Thus then spake Cleombrotus: I could, says he,
relate several such stories as these; but it is sufficient that
what has been said as yet does not contradict the opinion
of any one here. And we all know, the Stoics believe the
same as we do concerning the Daemons, and that amongst
[p. 25]
the great company of Gods which are commonly believed,
there is but one who is eternal and immortal; all the rest,
having been born in time, shall end by death. As to the
flouts and scoffing of the Epicureans, they are not to be
regarded, seeing they have the boldness to treat divine
providence with as little reverence, calling it by no better
a name than a mere whimsy and old wives' fable.
Whereas we, on the contrary, assert that their Infinity
is fabulous and ridiculous, seeing among such endless numbers of worlds there is not one governed by reason or divine
providence, they having been all made and upheld by
chance. If we cannot forbear drolling even in matters of
philosophy, they are most to be ridiculed who bring into
their disputes of natural questions certain blind, dumb, and
lifeless images, which appear they know not where nor
when, which, they say, proceed from bodies, some of which
are still living, and others long since dead and rotten.
Now, such people's opinions as these must needs be exploded and derided by all rational men; yet these very
people shall be offended and angry at a man's saying there
be Daemons, and that they subsist both by reason and by
Nature, and continue a long time.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.