear that there is no divine nature at all.

“For your own assertions are pure invention, scarcely worthy of little old women’s midnight musings. You do not perceive how many obligations you must undertake if you persuade us to grant that humans and gods have the same form. Every care and tending of the body that humans require must also be assigned to god: walking, running, reclining, bending, sitting, grasping, and ultimately even conversation and speech.

1.95 “And since you say there are both male and female gods, you see what follows. I truly cannot wonder enough where your great founder got these opinions.

“But you never stop crying out that we must hold fast to this: god is blessed and immortal. What prevents him from being blessed if he is not two-footed? Or that state, whether we should call it beatitas or beatitudo, Latin words for blessedness—both words are certainly awkward, but we must soften words through use—whatever it is, why can it not belong to that sun, this universe, or some eternal mind without bodily shape or limbs?

1.96 “You say nothing but, ‘I have never seen a blessed sun or universe.’ Well, have you ever seen any universe besides this one? You will say no. Why, then, did you dare assert that there are not six hundred thousand universes but innumerable ones? ‘Reason taught me.’ Will reason not teach you this, then? Since we seek the most excellent nature, blessed and eternal—the only divine nature—as that nature surpasses us in immortality, so it surpasses us in excellence of mind, and in body as in mind. Why, then, when we are inferior in everything else, are we equal in form? Human virtue came nearer to resembling the gods than did the human figure.

1.97 “Can anything be more childish—to press the same point a little longer—than to say that the kinds of beasts born in the Red Sea or India do not exist? Yet even the most inquisitive people cannot, by investigation, hear of as many things as actually exist on land, in the sea, in marshes and rivers. Shall we deny their existence because we have never seen them?

“And the resemblance itself, which pleases you most, is utterly irrelevant. Does a dog not resemble a wolf? And, as Ennius says, ‘How like us is the ape, that ugliest of beasts!’ Yet their characters differ. No beast is wiser than an elephant;

1.98 “but what has a more ungainly shape? I speak of beasts; among humans themselves, do we not find unlike characters in very similar forms, and unlike forms in people whose characters agree?

“Indeed, Velleius, once we adopt this sort of argument, consider where it spreads. You assumed that reason could exist only in a human form. Another will assume that it can exist only in an earthly creature, one that was born, grew up, learned, consists of a soul and a frail, perishable body—in short, only in a human and mortal being. If you resist on all these points, why should form alone trouble you? You saw reason and intelligence in humans joined to all the conditions I listed. Remove them, and you still say you recognize god, provided the outlines remain. This is not considering what to say, but almost casting lots for it.

1.99 “Unless perhaps you fail to notice even this: not merely in a human but even in a tree, whatever is superfluous or useless is a hindrance. How troublesome to have one finger too many! Why? Because five need no extra one, either for appearance or use. But your god has not merely one superfluous finger, but a head, neck, nape, sides, belly, back, backs of the knees, hands, feet, thighs, and shins. If he is to be immortal, what do these limbs contribute to life? What does his face itself contribute? The brain, heart, lungs, and liver matter more, for these are the homes of life; the configuration of the face has nothing to do with life’s endurance.

1.100 “And you censured those who, on seeing magnificent and splendid works—the universe itself, its parts, heaven, earth, and seas, and their adornments, sun, moon, and stars—and on recognizing the ripening seasons, their changes and successions, inferred that some excellent and preeminent nature existed, which had made these things and moved, directed, and governed them. Even if their inference goes astray, I can still see what they are pursuing. But what great and outstanding work do you possess that seems the product of a divine mind, from which you infer the gods’ existence? ‘I had,’ you say, ‘a certain conception of god implanted in my mind.’ Yes, a bearded Jupiter and a helmeted Minerva! Do you therefore think they really are like that?”

1.101 “How much better the uneducated multitude handles this! They assign god not merely human limbs but the use of those limbs. They give him bow, arrows, spear, shield, trident, and thunderbolt; and although they do not see what the gods’ activities are, they cannot conceive of a god doing nothing. The Egyptians themselves, whom people ridicule, consecrated no beast except for some benefit they received from it. Ibises, for instance, destroy a vast number of snakes: they are tall birds, with stiff legs and a long, horny beak. They avert a plague from Egypt by killing and devouring the winged snakes carried on the southwest wind from the Libyan wilderness, so that those snakes do no harm either by biting when alive or by their stench when dead. I could discuss the usefulness of mongooses, crocodiles, and cats, but I do not wish to speak at length. I shall conclude thus: at least those peoples consecrated beasts for their benefits, whereas of your gods no benefit is evident, nor even any deed at all.

1.102 “‘He has no business,’ Epicurus says. Certainly, like pampered children, Epicurus thinks nothing better than idleness. Yet even children, when idle, enjoy some playful exercise. Do we want god so completely on holiday, so numbed by idleness, that if he stirs we fear he may cease to be blessed? This reasoning not only strips the gods of divine movement and action, but makes human beings idle too, if not even god can be blessed while doing anything.

1.103 “But let god, as you wish, be the figure and image of a human. What is his dwelling, his abode, his location? What, then, is his manner of life, and what makes him blessed, as you insist he is? For anyone who is to be blessed must use and enjoy his own good things. Even substances without life each have their own proper place: earth occupies the lowest, water floods over it, a higher region belongs to air, and the highest realm is assigned to ethereal fires. Of beasts, some live on land, some in water, others have a double life in both habitats; and some are even thought to be born in fire, and are often seen flying about in blazing furnaces.

1.104 “So I ask, first, where your god lives; next, what causes him to move from his place, if indeed he ever moves; then, since it is characteristic of living creatures to seek something suited to their nature, what god seeks, and to what end he employs the movement of his mind and reason; finally, how he is blessed and how eternal. Whichever of these points you touch is a sore: so ill-founded an account can find no way out.

1.105 “For this is what you said: god’s appearance is perceived by thought, not by sense; it has no solidity, nor does it remain numerically the same; our vision of it is such that it is discerned through similarity and succession, and the arrival of similar images from infinite bodies never fails; and so our mind, intent upon them, considers that nature blessed and everlasting. By the very gods we are discussing, what can this mean? If they affect thought alone and have no solidity or projection, what difference does it make whether we think of a centaur or a god? Every other philosopher calls such a mental formation an empty movement; you call it the arrival and entry of images into the mind.

1.106 “Thus, when I seem to see Tiberius Gracchus addressing an assembly on the Capitol and bringing forward the voting urn concerning Marcus Octavius, I call that an empty movement of the mind. You, however, say that images of Gracchus and Octavius remain, and when they have reached the Capitol they are conveyed to my mind. You say the same happens with god: our minds are struck by his frequently recurring appearance, and from this he is understood to be blessed and eternal.

1.107 “Suppose there are images that strike the mind. Only a certain appearance is presented; is the reason why it is blessed or eternal presented too?

“And what are these images of yours, or where do they come from? This license comes entirely from Democritus; but he has been criticized by many, and you cannot find a way out: the whole thing wavers and limps. What could be less acceptable than that images of everyone strike me—Homer, Archilochus, Romulus, Numa, Pythagoras, Plato—and not in the form they actually had? How, then, are they images of those people? And images of whom? Aristotle teaches that the poet Orpheus never existed, and they say that this Orphic poem belonged to a certain Cercon, a Pythagorean. Yet Orpheus—or his image, as you would have it—often comes before my mind.

1.108 “What of the fact that different images of the same person enter my mind and yours? What of images of things that never existed and never could, such as Scylla and the Chimaera? What of people, places, and cities we have never seen? What of an image’s appearing as soon as I wish? What of their coming unbidden even to a sleeper? The whole thing, Velleius, is nonsense. You force images not only upon our eyes but upon our minds: such is your impunity in chattering. And what license you take!

1.109 “‘There is a succession of visions flowing in rapid sequence, so that one appears out of many.’ I would be ashamed to say I do not understand, if you who defend this understood it yourselves. How do you prove that images arrive continuously? Or, if continuously, how eternally? ‘The innumerable multitude of atoms supplies them,’ he says. Will that same multitude, then, make everything everlasting? You take refuge in equilibrium—let us use that word, if you please, for isonomia—and say that because mortal nature exists, immortal nature must also exist. By that reasoning, since humans are mortal, let there be some immortals; and since they are born on land, let them also be born in water. ‘And because there are things that destroy, let there be things that preserve.’ By all means, but let them preserve things that exist. I do not perceive that those gods of yours exist.

1.110 “And how does all that imagery of things arise from indivisible bodies? Even if those bodies existed—and they do not—they might perhaps strike one another and be driven about by collision; they could not create form, shape, color, or life. So in no way do you establish an immortal god.

“Let us now consider his blessedness. Certainly it cannot exist without virtue; but virtue is active, and your god does nothing. Therefore he has no virtue;”

1.111 “and so he is not blessed either. What life, then, does he have? ‘A supply,’ you say, ‘of good things, with no intrusion of evils.’ But what good things? Pleasures, I suppose—bodily ones, naturally. For you recognize no pleasure of the mind except what originates in the body and returns to it. I do not suppose you wish to resemble the other Epicureans who are ashamed of certain sayings of Epicurus, in which he declares that he cannot even understand any good apart from luxurious and obscene pleasures. Without blushing, he pursues them all by name.

1.112 “What food, then, what drinks, what varieties of sounds or flowers, what touches and scents will you offer the gods to bathe them in pleasure? The poets at least prepare nectar, ambrosia, and feasts, with Juventas, Youth, or Ganymede serving the cups. But what will you do, Epicurus? I cannot see either where your god gets these things or how he uses them. Human nature, then, has richer resources for living happily than divine nature, because it enjoys more kinds of pleasure.

1.113 “But you think those pleasures rather slight, which apply a sort of tickling—Epicurus’s own word—to the senses. How long will you trifle with us? Even our friend Philo could not bear to hear Epicureans disdain soft and luxurious pleasures. With his extraordinary memory he used to recite many sayings of Epicurus in the very words in which they were written. He also quoted many still more shameless statements of Metrodorus, Epicurus’s colleague in wisdom. Metrodorus accuses his brother Timocrates of hesitating to measure everything belonging to a happy life by the belly; he says this not once but repeatedly. I see you nodding: you know these passages. If you denied them, I would bring out the books. I am not now criticizing the reference of everything to pleasure—that is another inquiry—but showing that your gods have no share in pleasure, and thus, by your own judgment, are not even blessed. ‘But they are free from pain.’

1.114 “Is that enough for the supremely blessed life overflowing with good things? ‘He thinks continually,’ they say, ‘that he is blessed: he has nothing else to turn over in his mind.’ Conceive him, then, in your mind and set him before your eyes: a god who through all eternity thinks of nothing but ‘I am doing splendidly’ and ‘I am blessed.’ Yet I cannot see how that blessed god avoids fearing destruction, when he is struck and shaken without any interruption by the everlasting onrush of atoms, and images are always flowing from him. Thus your god is neither blessed nor eternal.

1.115 “‘But Epicurus even wrote books about holiness and piety toward the gods.’ Yet how does he speak in them? You would say you were hearing Tiberius Coruncanius or Publius Scaevola, chief pontiffs, not someone who utterly uprooted religion and overthrew the immortal gods’ temples and altars, not with his hands like Xerxes, but with arguments. Why say that gods should be worshipped by humans, when the gods not only pay no regard to humans but care about nothing and do nothing at all?

1.116 “‘But theirs is a certain exceptional and preeminent nature, which by itself should draw the wise man to worship it.’ Can there be anything exceptional in a nature that rejoices in its own pleasure and will never do anything, does nothing now, and has never done anything? Again, what piety is owed to one from whom you have received nothing? What can possibly be owed to one who has done no service? Piety is justice toward the gods; but what bond of justice can exist between us and them, when humans have no fellowship with god? Holiness, in turn, is knowledge of how to worship the gods. I do not understand why they should be worshipped when we have neither received nor expect any good from them.

1.117 “And why should we revere the gods out of admiration for a nature in which we see nothing outstanding?

“As for freeing people from superstition, as you regularly boast of doing, that is easy once you have removed all divine power. Unless perhaps you think Diagoras or Theodorus, who denied the gods’ existence altogether, could have been superstitious? I do not think even Protagoras could, though he was permitted neither alternative, neither that gods exist nor that they do not. The opinions of all these men remove not only superstition, which contains an empty fear of the gods, but religion as well, which consists in their pious worship.

1.118 “What of those who said that the entire belief in the immortal gods was invented by wise men for the republic’s sake, so that religion might bring to duty those whom reason could not? Did they not utterly uproot all religion? What religion, again, did Prodicus of Ceos leave, when he said that things beneficial to human life had been counted among the gods?

1.119 “What of those who relate that brave, famous, or powerful men became gods after death, and that these are the very beings we habitually worship, pray to, and revere? Are they not devoid of all religion? This theory was developed especially by Euhemerus, whom our Ennius both translated and followed more than anyone else. Euhemerus points out even the deaths and burial places of the gods. Does he seem, then, to have strengthened religion, or to have abolished it completely? I leave aside holy and august Eleusis, ‘where peoples from the farthest shores are initiated’; I pass over Samothrace and those rites on Lemnos that ‘are secretly celebrated by night, thickly enclosed by woodland hedges.’ When these are explained and reduced to a rational account, we come to know the nature of things rather than that of the gods.

1.120 “Even Democritus, a man of the first rank, from whose springs Epicurus watered his little gardens, seems to me unsteady on the nature of the gods. At one time he thinks images endowed with divinity exist throughout the universe; at another he calls the elements of mind in that same universe gods; then he speaks of living images that regularly benefit or harm us, then of certain vast images so immense that they embrace the whole universe from outside. All these notions are more worthy of Democritus’s native town than of Democritus himself;

1.121 “for who can conceive those images in his mind, who can admire them, who can judge them worthy of worship or religious devotion?

“But Epicurus tore religion out of human minds by the roots when he deprived the immortal gods of both helpfulness and good will. Although he says that god’s nature is the best and most excellent, he also denies that god possesses good will, taking away what belongs most properly to the best and most excellent nature. For what is better or more excellent than goodness and beneficence? By insisting that god lacks these, you insist that no one, god or human, is dear to god, that no one is loved or cherished by him. Thus not only are humans neglected by gods, but the gods themselves neglect one another. How much better are the Stoics, whom you criticize! They hold that the wise are friends of the wise even when they have never met. Nothing is more lovable than virtue, and whoever has attained it, wherever in the world he may be, will be loved by us.

1.122 “But what harm you do when you locate kindness and benevolence in weakness! To leave aside the power and nature of the gods, do you think even humans would never have been generous and kind if they had not been weak? Is there no natural affection among the good? The very word ‘dear’ speaks of love, from whose Latin name, amor, the name for friendship, amicitia, is derived. If we refer friendship to our own profit, not to the advantage of the person we love, it will be no friendship but a kind of trade in benefits to ourselves. Meadows, fields, and herds of cattle are loved that way, because we reap a profit from them; human affection and friendship are freely given. How much more so, then, is the love of the gods, who need nothing, love one another, and care for humans! If that is not so, why do we revere the gods, why pray to them? Why do pontiffs preside over sacrifices and augurs over auspices? What do we ask of the immortal gods, what do we vow? ‘But Epicurus even has a book On Holiness.’

1.123 “We are being made fools of by a man less distinguished for wit than for the freedom with which he writes whatever he likes. What holiness can there be if the gods have no concern for human affairs? And what living nature can care for nothing? Surely the truer view is what Posidonius, the friend of us all, argued in the fifth book of On the Nature of the Gods: Epicurus thought no gods existed, and said what he did about the immortal gods merely to avert hostility. For he would not have been so foolish as to fashion a god like a little human being, with only the outer outlines and no solid substance, endowed with every human limb but not the slightest use of those limbs, a thin, translucent being who gives nothing to anyone, shows no kindness, and has absolutely no concern or activity. First, such a nature cannot exist at all; seeing this, Epicurus abolishes the gods in reality while leaving them in his account.

1.124 “Next, even supposing god is such as to feel no good will, no affection for humans, let him go his way! Why should I say, ‘May he be gracious’? He can be gracious to no one, since, as you say, all good will and affection belong to weakness.”

1.1 There’s still a great deal in philosophy that hasn’t been adequately explained. But the question of what the gods are like is especially difficult and obscure, Brutus, as you know very well. It’s both a wonderful subject for the mind to explore and essential for guiding religious practice. <Since> the most learned people hold such varied and conflicting opinions about it, <this> question should provide strong evidence that philosophy’s starting point […] knowledge, and that the Academics were wise to withhold agreement on uncertain matters. After all, what’s more shameful than jumping to conclusions? What could be more reckless, or less worthy of a wise person’s seriousness and consistency, than believing something false, or defending something without any doubt when it hasn’t been thoroughly examined and understood?

1.2 In this question, for example, most people have said that gods exist. That is the most likely view, and the one we all reach †under nature’s guidance. Protagoras said he was unsure. Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene thought there were no gods at all. Those who say that gods exist have so many different and conflicting views that listing them would never end. They say many things about the gods’ shapes, their homes and dwelling places, and how they spend their lives. Philosophers argue over these points with the sharpest disagreement. But the heart of the matter is this: do the gods do nothing, undertake nothing, and remain free from all care and management of things? Or, on the contrary, did they make and arrange everything from the beginning, and do they guide and move everything for all time? Here above all there is a major disagreement. Unless it is settled, people must remain deeply mistaken and ignorant about the most important matters.

1.3 There are philosophers now, and there have been others before them, who think the gods have absolutely no concern for human affairs. If they’re right, what room is there for devotion, reverence, or religious observance? We owe all these things to the gods’ divine power, in purity and sincerity, only if the gods notice them and have given something to the human race. But suppose the gods can’t help us, don’t want to, don’t care about us at all, don’t notice what we do, and have nothing they can contribute to human life. What reason do we have to offer the immortal gods worship, honors, or prayers? Devotion, like the other virtues, can’t exist in something that’s merely an outward pretense. Once devotion goes, reverence and religious observance must go with it. And when those disappear, life becomes disordered and deeply confused.

1.4 Indeed, I suspect that if devotion to the gods is removed, trust, human fellowship, and justice, that supreme virtue, may disappear with it. Other philosophers, great and famous ones, think that the gods’ mind and reason manage and govern the whole world. And not just that: they also think the gods care for and provide for human life. They believe the immortal gods give humanity crops, the other products of the earth, the weather, the changing seasons, and the changes in the sky that ripen everything the earth produces. They bring together many further arguments, which will be discussed in these books. These make it almost seem that the immortal gods made those very things for human use. Carneades argued so extensively against these thinkers that he stirred people who were not lazy-minded to want to search for the truth.

1.5 There is no subject on which not only the uneducated but also the learned disagree so strongly. Their views are so varied and opposed that it is certainly possible that none is true. But it is certainly impossible that more than one is true.

On this subject we can both calm friendly critics and answer hostile attackers. The latter may regret their attacks; the former may be glad to have learned something. People who offer friendly warnings should be taught. People who attack from hatred should be driven back.

1.6 I see that the books I’ve published—quite a few in a short time—have set off a great deal of discussion of different kinds. Some people wonder where this sudden enthusiasm for philosophy came from. Others want to know what definite positions I hold on particular questions. I’ve also found that many people are surprised by my preference for a philosophy that takes away the light and seems to spread a kind of night over everything. They hadn’t expected me to take up the defense of a school that’s deserted and has long been abandoned. But I haven’t suddenly started doing philosophy. From my earliest years, I’ve put a great deal of effort and care into it. In fact, I was most deeply engaged in philosophy when I least appeared to be. You can see that in my speeches, which are full of philosophers’ ideas. You can also see it in my friendships with very learned men, whose company has always enriched my home, and in the outstanding teachers who instructed me: Diodotus, Philo, Antiochus, and Posidonius.

1.7 If all the rules of philosophy apply to life, I believe that in both public and private matters I have done what reason and learning prescribed. But if someone asks what led me to put these things in writing so late, nothing could be easier to explain. I was wasting away in enforced leisure, and the state of public affairs made government by one man’s judgment and care unavoidable. So I thought, first of all for the country’s sake, that I should explain philosophy to our people. I believed it would greatly add to our country’s honor and reputation if subjects so serious and splendid were available in Latin writing too.

1.8 And I’ve even less reason to regret what I’ve undertaken, since I can readily see how many people I’ve encouraged not just to study but also to write. Quite a few people educated in Greek learning couldn’t share what they’d learned with their fellow citizens. They didn’t believe that what they’d received from the Greeks could be expressed in Latin. In this respect, I seem to have made enough progress that the Greeks don’t surpass us even in richness of vocabulary.

1.9 Another thing that drove me toward these studies was the grief caused by a great and crushing blow of fortune. If I could have found some greater relief for it, I would not have turned to this above all else. But I could enjoy even this relief best by devoting myself not only to reading books but also to working through the whole of philosophy. All its parts and branches become easiest to understand when entire questions are explained in writing. There is a wonderful continuity and sequence in its subjects. One seems linked to another, and all seem fitted and bound together.

1.10 Those who ask what I myself think about every subject are more curious than they need to be. In a discussion, we should look for the weight of reasons, not of authority. In fact, the authority of people who claim to teach often harms those who want to learn. The learners stop using their own judgment. They accept as settled whatever they see approved by the person they trust. Nor do I usually approve of the practice reported about the Pythagoreans. When they asserted something in a discussion and were asked why it was so, they are said to have answered, “He said so himself.” “He” was Pythagoras. So powerful was a judgment made in advance that authority could prevail even without a reason.

1.11 As for those who wonder why I chose this school above all others, I think my four books on Academic philosophy answer them well enough. Nor have I taken up the defense of ideas that are deserted and abandoned. Opinions do not die when their holders die, though they may miss the light their author gave them. This philosophical method of arguing against every position and deciding nothing outright began with Socrates. Arcesilaus revived it, and Carneades strengthened it. It remained vigorous down to my own time. Now, I understand, it is almost bereft of followers even in Greece itself. I think this happened not through any fault of the Academy but because people are slow. If mastering any one school is a great task, how much greater is mastering all of them! Yet that is what people must do if they aim to find the truth by arguing both against every philosopher and for every philosopher.

1.12 I don’t claim to have mastered something so important and so difficult. I do openly claim to have tried. Still, people who practice philosophy this way can’t be left with nothing to guide them. I’ve discussed this more carefully elsewhere. But some people are so slow and unwilling to learn that they seem to need repeated reminders. We aren’t people who think nothing’s true. We say that every true impression has false ones alongside it that look so similar that there’s no reliable mark for judging them and giving our agreement. It follows that many things are plausible. Even though they can’t be grasped with certainty, they have a distinctive, clear appearance, and a wise person’s life can be guided by them.

1.13 But now, to clear myself of all resentment, I’ll lay the philosophers’ views about the gods out in the open. It seems we should call them all together here to judge which view is true. Only then will I consider the Academy presumptuous: if they all agree, or if someone is found who’s discovered what’s true. So I feel like crying out, as the character does in The Young Companions:“In the name of the gods, of all my fellow citizens, of <all> young men,

“I shout, demand, beg, pray, weep, and appeal to their good faith!”And it’s not over some utterly trivial matter. That character complains that terrible crimes are being committed in the community: “A prostitute won’t take money from a friend who loves her.”

1.14 Instead, I want people to attend, understand, and consider what they should think about religion, devotion, reverence, rituals, good faith, and oaths; about temples, shrines, and regular sacrifices; and about the very auspices over which we preside. All these must be referred to this question about the immortal gods. The profound disagreement of the most learned people on this most important subject will surely force even those who think they have some certainty to feel doubt.

1.15 I’ve noticed this on many other occasions, but especially during a very thorough and careful discussion of the immortal gods at the home of my friend Gaius Cotta. I’d gone to see him during the Latin Festival, at his own invitation and request. I found him sitting in a conversation room, debating with the senator Gaius Velleius. At the time, the Epicureans ranked Velleius first among our countrymen. Quintus Lucilius Balbus was there too. He’d made such progress in Stoic philosophy that people compared him with the leading Greeks in that field.

When Cotta saw me, he said, “You’ve come at just the right moment. Velleius and I are getting into an argument about something important. Given your interests, it’s just the sort of discussion you should join.”

1.16 “Yes,” I said, “I think I’ve arrived at a good time too, just as you say. Here you are, three leading men from three schools. If Marcus Piso were here as well, none of the philosophical schools—at least, none of those that are respected—would lack a representative.”

Then Cotta said, “If our friend Antiochus tells the truth in the book he recently sent to Balbus here, there’s no reason for you to miss your friend Piso. Antiochus thinks the Stoics and Peripatetics agree about the substance and differ only in their words. Balbus, I’d like to know what you think of that book.”

“What do I think?” he said. “I’m surprised that Antiochus, a remarkably sharp man, hasn’t seen the enormous difference between them. The Stoics separate what’s morally good from what’s advantageous, not just by giving them different names, but by putting them in entirely different categories. The Peripatetics mix moral goodness with advantage. They make the difference between them one of size or, so to speak, degree, rather than kind. This isn’t a small disagreement over words. It’s a huge disagreement about the things themselves. But let’s leave that for another time. For now, shall we go back to what we’d started?”

1.17 “Certainly,” Cotta said. Then, looking at me, he added, “But let’s make sure our new arrival knows what we’re discussing. We were talking about the nature of the gods. I found it very obscure, as I always do, so I was asking Velleius for Epicurus’s view. So, Velleius, if you don’t mind, please go over what you’d begun to say.”

“Of course I’ll go over it. Though he’s come to help you, not me,” he said with a smile. “You both learned from the same Philo that you don’t know anything.”

Then I said, “I’ll let Cotta answer for what we’ve learned. But don’t think I’ve come to help him rather than to listen. I’ll be a fair listener, too, free to judge for myself. I’m under no obligation to defend some fixed opinion whether I want to or not.”

1.18 Then Velleius spoke with the great confidence his school usually shows. He feared nothing so much as appearing to doubt anything. He sounded as if he had just come down from the gods’ council and from Epicurus’s spaces between worlds. “Listen,” he said, “not to empty, made-up opinions; not to Plato’s god in the Timaeus, the craftsman and builder of the world; not to the Stoics’ old fortune-telling woman, Pronoia, whom we can call Providence in Latin; and certainly not to the world itself, a god with a mind and senses, round, burning, and spinning. These are freakish marvels dreamed up by philosophers asleep, not thought through by philosophers awake.

1.19 “What eyes did your Plato’s mind have that let him see the construction of that enormous work, when he presents the world as something a god constructs and builds? What building operation was there? What tools, levers, machines, and workers did he have for such a huge job? And how could air, fire, water, and earth obey the architect’s wishes and follow his orders? Where did those five shapes come from, which form everything else and are so neatly suited to affecting the mind and producing sensations? It would take too long to deal with every point. They all look more like things he wished for than things he discovered.”

1.20 “But here’s the crowning achievement. He not only presents the world as having come into existence, but almost as having been made by hand—and then says it’ll last forever. Do you think someone who believes anything that’s come into existence can be eternal has had even the slightest taste of physiologia, the study of nature? As the saying goes, he’s barely touched it with his lips. What structure can’t be taken apart? What can have a beginning but no end? And if your Pronoea, or Providence, Lucilius, is the same, I ask again for what I asked for just now: the workers, the machines, the complete plan and equipment for the whole job. But if it’s different, why did it make a world that’ll die, instead of an everlasting one like Plato’s god did?”

1.21 “I ask both of them: why did they suddenly become builders of the world after sleeping for countless ages? The fact that there was no world doesn’t mean there were no ages. By ‘ages’ I don’t mean periods made up of counted days and nights and yearly cycles. I admit those couldn’t have existed without the world’s rotation. But there was an eternity stretching back through infinite time, which no measured periods of time marked out. Still, we can understand its extent, because we can’t even conceive that there was”

1.22 a time when there was no time. So, Balbus, I ask why your Providence remained idle throughout that immense stretch. Was it avoiding work? But work does not touch a god. Nor would there have been any work, when all the elements—sky, fire, land, and sea—obeyed divine power. And what made the god want to decorate the world with figures and lights, like an official putting on public shows? If he wanted a better place to live himself, then apparently he had previously spent infinite time in the dark, as if in a shack. And afterward? Do we think he enjoys the variety with which we see heaven and earth decorated? What pleasure could that give a god? If it did, he could not have gone without it so long.

1.23 “Or did god arrange all this for human beings, as you generally say? For wise people? Then all that enormous construction was for just a few people. Or for fools? First, there wasn’t any reason for him to do favors for bad people. Second, what did he accomplish? Every fool is unquestionably utterly miserable, above all because they’re fools. What could we call more miserable than foolishness? Then there are so many troubles in life. Wise people soften them by weighing them against life’s benefits. Fools can neither avoid the troubles coming their way nor bear the ones they’ve already got. As for those who say the world itself is alive and wise, they completely failed to see what sort of shape could hold an intelligent mind. I’ll discuss that a little later. For now, I’ll just say this:”

1.24 “I can’t get over how slow-witted people must be to insist that an immortal, happy living being is a sphere, just because Plato says no other shape is more beautiful. To me, though, a cylinder, a square, a cone, or a pyramid looks more beautiful. And what sort of life do they give this spherical god? Apparently, he’s supposed to spin at a speed so great that we can’t even imagine its equal. I don’t see where a steady mind or a happy life could find a footing in all that. If even the slightest trace of something in our bodies would cause discomfort, why shouldn’t the same thing cause discomfort in god? The earth is certainly part of the world, so it’s also part of god. Yet we see vast regions of the earth that are uninhabitable and uncultivated. Some have been scorched by the sun beating down on them. Others have frozen in snow and frost because the sun is so far away. If the world is god, these regions are parts of god, since they’re parts of the world. So we must think of some of god’s limbs as burning hot and others as frozen cold.”

1.25 “Those, then, are your views, Lucilius. But what sort […] is, I’ll go back to the earliest of the predecessors. Thales of Miletus, the first person to investigate these questions, said water was the starting point of everything. God, he said, was the mind that shaped everything out of water—if gods can exist without awareness; and why did he attach mind to water, if mind itself can exist without a body? Anaximander’s view is that gods are born, coming into being and passing away at long intervals, and that these gods are countless worlds. But how can we understand a god as anything but everlasting?”

1.26 “After him, Anaximenes declared that air was god. He said it came into being, was immeasurable and infinite, and was always moving. As if shapeless air could be a god! Surely a god ought to have not just some shape, but the most beautiful one. And as if everything that’s born weren’t subject to death! Next came Anaxagoras, who studied under Anaximenes. He was the first to hold that the arrangement and order of everything were planned and carried out by the power and reason of an infinite mind. He didn’t see that there can’t be any continuous motion tied to awareness [in] something infinite. Nor can there be any awareness at all unless the thing itself receives an impact and feels it. Then again, if he meant this mind to be a kind of living creature, it’ll need something inside it to account for its name animal, ‘living creature.’ But what could be further inside than mind? So let it be surrounded by an outer body.”

1.27 “Since that doesn’t suit him, we’re left with a bare, simple mind, with nothing attached to it, yet capable of awareness. That seems beyond our ability to understand or even conceive. Alcmaeon of Croton gave divinity to the sun, the moon, the other heavenly bodies, and the soul as well. He didn’t realize he was giving immortality to things that die. Pythagoras thought there was a soul stretched throughout all nature and passing through it, with our souls taken from it. He didn’t see that pulling human souls away would tear god apart and rip him to pieces. And when souls were miserable, as happens to most of them, part of god would then be miserable. That can’t happen.”

1.28 “And why would a human soul be ignorant of anything if it were god? Besides, if this god were nothing but soul, how could he be fixed in the world or poured through it? Then there’s Xenophanes. He treated the infinite whole as god and gave it a mind as well. His account of mind faces the same objections as the others. His account of infinity faces even stronger ones: nothing in it can have awareness or form a connected whole. Parmenides, for his part, came up with something imaginary. He makes a continuous ring of blazing light, shaped like a crown—he calls it στεφάνην, ‘wreath.’ It circles the sky, and he calls it god. No one could imagine either a divine shape or awareness in that. He’s got plenty of other bizarre ideas too. He treats war, conflict, desire, and other things of that kind as divine, though illness, sleep, forgetfulness, or age can wipe them out. He says the same things about the stars. We’ve already criticized those ideas in someone else, so let’s leave them aside in his case.”

1.29 “Empedocles makes plenty of other mistakes, but his worst blunder is his view of the gods. He holds that the four substances he thinks make up everything are divine. Yet it’s obvious that they come into being, die out, and have no awareness at all. Protagoras doesn’t seem to have any idea about the gods’ nature either. He says he has no clear knowledge at all about them: whether they exist or don’t exist, or what they’re like. And what about Democritus? At one moment he counts images and their circling movements as gods. At another, it’s the substance that pours out and sends off those images. At another, it’s our own thought and understanding. Isn’t he utterly mistaken? He also denies that anything is everlasting, since nothing always stays in the same condition. Doesn’t that do away with god altogether, leaving no conception of him at all? And what about the air that Diogenes of Apollonia treats as god? What awareness could it have? What godlike shape?”

1.30 “It would take a long time to discuss Plato’s inconsistency. In the Timaeus he says the father of this world cannot be named. In the Laws he thinks we should not inquire into what god actually is. As for his claim that god has no body—what the Greeks call asōmaton, bodiless—we cannot understand what that could be like. Such a being must lack sensation, and also judgment and pleasure. We include all these things in our idea of gods. Yet in both the Timaeus and the Laws he also says the world is a god, and so are the sky, stars, earth, souls, and those gods handed down to us by our ancestors’ institutions. These statements are plainly false in themselves, and sharply contradict one another.

1.31 “Xenophon makes much the same mistakes, though he uses fewer words. In his account of what Socrates said, he has Socrates argue that we shouldn’t ask what shape god has. Yet he also has him call both the sun and the soul god, and speak sometimes of one god and sometimes of several. These are much the same errors as those in the views we’re discussing in Plato.”

1.32 “Antisthenes, too, in his book called On Nature, says there are many gods in popular belief but only one in nature. He thus does away with the gods’ power and nature. Speusippus does much the same. Following his uncle Plato, he speaks of a certain power that governs everything and has life. He too tries to tear the knowledge of the gods out of our minds.

1.33 “Aristotle also makes a mess of things in the third book of his On Philosophy, where he disagrees with his teacher Plato. At one moment he assigns all divinity to mind. At another he says the world itself is god. At another he puts some other being in charge of the world, with the job of controlling and maintaining its movement through a kind of backward turning. Then he says the fiery heat of the sky is god. He doesn’t realize that the sky is part of the world, which he himself has identified elsewhere as god. And how could that divine awareness in the sky survive at such enormous speed? Then where do all those gods of his come in, if we count the sky as a god too? He also wants god to have no body, but that strips him of all awareness, and of wisdom too. Besides, how could the world move without a body? Or how could it always be moving itself and still be at rest and happy?”

1.34 “His fellow student Xenocrates isn’t any wiser on this subject. His books on the nature of the gods don’t describe any divine shape. He says there are eight gods. Five are those called ‘wandering stars.’ Another is to be thought of as a single god made up of all the stars fixed in the sky, like scattered limbs. He adds the sun as the seventh and the moon as the eighth. It’s impossible to understand what awareness could make these gods happy. Heraclides of Pontus came from the same school of Plato. He filled his books with childish stories. Yet sometimes he thinks the world is divine, and sometimes mind. He also gives divinity to the wandering stars, strips god of awareness, and holds that god’s shape can change. Then, in the very same book, he again includes earth and sky among the gods.”

1.35 “Theophrastus’s inconsistency is intolerable too. At one point he gives the mind supreme divine power; at another, the sky; then again, the constellations and stars. His pupil Strato, the one called the natural philosopher, doesn’t deserve a hearing either. He thinks all divine power lies in nature. Nature, he says, contains the causes of birth, growth, and decline, but has no awareness or shape at all.”

1.36 “Now I’ll turn to your own school, Balbus. Zeno thinks the law of nature is divine. He says its power consists in ordering what’s right and forbidding the opposite. We can’t understand how he makes this law a living being. We certainly hold that a god must be alive. Elsewhere this same man calls the ether a god—if we can even conceive of a god that feels nothing and never enters our thoughts when we pray, express our hopes, or make vows. In other books he thinks a kind of reason running through the whole natural world has divine power. He gives the stars this same power, then years, months, and the changing seasons. But when he explains Hesiod’s Theogony, meaning the origin of the gods, he completely does away with our familiar, established ideas about them. He doesn’t count Jupiter, Juno, Vesta, or anyone bearing such a name among the gods. Instead, he teaches that these names have been assigned, with a symbolic meaning, to things that have neither life nor speech.”

1.37 “The view of his pupil Aristo is just as badly mistaken. He thinks we can’t grasp a god’s shape, says the gods have no awareness, and doubts whether a god is even a living being. Cleanthes studied under Zeno alongside the man I’ve just named. Sometimes he calls the universe itself a god. Sometimes he gives that name to the mind and soul of all nature. At other times he says the outermost, highest fire, which spreads around everything and encloses and embraces it all—the fire called ether—is most certainly a god. In the books he wrote against pleasure, he seems positively delirious. Now he imagines the gods with a particular shape and appearance; now he assigns all divinity to the stars; now he thinks nothing’s more divine than reason. The result is that this god, whom we recognize in our minds and want to settle into our mental conception as into his proper place, is nowhere to be found. Then there’s Persaeus, another pupil of Zeno. He says people were regarded as gods when they’d discovered something of great use in improving human life. Useful and beneficial things themselves, he adds, were given the gods’ names. He wouldn’t even say these things were inventions of the gods: the things themselves were divine;

1.38 “What could be more absurd than giving divine honors to dirty, ugly things, or placing among the gods people already wiped out by death, whose worship would consist entirely of mourning?

1.39 “Now Chrysippus, who’s considered the cleverest interpreter of Stoic dreams, gathers together a great crowd of unknown gods. They’re so unknown that we can’t even form a rough idea of them, although our minds seem able to picture anything at all. He says divine power resides in reason and in the soul and mind of nature as a whole. He calls the universe itself a god, along with its soul spread throughout it. Then he adds that soul’s ruling power, which lies in mind and reason, and the universal nature shared by everything and embracing everything. Then come the †shadow of fate and the necessity governing future events; fire, too, and the ether I mentioned earlier. He adds things that naturally flow and stream out, such as water, earth, and air; the sun, moon, and stars; the totality of things that contains everything; and even human beings who’ve gained immortality.”

1.40 “He also argues that ether is what people call Jupiter, that the air flowing through the seas is Neptune, and that earth is what’s called Ceres. He works through the other gods’ names in the same way. He also calls the power of the permanent, eternal law Jupiter. This law is like a guide to life and a teacher of duties. That same necessity of fate, he says, is the everlasting truth of what’ll happen. None of these things seems capable of possessing divine power.”

1.41 “That’s what he says in the first book of On the Nature of the Gods. In the second, he tries to fit the stories of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer to his own statements about the immortal gods in the first book. That way, even those very early poets can look like Stoics, although they never so much as suspected any of these ideas. Diogenes of Babylon follows his lead. In his book called On Minerva, he separates Jupiter’s giving birth and the virgin’s coming into existence from the mythical story and turns them into an account of nature.”

1.42 “I have presented, more or less, not philosophers’ judgments but madmen’s dreams. The stories poured out in the poets’ words are not much more absurd. Their very charm has made them harmful. They have presented gods blazing with anger and mad with lust. They have shown us their wars, battles, fights, and wounds; their hatreds, quarrels, and feuds; their births and deaths; their complaints and weeping; their desires running loose in every kind of excess; their adulteries and chains; their sexual relations with human beings; and mortals fathered by an immortal.

1.43 “With the poets’ mistakes we can join the strange tales of the Magi, the Egyptians’ madness on the same subject, and the beliefs of ordinary people, which are deeply inconsistent and ignorant of the truth.

“Anyone who considers how thoughtlessly and rashly these things are said ought to revere Epicurus, and to count him among those very beings we are discussing. He alone saw, first, that gods exist, because nature itself has stamped a concept of them in everyone’s mind. What nation or group of people lacks, without being taught, some advance idea of gods? Epicurus calls this prolēpsis: a mental picture of something formed beforehand. Without it, nothing can be understood, investigated, or discussed. We have learned the force and value of this principle from Epicurus’s heavenly book on the rule and standard of judgment.

1.44 “So you see how soundly the foundation of this inquiry has been laid. This belief wasn’t established by any institution, custom, or law. Everyone, without exception, continues to agree firmly on it. We must therefore recognize that the gods exist, since our knowledge of them is rooted in us—or rather, born in us. What everyone’s nature agrees on must be true. So we have to acknowledge that the gods exist. Nearly everyone agrees on this, not just philosophers but people without an education too. We admit that this point is also settled: we have what I called earlier an anticipation, or a prior conception, of the gods (new things need new names, and Epicurus himself called it πρόληψιν,

1.45 a word no one had used for it before). We have this notion, then, that the gods are happy and immortal. The same nature that gave us a mental picture of the gods themselves has engraved in our minds that they are eternal and happy. If that is so, Epicurus stated this principle truly: what is happy and eternal neither has any troubles itself nor causes trouble to another. So it is held by neither anger nor favor, since all such feelings belong to weakness.

“If our only aims were to worship the gods with devotion and free ourselves from superstition, enough would have been said. Human devotion would honor the gods’ excellent nature as eternal and supremely happy. Whatever excels deserves respect. And all fear of the gods’ power and anger would have been driven out. We understand that a happy, immortal nature is free of both anger and favor. With these removed, no fears threaten us from above. But to strengthen this belief, the mind asks about a god’s shape, life, and the activity and movement of his mind.

1.46 “As for the gods’ shape, nature gives us part of the answer and reasoning teaches us the rest. In every nation, nature gives all of us an image of the gods in human form and no other. What other shape has ever appeared to anyone, awake or asleep? But we don’t have to refer everything back to our first conceptions. Reasoning itself shows us the same thing.”

1.47 “The finest kind of being, whether because it’s happy or because it lives forever, should also, it seems, be the most beautiful. What arrangement of limbs, what shaping of features, what outline or appearance could be more beautiful than a human being’s? You Stoics, Lucilius, regularly describe God’s craftsmanship and construction. My friend Cotta takes one side and then the other. You explain how everything in the human form is suited not just to practical use but to beauty too;

1.48 “If the human form is more beautiful than that of every other living creature, and a god is a living being, then a god surely has the most beautiful form of all. And we agree that the gods are supremely happy. But no one can be happy without virtue. Virtue can’t exist without reason, and reason can’t exist anywhere except in a human form. So we have to admit that the gods have a human appearance.”

1.49 “Yet that appearance is not a body but something like a body, and it has not blood but something like blood. Epicurus discovered these things with more insight and stated them more precisely than just anyone can understand. Still, trusting your intelligence, I will discuss them more briefly than the subject calls for. Epicurus sees hidden and deeply concealed things not only with his mind; he handles them as if with his hand. He teaches that the gods’ power and nature are such that, first, they are perceived not by the senses but by the mind. They are not perceived as solid objects or as individual units, like the things he calls steremnia because of their solidity. Instead, they are perceived through images, through their likeness and passage. An infinite series of closely similar images arises from countless indivisible particles and flows toward the gods. Our mind fixes and fastens itself on those images with the greatest pleasure, and our understanding grasps what a happy and eternal nature is.

1.50 “The supreme power of infinity is well worth deep and careful thought. We must understand that its nature is such that everything has its equal counterpart, with all things balanced equally. Epicurus calls this isonomia, meaning equal distribution. From this it follows that if mortal beings are so numerous, immortal beings are no less numerous. And if the forces that destroy are countless, the forces that preserve must also be infinite.

“You Stoics, Balbus, also often ask us what the gods’ life is like, and how they spend their time.

1.51 “It is, of course, a life than which none happier or richer in every good thing can be imagined. A god does nothing. He is tangled in no duties and undertakes no labor. He delights in his own wisdom and virtue. He knows for certain that he will always enjoy pleasures that are both the greatest and eternal.

1.52 “We would rightly call this god happy, but yours extremely hard-working. If the world itself is god, what could be less restful than turning around the axis of heaven at amazing speed without a moment’s pause? But nothing can be happy without rest. Or if there is some god within the world who rules and governs it, who maintains the stars’ courses, the changing seasons, and the orderly changes of things, who watches over land and sea and protects human interests and lives—then he certainly is caught up in troublesome, demanding business.

1.53 “We, however, find a happy life in peace of mind and freedom from every responsibility. The man who taught us everything else also taught us that nature made the universe. There wasn’t any need for construction. You say this couldn’t be done without divine skill. But it’s so easy for nature that it will make countless universes, is making them, and has made them already. You can’t see how nature could do this without some intelligence behind it. So, like tragic playwrights who can’t work out how to end their plot, you turn to a god.”

1.54 “You certainly wouldn’t need his help if you could see the vast extent of space, immeasurable and without a limit in any direction. The mind throws itself into it and stretches outward, traveling far and wide. Yet it never sees a final boundary where it could stop. Through this immeasurable width, length, and depth, an endless quantity of countless atoms flies about. Even with empty space between them, they stick together. They catch hold of one another and form connected bodies. That’s how things get their shapes and outlines—shapes you don’t think can be made without bellows and anvils. So you’ve put an everlasting master over our necks, someone we’d have to fear day and night. Who wouldn’t fear a god who foresees everything, thinks about everything, notices everything, and considers everything his concern—a prying god with his hands full?”

1.55 “That’s where your necessity imposed by fate first came from. You call it εἱμαρμένην, or fate. You say that whatever happens has flowed from eternal truth and an unbroken chain of causes. What’s that philosophy worth? Like old women—and uneducated ones at that—it thinks everything happens by fate. Next comes your μαντικὴ, called divinatio in Latin: divination. If we were willing to listen to you, it would soak us in so much superstition that we’d have to worship entrail-readers, readers of bird omens, fortune-tellers, prophets, and dream interpreters.”

1.56 “Epicurus has released us from these terrors and won our freedom. We do not fear the beings whom we understand neither create trouble for themselves nor try to cause it for others. We worship their excellent, outstanding nature with devotion and reverence.

“But I fear enthusiasm has carried me on too long. It was hard to begin so great and splendid a subject and leave it unfinished. Still, I should have given more thought to listening than to speaking.”

1.57 Then Cotta said, with his usual friendliness, “But Velleius, if you had not said anything, you certainly could not have heard anything from me. Reasons why something is true do not usually come to my mind as easily as reasons why it is false. That has happened often, and it happened just now while I listened to you. Ask me what I say the gods’ nature is like, and perhaps I will give no answer. Ask whether I think it is like the nature you just described, and I will say nothing seems less likely to me.

“But before I tackle your arguments, I will tell you what I think of you yourself.

1.58 “I think I’ve often heard this about your friend Lucius Crassus: he put you unquestionably ahead of every Roman, and thought only a few Epicureans from Greece could match you. But I knew how deeply he cared for you, so I thought his affection made him more generous with his praise. Now, though I’m reluctant to praise someone to his face, I think you’ve explained a dark and difficult subject clearly. You’ve offered plenty of ideas, and your language has been more polished than your school usually manages.”

1.59 “When I was in Athens, I often listened to Zeno. Our friend Philo used to call him the Epicureans’ chorus leader. In fact, Philo himself urged me to listen. I suppose he wanted me to hear how the leading Epicurean presented their arguments, so I could judge more easily how well they were refuted. Unlike most of them, Zeno spoke as you do: clearly, seriously, and elegantly. But listening to you just now, I had the same feeling I often had with him. It bothered me that so much talent—please don’t take offense—had landed on such shallow ideas, not to say such silly ones.”

1.60 “I’m not going to offer anything better myself right now. As I just said, on almost any subject, and especially in natural philosophy, I could tell you what isn’t true more readily than what is. Suppose you ask me what a god is, or what a god is like. I’ll take Simonides as my authority. When the tyrant Hiero asked him that very question, he requested one day to think it over. Hiero asked him again the next day, and he requested two days. He kept doubling the number of days, until Hiero asked in surprise why he was doing that. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘the longer I consider it, the murkier the prospect seems to me.’ Simonides wasn’t just a delightful poet. He’s also said to have been learned and wise in other ways. I think many sharp and subtle ideas came into his mind. He couldn’t decide which was truest, and so he gave up hope of reaching any truth at all.”

1.61 “But your Epicurus—I’d rather argue with him than with you—what does he say that deserves to count as philosophy, or even as ordinary good sense?”

“The first question in an inquiry into the nature of the gods is whether gods exist or not. ‘It’s hard to deny it.’ I’d think so, if you were asked at a public assembly. But in a conversation like this, at an <informal> gathering, nothing could be easier. I’m a priest myself, and I think we must take the greatest care to preserve our public ceremonies and religious observances. Even so, I’d very much like to be convinced of this first point, that gods exist—not just as a matter of opinion, but as actual truth. Many things come to mind that unsettle me, so that sometimes it seems there aren’t any gods.”

1.62 “But look how generously I’m treating you. I won’t touch the views you share with other philosophers, including this very point. Almost everyone agrees that gods exist, and I’m certainly among them. So I’m not disputing that. Still, I don’t think the reason you offer is strong enough. You said that people of every nation and race believe it, and that this was a substantial enough argument for us to admit that gods exist. That argument is weak in itself, and its claim is false as well. For a start, how do you know what the nations think? I believe there are many peoples so brutalized by their savage way of life that they haven’t the slightest notion of gods.”

1.63 “What about Diagoras, who was called Atheos, ‘the atheist’? And later, Theodorus? Didn’t they openly deny that gods exist? Then there’s Protagoras of Abdera, whom you just mentioned. He was perhaps the greatest teacher of argumentative skill in his day. At the beginning of a book he wrote, ‘About the gods, I can’t say either that they exist or that they don’t.’ On the Athenians’ orders, he was expelled from their city and territory, and his books were burned at a public assembly. I think that made many people more reluctant to declare this opinion. After all, even doubt hadn’t escaped punishment. What shall we say about people who rob temples, or about the irreligious and those who swear falsely?If Lucius Tubulus ever,

if Lupus or Carbo or Neptune’s son,as Lucilius puts it, had believed there were gods, would he have been so ready to swear falsely or so corrupt?”

1.64 “So that argument is not as securely established as it seems for proving what you want. But since other philosophers also share this argument, I will leave it aside for now. I would rather come to views that belong to your school alone.

1.65 “I grant that gods exist. So tell me where they come from, where they are, and what they’re like in body, mind, and way of life. That’s what I want to know. You exploit the atoms’ unrestricted rule to explain everything. From them you invent and produce whatever comes your way, as the saying goes. To begin with, atoms don’t exist. There’s nothing […] that’s empty of bodies. Bodies occupy every place. So there can be no empty space, and nothing can be indivisible.”

1.66 “Now I’m pouring out the natural philosophers’ oracles. I don’t know whether they’re true or false, but they’re still closer to the truth [plausible] than yours. Think of those outrageous ideas of Democritus, or even of Leucippus before him. There are supposedly tiny bodies, some smooth, others rough; some round, some angular and hooked; some bent and, so to speak, hook-shaped. From these, the sky and earth came into being. Nature didn’t force them together; some chance collision did it. You’ve reached your present age still holding that opinion, Gaius Velleius. Someone would find it easier to overturn your whole way of life than to shake your loyalty to that authority. You decided you ought to be an Epicurean before you’d learned these teachings. So you had to accept these outrageous ideas or give up the name of the philosophy you’d adopted.”

1.67 “What reward would it take to make you stop being an Epicurean? ‘Nothing,’ you say, ‘could make me give up the principles of a happy life and the truth.’ So this is the truth? I’m not arguing about a happy life. You don’t think even a god can have one unless he languishes in complete idleness. But where’s the truth? In those countless worlds, I suppose, with some being born and others collapsing at every tiny instant? Or in indivisible little bodies that fashion such magnificent works without any direction from nature or reason? But I’ve forgotten the generosity I began showing you a little while ago, and I’m taking on too much. So I’ll grant that everything consists of indivisible bodies. What does that have to do with the question?”

1.68 “We’re asking about the nature of the gods. Let them be made of atoms, then. In that case, they aren’t eternal. †Because anything made of atoms came into being at some point. If the gods came into being, there weren’t any gods before they were born. And if the gods had a beginning, they must also have an end. That’s the argument you used a little while ago about Plato’s world. So what’s become of your ‘happy’ and ‘eternal,’ those two words you use to describe a god? When you try to establish that, you crawl into thickets. You were saying that a god doesn’t have a body, but something like a body; not blood, but something like blood.”

1.69 “You do this very often. You say something implausible, then try to escape criticism by offering something that couldn’t possibly happen at all. It would’ve been better to concede the very point in dispute than to resist so shamelessly. Take Epicurus. He saw that if atoms moved downward under their own weight, nothing would be in our power, because their movement would be fixed and necessary. So he invented a way to escape necessity—something Democritus had apparently missed. He says that as an atom moves straight downward under its weight and gravity, it swerves a little.”

1.70 “Saying that is more disgraceful than being unable to defend the position he wants to hold. He does the same thing against the logicians. They teach that in every either-or statement framed as ‘either yes or no,’ one alternative is true. He got frightened. Suppose he admitted a statement like ‘Either Epicurus will be alive tomorrow or he won’t.’ Then one alternative would become necessary. So he denied that the whole ‘either yes or no’ statement was necessary. What could be more dull-witted? Arcesilaus pressed Zeno hard. Arcesilaus said that every impression we get through our senses is false. Zeno said some impressions are false, but not all. Epicurus was afraid that if one impression were false, none would be true. So he declared that all the senses report the truth. None of this is anything but †very; he was accepting a heavier blow to ward off a lighter one.”

1.71 “He does the same thing about the gods’ nature. He wants to avoid making them a collection of indivisible particles, because destruction and dispersal would follow. So he says the gods don’t have a body, but something like a body; they don’t have blood, but something like blood. People find it amazing that a priest who reads entrails doesn’t laugh when he sees another such priest. Is that more amazing than <the fact that> you can keep from laughing among yourselves? ‘It isn’t a body, but something like a body.’ I could understand what that meant if we were talking about figures modeled in wax or clay. But I can’t understand what something like a body or something like blood means in a god. Neither can you, Velleius. You just won’t admit it.”

1.72 “You repeat these things as though you’d learned them from dictation. They’re things Epicurus dreamed up while yawning. Yet he boasted, as we see in his writings, that he’d never had a teacher. I’d readily believe that even if he didn’t announce it. I’d also believe the owner of a badly built house who boasted that he hadn’t used an architect. There’s no smell of the Academy in his work, or [even] the Lyceum, or even the things children learn at school. He could’ve studied under Xenocrates—and what a man Xenocrates was, immortal gods! Some people think he did. He himself denies it. I believe him more than anyone on that point. He says he attended the lectures of a certain Pamphilus, a student of Plato, on Samos. He lived there as a young man with his father and brothers. His father Neocles had gone there to acquire farmland. But the little farm apparently couldn’t support him well enough, so he became a schoolteacher.”

1.73 “But Epicurus treats this follower of Plato with extraordinary contempt. He’s that afraid of seeming ever to have learned anything. With Nausiphanes, the follower of Democritus, he can’t get out of it. He doesn’t deny studying under him, but he still heaps every insult on him. Yet if he hadn’t heard these teachings of Democritus, what had he heard? What is there in Epicurus’ account of nature that doesn’t come from Democritus? He did change a few things, such as the swerve of the atoms I mentioned a little earlier. But most of what he says is the same: atoms, empty space, images, limitless space, countless worlds, their beginnings and endings—nearly everything that makes up his explanation of nature.”

“Now, what do you mean by that ‘something like a body’ and ‘something like blood’?”

1.74 “I don’t just admit that you understand these matters better than I do. I’m quite happy to let you. But once they’ve been stated, what can Velleius understand that Cotta can’t? I understand what a body is and what blood is. But I have absolutely no idea what something like a body or something like blood is. You aren’t hiding things from me, as Pythagoras used to hide them from outsiders. You aren’t deliberately speaking obscurely, like Heraclitus. But, just between us, you don’t understand them yourself.”

1.75 “I see that you are struggling to establish some appearance of gods that has nothing compact or solid, nothing in relief or projecting, but is pure, smooth, and transparent. Then we shall say the same as we say about the Venus of Cos: that is not a body, but something resembling a body; that spreading blush mingled with white is not blood, but something resembling blood. So in the Epicurean god there are no actual things, only likenesses of things.

“Suppose I am convinced of something I cannot even understand. Come, give me the features and shapes of those shadowy gods of yours.

1.76 “You have no shortage of arguments here to try to prove that the gods have human forms. First, you say this has been pictured and anticipated in our minds, so that when someone thinks of a god, a human shape comes to mind. Second, since divine nature surpasses everything, it must also have the most beautiful shape, and none is more beautiful than the human one. You add a third reason: that a mind can have its home in no other shape.

1.77 “First, then, consider each point and what it amounts to. You seem to me to grab hold of something utterly implausible as though it were yours by right.”

“<First> of all, has anyone ever been so blind in looking at the world that he couldn’t see how those human shapes got assigned to the gods? Either wise people deliberately introduced them to turn the ignorant away from corrupt lives and make it easier to lead them to worship the gods, or superstition did it. People wanted images they could worship and believe they were approaching the gods themselves. Poets, painters, and craftsmen developed these same ideas further. It wasn’t easy to show gods doing things and carrying out projects while keeping their shapes modeled on other creatures.”

“Perhaps this belief also took hold because nothing looks more beautiful to a human being than another human being. But as a student of nature, don’t you see how nature wins us over with flattery, almost acting as her own pimp? Do you think there’s any animal on land or sea that doesn’t take the greatest pleasure in an animal of its own kind? If that weren’t so, why wouldn’t a bull get excited by contact with a mare, or a horse by contact with a cow? Do you think an eagle, a lion, or a dolphin prefers any shape to its own? Then why be surprised if nature has given humans the same rule, making them think nothing is more beautiful than a human being? […] that this is why we thought the gods looked like human beings. What do you think? If animals could reason, wouldn’t each kind have rated its own kind highest?”

1.78 “But, by Hercules, I’ll tell you what I think. Much as I love myself, I still wouldn’t dare say I’m more beautiful than that bull that carried Europa. We aren’t discussing our intelligence or our powers of speech here. We’re discussing appearance and shape. Suppose we wanted to invent shapes and join them together, like the pictures of Triton of the sea, carried along by swimming beasts attached to a human body. You wouldn’t want to be like that. I’m in a difficult position. Nature’s influence is so strong that no human wants to look like anything but a human—and no ant like anything but an ant.”

1.79 “But which human? How many people are good-looking? When I was at Athens, you could barely find one here and there among whole groups of young men. I see what made you smile, but that’s still how it is. Besides, those of us who are attracted to young men, with the ancient philosophers’ approval, often find even their flaws appealing. Alcaeus is delighted by a mole on a boy’s joint. Now, a mole is a blemish on the body. To him, though, it seemed a bright spot. Quintus Catulus, the father of our colleague and friend here, loved Roscius, your fellow townsman. He even wrote these lines about him:I happened to be standing there, greeting Aurora as she rose,

when suddenly Roscius rose on my left.

“Heavenly gods, let me say this without offending you:

a mortal seemed more beautiful than a god.To Catulus, Roscius was more beautiful than a god. Yet his eyes were terribly crossed, just as they are today. What does that matter, if Catulus found that very feature charming and attractive?”

1.80 “Back to the gods. Do we think any of them are, if not badly cross-eyed, at least a little so? Do any have a mole? Do any have snub noses, drooping ears, big foreheads, or big heads, as we do? Or are they all free of defects? Let’s grant you that. But do they all have the same face too? If they have different faces, one must be more beautiful than another. So some god isn’t the most beautiful. If they all have the same face, the Academy must be flourishing in heaven. If there’s no difference between one god and another, the gods can’t know anything or be sure of what they perceive.”

1.81 “What if that claim is completely false too, Velleius—the claim that when we think about a god, no shape comes to mind except a human one? Will you still defend these absurd ideas? Perhaps we do picture gods as you say. From childhood we’ve known Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo, and the other gods with whatever appearance painters and sculptors chose to give them. And not just their faces: their accessories, ages, and clothes too. But that isn’t true of the Egyptians, the Syrians, or nearly all the rest of the foreign world. You’d find that their convictions about certain animals are stronger than ours about our most sacred temples and statues of the gods.”

1.82 “We see plenty of shrines plundered by our people, and statues of the gods carried off from the holiest places. But we’ve never even heard of an Egyptian harming a crocodile, an ibis, or a cat. What do you think, then? Don’t the Egyptians regard Apis, their sacred bull, as a god? By Hercules, just as surely as you regard that Sospita of yours as one. You never see her, even in your dreams, without her goatskin, spear, little shield, and little shoes with turned-up toes. But the Juno of Argos isn’t like that, nor is the Juno of Rome. So Juno has one appearance for the people of Argos and another for the people of Lanuvium. Likewise, Jupiter of the Capitol has one appearance for us, and Jupiter Ammon another for the Africans.”

1.83 “Should a natural philosopher—that is, an observer and tracker of nature—not be ashamed to seek evidence of truth from minds steeped in custom? On that basis we may say Jupiter is always bearded and Apollo always beardless, Minerva has gray eyes and Neptune blue ones. We praise the Vulcan at Athens made by Alcamenes. He stands clothed, and his slight limp is visible without being ugly. Shall we then count the god as lame because that is the story we have received about Vulcan? And come, shall we also make the gods bear the very names we call them by?

1.84 “But to start with, the gods have as many different names as people have languages. You’re Velleius wherever you go. But Vulcan doesn’t have the same name in Italy, Africa, and Spain. Besides, even our priests’ records don’t contain many divine names, while the gods themselves are beyond counting. Do they have no names? That’s what your position forces you to say. After all, if they all look alike, what’s the point of having different names? Velleius, wouldn’t it have been much better to admit you didn’t know what you didn’t know? Instead, you babble this stuff, make yourself sick, and end up disgusted with yourself. Do you think a god looks like me, or like you? Of course you don’t.”

“What then? Am I supposed to call the sun, the moon, or the sky a god? Then it must be happy too. What pleasures does it enjoy? And it must be wise. How can a block like that have wisdom?”

1.85 “That’s your school’s argument. So if gods don’t have human form […], as I’ve shown, or any form like those, as you’re convinced, why hesitate to deny that gods exist? You don’t dare. That’s sensible enough, though here it isn’t the public you’re afraid of. It’s the gods themselves. I know Epicureans who bow before every little idol. Still, I see that some people think Epicurus kept the gods in words but did away with them in reality, so he wouldn’t offend the Athenians. That’s why, in that selection of short sayings you call κυρίαι δόξαι, or ‘Principal Doctrines,’ the first saying is, I think: ‘What’s happy and immortal neither has troubles itself nor causes trouble for anyone else.’ Some people think he deliberately put it that way. In fact, he simply didn’t know how to express himself clearly.”

1.86 “They’re judging a man who wasn’t at all crafty unfairly. His wording leaves it uncertain whether he means that something happy and immortal exists, or that anything of that kind, if it exists, has those qualities. They fail to notice that although he spoke ambiguously here, in many other passages both he and Metrodorus spoke as openly as you did just now. He certainly thinks gods exist. And I’ve never seen anyone more afraid of the things he says we shouldn’t fear—I mean death and the gods. Ordinary people aren’t very disturbed by them. Yet he shouts that they’ve terrified the minds of every mortal alive. So many thousands carry on as bandits with death hanging over them. Others loot every temple they can. I suppose the first lot are terrified of death, and the second of offending the gods!

“But since you don’t dare deny that gods exist—I’m talking to Epicurus himself now—what keeps you from counting the sun, the universe, or some eternal mind among the gods?”

1.87 “He says, ‘I’ve never seen a soul with reason and judgment in any shape except a human one.’ Well, have you ever seen anything like the sun, the moon, or the five wandering stars? The sun’s motion is bounded by the two extreme points of a single circuit, and it completes its rounds year by year. The moon, lit by that same sun’s rays, covers this circuit in a month. The five stars follow the same circle, some closer to the earth and others farther away. They start from the same points and cover the same distances, but take different lengths of time. Have you ever seen anything like that, Epicurus?”

1.88 “Then let’s say there’s no sun, no moon, and no stars, since nothing can exist unless we’ve touched it or seen it. What about god himself? Have you seen him? Why believe he exists, then? Let’s reject everything new that either reports of events or reasoning bring to our attention. On that basis, people living inland wouldn’t believe there’s a sea. What a cramped mind! Suppose you’d been born on Seriphus and never left the island. You’d have often seen little hares and foxes there. But when someone described lions and panthers to you, you wouldn’t believe they existed. And if someone told you about an elephant, you’d think they were making fun of you.”

1.89 “And you, Velleius, didn’t follow your own school’s usual practice. You used the <tight confines> of an argument to pin down your conclusion, as the dialecticians do—though your whole school knows nothing whatever about their methods. You assumed that the gods are happy. We grant that. Then you said no one can be happy without virtue. We grant that too, and gladly. Next, virtue can’t exist without reason. We have to agree to that as well. Then you add that reason can exist only in a human shape. Who do you think will grant you that? If it were true, why did you need to reach it step by step? You’d have been entitled to assume it. And what’s this talk of proceeding step by step? I can see your steps from happiness to virtue, and from virtue to reason. But how do you get from reason to human shape? That’s not stepping down. It’s falling headfirst.”

1.90 “I also don’t understand why Epicurus preferred to say that gods resemble human beings rather than that human beings resemble gods. You’ll ask what difference it makes: if this resembles that, then that resembles this. I understand. But my point is that the gods didn’t get their bodily shape from human beings. The gods have always existed. They were never born, if they really are going to exist forever. Human beings, though, were born. So the human shape existed before human beings did, and the immortal gods had that shape. We shouldn’t say, then, that their shape is human. We should say that ours is divine.”

“But have it your way on that point. What I want to know is how chance could’ve been so fortunate—for you hold that nothing in nature

1.91 is made by reason. Still, what enormous chance was it, what source of so fortunate a meeting of atoms, that humans were suddenly born with the gods’ form? Do we suppose the gods’ seed fell from heaven to earth, and humans emerged resembling their fathers? I wish you said so. I would gladly recognize our kinship with the gods. You say nothing of the kind. You say it happened by chance that we resemble gods. And now we are supposed to look for arguments to refute this! If only I could find the truth as easily as I can expose falsehood.

“You listed the philosophers’ views of the gods’ nature from Thales of Miletus onward, from memory and in great detail. It made me marvel at such learning in a Roman.

1.92 “Did you think everyone who held that a god could exist without hands and feet was talking nonsense?”

“When you consider how useful people’s limbs are, and how well they suit their purposes, doesn’t even that lead you to see that gods don’t need human limbs? What’s the point of feet if you don’t walk, or hands if there’s nothing to grasp? And what about the whole arrangement of the other parts of the body? Nothing in it is pointless, nothing lacks a reason, and nothing’s unnecessary. No human skill can match nature’s ingenuity. So will a god have a tongue and never speak? Will he have teeth, a palate, and a throat that serve no purpose? Will the parts nature attached to the body for reproduction be useless to a god? That goes for the internal organs as much as the external ones: the heart, lungs, liver, and the rest. Take away their usefulness, and what’s attractive about them? After all, you insist that a god has them for their beauty.”

1.93 “Was it confidence in dreams like these that led not just Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Hermarchus to attack Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles, but even that little prostitute Leontium to dare to write against Theophrastus? Her language was polished and thoroughly Attic, to be sure. But still! That’s how much license there was in Epicurus’s Garden. And you people regularly complain about others! Zeno even used to start fights. Why mention Albucius? As for Phaedrus, no one could’ve been more refined or kinder. But the old man would get angry if I said anything a little sharp. Yet Epicurus heaped the most insulting abuse on Aristotle. He spoke disgustingly of Phaedo, Socrates’ follower. He filled whole books with attacks on Timocrates, the brother of his companion Metrodorus, because Timocrates disagreed with him about some point of philosophy or other. He was ungrateful to Democritus himself, whose teachings he followed. And he treated his own teacher Nausiphanes appallingly, though he’d learned <not> nothing from him. Zeno didn’t just fire insults at people of his own time—Apollodorus Sillis and the others. He even called Socrates himself, the father of philosophy, ‘an Athenian clown,’ using the Latin word for ‘clown.’ And he never called Chrysippus anything but the feminine ‘Chrysippa.’”

1.94 “Just now, you yourself ran through what sounded like a senate of philosophers. You said those outstanding men were foolish, raving, and insane. If none of them saw the truth about the gods’ nature, we have reason to worry that there’s no such nature at all.

“What you people say is entirely made up. It hardly deserves to be something old women dream up over their lamps at night. You don’t realize how much you’ll have to accept if you get us to agree that gods and human beings have the same shape. A god will need all the same bodily care and attention as a human being. He’ll have to walk, run, recline, bend, sit, grasp things, and finally even converse and speak.”

1.95 “For you say there are both male and female gods, and you see what follows. I cannot marvel enough at how that founder of yours arrived at these beliefs.

“But you never stop shouting that we must hold to this: a god is happy and immortal. What stops him from being happy if he does not have two feet? Whether we should call it beatitas or beatitudo—both Latin words for happiness are certainly awkward, but usage must soften our words—whatever we call it, why can it not belong to that sun, this world, or some eternal mind without a bodily shape or limbs?

1.96 “You’re only saying, ‘I’ve never seen a happy sun or a happy universe.’ Have you ever seen any universe besides this one? You’ll say no. Then how did you dare to say there are not six hundred thousand universes, but infinitely many? ‘Reason taught me.’ Won’t reason teach you this too? We’re looking for the finest possible nature, one that’s happy and eternal. That alone is a divine nature. Just as it surpasses us in immortality, it must surpass us in mental excellence—and in bodily excellence as well. So why should we match the gods in shape when we’re inferior in everything else? Human excellence came closer to resembling the gods than the human figure did.”

1.97 “Let me press the same point a little longer. Could anything be more childish than denying that certain kinds of animals exist because they’re born in the Red Sea or India? Even the most curious people can’t ask around and hear about all the creatures that live on land, in the sea, in marshes, and in rivers. Should we deny that they exist because we’ve never seen them?

“And that resemblance you’re so fond of really has nothing to do with the issue. Doesn’t a dog look like a wolf? And, as Ennius says, ‘How much the ape, that ugly beast, resembles us!’ But their behavior is different. No animal has more sense than an elephant.”

1.98 “But what animal has a huger shape? I am speaking of animals. What about humans themselves? Do we not find different characters in people with very similar forms, and different shapes in people with the same character?

“For once we accept this kind of argument, Velleius, notice how far it spreads. You assumed reason could exist only in a human form. Someone else will assume it can exist only in an earthly being; only in one that was born; only in one that grew up; only in one that learned; only in one made of a soul and a weak, perishable body; in short, only in a mortal human. If you resist all these claims, why are you troubled by shape alone? You saw reason and mind in humans accompanied by all the things I have listed. Yet with these removed, you say you still recognize a god, provided the outlines remain. That is not considering what to say, but almost drawing it by lot.

1.99 “Perhaps you don’t even notice this: anything unnecessary or useless gets in the way, not just in a human being but even in a tree. What a nuisance it is to have one extra finger! Why? Because the five don’t need another one, either for looks or for use. But your god has much more than one extra finger. His head, neck, the back of his neck, sides, belly, back, the backs of his knees, hands, feet, thighs, and lower legs are all unnecessary. If they’re meant to make him immortal, what do these body parts contribute to keeping him alive? What does his face itself contribute? The brain, heart, lungs, and liver matter more: they’re where life is housed. The shape of the face does nothing to keep life secure.”

1.100 “And you criticized people who looked at magnificent, splendid works and suspected that some outstanding, superior being had made them and kept them moving, directing and governing them. They’d seen the universe itself and its parts—the sky, land, and seas. They’d seen their most striking features: the sun, moon, and stars. They’d observed the seasons reaching their fullness, changing, and coming round again. Even if their guess is wrong, I can at least see what leads them to it. But what great, remarkable work can you point to that looks like the product of a divine mind and leads you to suspect that gods exist? ‘I had a certain conception of a god planted in my mind,’ you say. Yes, of a bearded Jupiter and a helmeted Minerva. Do you really think they look like that?”

1.101 “How much better ordinary, uneducated people handle this! They give a god not just human body parts, but uses for those parts too. They give him a bow, arrows, a spear, a shield, a trident, a thunderbolt. Even if they can’t see what the gods actually do, they still can’t imagine a god doing nothing. Even the Egyptians, who get laughed at, never made an animal sacred unless they got some benefit from it. Take ibises. They destroy huge numbers of snakes. They’re tall birds with stiff legs and long beaks made of horn. They keep a plague out of Egypt by killing and eating the winged snakes that the southwest wind blows in from Libya’s wastelands. That way, the snakes can’t hurt people with their bites while alive or with their smell when dead. I could discuss the usefulness of mongooses, crocodiles, and cats, but I don’t want to go on too long. I’ll finish with this: at least those foreign peoples made animals sacred because they did some good. Your gods haven’t just failed to do any good. They haven’t done anything at all.”

1.102 “‘He has no business to attend to,’ he says. Clearly Epicurus, like spoiled children, thinks nothing better than doing nothing. But even children, when free from work, enjoy some active play. Do we want a god on such a permanent holiday that he is numb with idleness, and we fear that if he stirs himself he may be unable to stay happy? This argument not only strips the gods of divine movement and action. It also makes people lazy, if not even a god can be happy while doing something.

1.103 “But let the god be a human likeness and image, as you wish. What is his home, his dwelling, his location? How does he spend his life? By what means is he happy, as you want him to be? Anyone who is to be happy must use and enjoy his good things. Even the lifeless elements each have their own proper place. Earth holds the lowest, water floods over it, the next higher place belongs to air, and the highest region is assigned to the fires of aether. Among animals, some live on land, some in water, and some live a double life in both places. Some are even thought to be born in fire and are often seen flying about in burning furnaces.

1.104 “So I ask first where your god lives. Next, what makes him move from his place, if he ever does move? Then, since living creatures characteristically seek something suited to their nature, what does a god seek? For what purpose does he use the movement of mind and reason? Finally, how is he happy, and how is he eternal? Touch any one of these points and you touch a sore. Your theory is so badly set up that it cannot find a way out.

1.105 “This is what you were saying: we grasp a god’s appearance through thought, not through our senses. There’s nothing solid about it, and it doesn’t remain one and the same individual thing. We see it through the resemblance of images passing in succession. Similar images never stop arriving from the infinite supply of bodies. Our minds focus on these, and that’s why we think this nature is happy and everlasting. By the very gods we’re discussing, what sort of account is that? If these images only affect our thoughts and have no solidity or depth, what difference does it make whether we’re thinking about a centaur or a god? Other philosophers call every such mental picture an empty stirring of the mind. You call it the arrival of images in our minds and their entry into them.”

1.106 “For example, when I seem to see Tiberius Gracchus addressing the people on the Capitol and bringing out the voting urn for the decision about Marcus Octavius, I call that an empty movement of my mind. You say images of Gracchus and Octavius remain, and after reaching the Capitol are carried back to my mind. You say the same happens with a god: repeated appearances of his face strike our minds, and from this we understand that gods are happy and eternal.

1.107 “Suppose there are images that strike our minds. All that’s presented is some sort of appearance. Does it also show us why that being is happy or why it’s eternal?

“And what are these images of yours? Where do they come from? This license certainly started with Democritus. But plenty of people criticized him too, and you can’t find a way out. The whole theory wobbles and limps. What could be harder to accept than the claim that images of everyone reach me—Homer, Archilochus, Romulus, Numa, Pythagoras, Plato—and not even looking as those people actually did? How can the images be theirs, then? And whose images are they in some cases? Aristotle tells us that the poet Orpheus never existed. They say this Orphic poem was the work of a certain Pythagorean named Cercon. Yet Orpheus—or his image, as you’d have it—often enters my mind.”

1.108 “What about different images of the same person reaching me and reaching you? What about images of things that never existed at all and couldn’t exist, like Scylla or the Chimaera? What about images of people, places, and cities we’ve never seen? What about an image being there as soon as I feel like having it? What about their coming uninvited even when I’m asleep? The whole thing is nonsense, Velleius. You force these images not just on our eyes but on our minds too. That’s how freely you can chatter without being called to account. And what reckless freedom it is!”

1.109 “‘Images stream past in such quick succession that many look like one.’ I’d be embarrassed to say I don’t understand if you people who defend this understood it yourselves. How do you prove that images keep arriving without a break? And even if they do, how do you prove they’ll do so forever? ‘The infinite number of atoms keeps up the supply,’ comes the reply. Is that same infinity going to make everything last forever, then? You fall back on equal balance—let’s use that, if you like, for ἰσονομίαν. You say that since mortal beings exist, immortal ones must exist too. By that reasoning, since people are mortal, some people must be immortal. And since people are born on land, they must be born in water too. ‘And because there are things that destroy, there must be things that preserve.’ Fine, let there be. But let them preserve things that exist. I don’t recognize the existence of those gods of yours.”

1.110 “Still, how does this whole image of things arise from indivisible bodies? Even if these existed, though they do not, they might perhaps strike themselves and be set in motion by colliding with each other. They could not form, shape, color, or bring things to life. So you do not establish an immortal god in any way.

“Now let us look at happiness. Certainly it cannot exist without virtue. But virtue is active, while your god does nothing. So he has no virtue.

1.111 “So he isn’t happy either. What sort of life does he have, then? ‘A supply of good things,’ you say, ‘with nothing bad getting in the way.’ What good things, exactly? Pleasures, I suppose—bodily ones, of course. You don’t recognize any mental pleasure except one that starts in the body and comes back to it. I don’t suppose you want to be like the rest of the Epicureans, who’re embarrassed by some of Epicurus’s statements. In those statements he declares that he <can’t> even conceive of anything good apart from luxurious and obscene pleasures. And he runs through every one of them by name without a blush.”

1.112 “So what food or drinks will you give the gods? What different sounds or flowers? What sensations of touch, what smells, will you provide to drench them in pleasure? The poets at least prepare feasts of nectar and ambrosia, with either Juventas or Ganymede serving drinks. But what will you do, Epicurus? I can’t see where your god would get these things or how he’d use them. So by nature, humans are better equipped than gods for a happy life, since they enjoy more kinds of pleasure.”

1.113 “But you think less of pleasures that give our senses a kind of ‘tickling’—that’s Epicurus’s own word. How long will you keep playing games? Even our friend Philo couldn’t stand the Epicureans’ dismissing gentle, delicate pleasures. He had an extraordinary memory. He’d quote a great many of Epicurus’s statements exactly as they’d been written. He’d also recite many even more shameless passages from Metrodorus, Epicurus’s fellow sage. Metrodorus criticizes his brother Timocrates for hesitating to measure everything that contributes to a happy life by the stomach. And he doesn’t say this just once, but repeatedly. I see you nodding. You know these passages. If you denied it, I’d bring out the books. I’m not now criticizing the idea that pleasure should be the standard for everything. That’s a separate question. I’m showing that your gods have no pleasure. So even by your own standards, they aren’t happy. ‘But they’re free from pain.’”

1.114 “Is that enough for the happiest possible life, overflowing with good things? ‘He’s constantly thinking about how happy he is,’ they say. ‘There’s nothing else for him to turn over in his mind.’ So picture this god. Set him before your eyes, spending all eternity thinking nothing but ‘I’m doing wonderfully’ and ‘I’m happy.’ Still, I don’t see how this happy god can avoid fearing destruction. Atoms constantly collide with him, battering and shaking him without a moment’s break, while images constantly flow away from his own being. So your god is neither happy nor eternal.”

1.115 “‘But Epicurus even wrote books about holiness and religious duty toward the gods.’ Yes, but listen to how he speaks in them! You’d think you were hearing <Tiberius> Coruncanius or Publius Scaevola, those chief priests. You wouldn’t think this was the man who’d uprooted all religion and demolished the immortal gods’ temples and altars—not with his hands, like Xerxes, but with arguments. Why say that people should worship the gods, when the gods don’t look after people and, in fact, don’t care about anything or do anything at all?”

1.116 “‘But their nature is so exceptional and outstanding that it should, all by itself, draw a wise person to worship it.’ Can there be anything exceptional about a nature that enjoys its own pleasure but has never done anything, does nothing now, and will never do anything? And what religious duty do you owe someone from whom you’ve received nothing? What can you owe anyone who’s done nothing to deserve it? Religious duty is justice toward the gods. But what claims can there be between us and them when human beings have no shared bond with a god? Holiness, in turn, means knowing how to worship the gods. I don’t understand why we should worship them if we’ve received no good from them and expect none.”

1.117 “And why should we worship the gods out of admiration for their nature, when we see nothing remarkable in it?”

“It’s easy enough to free people from superstition, as you like to boast you do, once you’ve stripped the gods of all power. Unless perhaps you think Diagoras or Theodorus could have been superstitious, when they denied that gods existed at all. I don’t think even Protagoras could have been. He couldn’t say either that gods exist or that they don’t. All these views remove more than superstition, which involves an empty fear of the gods. They also remove religion, which consists in worshiping the gods with devotion.”

1.118 “What about those who said the whole belief in immortal gods was invented by wise people for the state’s sake, so that religion would lead to duty those whom reason could not lead? Did they not uproot all religion? And Prodicus of Ceos, who said the things that benefited human life were counted among the gods—what religion did he leave, after all?

1.119 “What about those who say that brave, famous, or powerful men became gods after death, and that these are the very gods we regularly worship, pray to, and honor? Aren’t they doing without religion altogether? Euhemerus developed this account more than anyone else. Our own Ennius translated him and followed him especially closely. But Euhemerus points out where the gods died and were buried. Does he seem to have strengthened religion, then, or to have completely destroyed it? I won’t discuss holy, awe-inspiring Eleusis, ‘where peoples from the farthest shores are initiated.’ I’ll pass over Samothrace and the rites on Lemnos, ‘celebrated in secret, entered at night, amid thick woodland hedges.’ Once you explain these things and give a rational account of them, you learn more about the nature of things than about the gods.”

1.120 “Even Democritus, one of the greatest men, seems to me uncertain about the nature of the gods. Epicurus watered his little gardens from that man’s springs. At one point Democritus thinks there are images with divine powers in the universe. At another, he says the basic elements of mind, which exist in that same universe, are gods. Then he calls them living images that regularly help or harm us. Then they’re enormous images, so vast that they surround the whole world from outside. All these ideas suit Democritus’s hometown better than Democritus himself.”

1.121 “Who can get their mind around images like those? Who can admire them? Who can think they deserve worship or religious devotion?”

“Epicurus, though, tore religion out of people’s minds by the roots when he denied the immortal gods both the ability to help and goodwill. He says a god’s nature is the best and most outstanding there is. Yet he also denies that a god has goodwill. He removes the very quality that most belongs to the best and most outstanding nature. What’s better or more outstanding than goodness and generosity? You insist that a god lacks these. That means no one, whether god or human, is dear to a god. No one is loved by him; no one has his affection. The result is that the gods neglect not just human beings, but one another as well. How much better the Stoics do—the people you criticize! They think wise people are friends with other wise people even if they don’t know them. Nothing’s more lovable than virtue. Anyone who’s gained it will have our affection, wherever in the world they may be.”

1.122 “But what a harmful idea you’re offering when you base favors and goodwill <on> weakness! Let’s set aside the gods’ power and nature. Do you really think that even human beings would never have been generous or kind unless they’d been weak? Isn’t there any natural affection between good people? The very word carum, ‘dear,’ expresses amor, ‘love.’ And amor is where the Latin word amicitia, ‘friendship,’ gets its name. If we direct friendship toward our own profit rather than the benefit of the person we love, it won’t be friendship. It’ll be a kind of trading for our own advantage. That’s how we value meadows, fields, and herds of livestock: for what we get from them. But affection and friendship between people ask for nothing in return. How much more must that be true of the gods! They need nothing, yet they love one another and look after human beings. If that’s not so, why do we worship the gods? Why do we pray to them? Why do pontiffs oversee sacred rites and augurs oversee the watching for divine signs? What do we ask the immortal gods for? What do we promise them in our vows? ‘But Epicurus even wrote a book about holiness.’”

1.123 “We are being mocked by a man who is less witty than he is unrestrained in what he writes. What reverence can there be if gods do not care about human affairs? And what living nature can care about nothing? Surely, then, the truer view is what our common friend Posidonius argued in the fifth book of his On the Nature of the Gods: Epicurus thinks there are no gods, and said what he did about immortal gods to ward off public resentment. He would not have been so foolish as to invent a god resembling a little man only in his outer outlines, not in solid substance; equipped with every human limb, but without even the slightest use for his limbs; thin and transparent; giving nothing to anyone and showing no favor; caring about absolutely nothing and doing nothing. First, such a nature cannot exist at all. Epicurus sees this and removes the gods in fact while leaving them in words.

1.124 “Then, even if a god really is just as you say, with no goodwill or love for people to move him, goodbye to him! Why should I say, ‘May he look kindly on us’? He can’t look kindly on anyone, since, as you say, all goodwill and love come from weakness.”