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On the Nature of the Gods

Epicurean, Stoic and sceptic argue over whether the gods run the world, in the dialogue David Hume took as a model for his own.

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Original title
De natura deorum
First published
45 BCE(aged 61)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

Gaius Cotta was a pontiff, one of the senior priests of the Roman state, and in this dialogue he spends a public holiday at his house in Rome, some time between 77 and 75 BCE, taking apart every argument his two guests offer about the gods. He tells them first that he does not doubt the gods exist; he doubts their reasons. Gaius Velleius, an Epicurean senator, holds that the gods exist but live untroubled and take no part in running the world. Quintus Balbus, a Stoic, argues that the order of the stars and seasons and the workings of the human body show that the world is governed by a providential mind. Cotta answers both — the Epicurean gods are idle, and the Stoic proofs prove less than they claim — and holds to his country's religion on the authority of his ancestors, not on anyone's argument. Cicero, who was one of Rome's augurs, the officials who read the signs of the gods' will for the state, is present at the conversation but barely speaks, and in the preface he refuses to tell his readers what he thinks. Then on the last page he says that Balbus's case seemed to him the more probable. Christian writers from Tertullian and Minucius Felix to Lactantius and Augustine knew the book and drew on it. David Hume modelled his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in part on it, and Hume's narrator, like Cicero, ends by preferring the speaker who argues from design; the Dialogues appeared in 1779, three years after Hume's death. Cicero probably never revised the book, and it may not have been released in his lifetime. More than a third of the third book is lost, and with it parts of Cotta's reply to Balbus.

Key concepts

Why won't Cicero say what he himself believes about the gods?

Because he thinks a teacher's authority gets in the way of the reader's own judgment. In the preface he recalls the followers of Pythagoras, who settled any dispute with 'He himself has said it', letting a name win without an argument. So he sets out three positions and leaves the weighing to the reader, until one sentence at the very end.

What is the Epicurean 'prolepsis' that Velleius relies on?

Prolepsis is Epicurus's word for a notion the mind holds before any teaching, a conception formed in advance. Velleius argues that every nation, without learning, has such a notion of gods, and that what all peoples agree on by nature must be true. The same inborn notion, he adds, tells us the gods are happy and eternal, and therefore free of all labour.

What do the Stoics mean by providence?

Providence is the Stoic belief that a divine mind foresees and arranges the world for the good of gods and humans. The Greek word, pronoia, means forethought, and Velleius mocks it as an old prophesying woman. Balbus defends it by the fit of things to their uses: crops exist for animals, and animals for people, the horse for carrying, the ox for the plough.

Why does Balbus call the world itself a living god?

Because he argues that whatever moves of its own accord has a mind, and the world does. Every motion in it comes from a heat that no outside push sets going; heat moving itself must be mind, so the world is alive and reasoning. Nothing is greater than the world, so it must also be wise, and what is supreme and wise is divine.

How can Cotta keep his religion and reject every proof of it?

Cotta separates belief from argument. As a priest he accepts the gods and the rites of his ancestors on their authority, and says no reasoning, learned or unlearned, will move him from them. What he refuses is the claim that philosophy has proved them: from his ancestors he takes belief without reasons, but from a philosopher like Balbus he demands reasons.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Gods who do nothing

Would gods who never meddle with the world be a relief or a loss? Velleius the Epicurean offers their idleness as freedom from fear, and the book asks whether religion can survive it.

Gaius Velleius opens the debate for Epicurus. The gods exist, he says, because every people holds a notion of them before any teaching; they are shaped like humans, since no form is finer, and they are perfectly happy because they labour at nothing, least of all at running the world. Fear of their anger is therefore groundless. Cotta answers that such gods are owed nothing, and Cicero's preface has already warned that without their care, prayer, piety and perhaps justice lose their ground.

  • pleasure
  • nature
  • perception
  • fear
  • human nature

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A world run by a mind

Does the order of the stars, the seasons and the human body prove that a mind governs the world? Balbus the Stoic says it does, and that the world was made for gods and people.

Quintus Lucilius Balbus gives the Stoic case at length. The heavens move with a regularity no chance could produce; a heat that moves itself runs through the world, so the world is alive, reasoning and divine; plants and animals are fitted to their uses, the ox for the plough, the dog for guarding. Against the Epicurean claim that atoms fell together by accident he offers his sharpest comparisons. Cicero, silent through the debate, ends by calling this case the more probable.

  • cosmology
  • nature
  • reason
  • evidence
  • human nature

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Faith without proofs

Can someone keep his country's religion while rejecting every argument offered for it? Gaius Cotta, one of Rome's senior priests, tries, and his doubts reach the question of why the good suffer.

Cotta speaks for the Academy, the school that withholds assent from what has not been shown. He believes in the gods because his ancestors handed down their worship, and in religion he follows Rome's high priests, not Zeno or Chrysippus. Yet he takes the Stoic proofs apart one by one: the gods' gift of reason also made fraud possible, temple robbers prosper, good men die cruelly. More than a third of his reply is lost, so parts of the argument are missing.

  • tradition
  • authority
  • skepticism
  • evidence
  • justice
  • divine providence

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Within this work

passages held
217
distinct concepts
291
by passages held, corpus-wide
#332

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine providence” and “teleology”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine providenceteleology10
cosmologyepicureanism7
cosmologystoicism7
divine providencetheology7
cosmologydivine providence6
divine providenceepicureanism6
divine providencenature6
divine providencereligion6
natureteleology6
stoicismtheology5
cosmologynature3
cosmologytheology3
epicureanismreligion3
epicureanismstoicism3
epicureanismtheology3
religiontheology3
divine providencestoicism2
stoicismteleology2
cosmologyteleology1
epicureanismnature1
naturereligion1
naturestoicism1
naturetheology1
religionstoicism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. -70 Orations

    Four volumes of the speeches themselves — some delivered, some, like the case against Verres, only published. The philosophical books that fill the rest of the shelf came later, most of them once he had been shut out of that life.

     EN
  2. -54 The Republic (De re publica)

    Plato wrote a Republic and then a Laws; Cicero set out to do both, and the treatise on law is this book's companion — begun a couple of years later and left unfinished.

     EN
  3. -52 Treatise on the Laws (De legibus)

    Unfinished, unpublished, and on the available evidence never released at all. For centuries it travelled as the lesser half of a pair whose better half had gone missing.

     EN
  4. -46 Brutus or History of Famous Orators (Brutus; Orator)

    Not the speeches but the account of them, made when the courts had stopped sitting. The edition carries Orator with it, the portrait of the ideal speaker written for the same dedicatee in the same year.

     EN
  5. -45 A Treatise on the Chief Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum)

    Cicero's fullest treatment of ethics: three conversations, set years apart and in different places, bound into one survey of what the leading schools said a life is for.

     EN
  6. -45 On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum) you are here EN
  7. -45 The Academic Questions (Academica)

    Readers who wondered why Cicero sided with the sceptical Academy were sent here by On the Nature of the Gods, written later the same year: this is where he defends arguing every side of a question and settling for the probable.

     EN
  8. -45 The Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes)

    The practical sequel to the treatise on the chief good, written next: that book compares what the schools say the good is, and this one puts the answer to work against fear and grief.

     EN
  9. -44 On Friendship (De Amicitia)

    Copyists kept this and On Old Age bound together for so long that printers followed them. The edition prints the Dream of Scipio after it, which belongs to De re publica.

     EN
  10. -44 On Moral Duties (De officiis)

    The last of his philosophical books, and the one that travelled furthest: for centuries afterwards it was simply the standard book of conduct.

     EN
  11. -44 On Old Age (Cato Maior de Senectute)

    Written alongside On Friendship and sent to the same friend, Atticus; the later book refers back to this one by name.

     EN
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