that
sustenance most necessary to animal life."[297]

The third book is but a fragment, but it begins well with pleasant
raillery against Epicurus. Cotta declares that he had felt no difficulty
with Epicurus. Epicurus and his allies had found little to say as to the
immortal gods. His gods had possessed arms and legs, but had not been
able to move them. But from Balbus, the Stoic, they had heard much
which, though not true, was nevertheless truthlike. In all these
discourses it seems that the poor Epicureans are treated with but a
moderate amount of mercy. But Cotta continues, and tells many stories of
the gods. He is interrupted in his tale, for the sad hand of destruction
has fallen upon the MS., and his arguments have come to us unfinished.
"It is better," he says, "not to give wine to the sick at all, because
you may injure them by the application. In the same way I do not know
whether it would not be better to refuse that gift of reason, that
sharpness and quickness of thought, to men in general, than to bestow it
upon them so often to their own destruction."[298] It is thus that is
discussed the nature of the gods in this work of Cicero, which is indeed
a discussion on the different schools of philosophy, each in the
position which it had reached in his time.

The De Natura Deorum is followed by two books, De Divinatione, and by
the fragment of one, De Fato. Divination is the science of predicting
events. By "Fatum" Cicero means destiny, or that which has been fixed
beforehand. The three books together may be taken as religious
discourses, and his purport seems to have been to show that it might be
the duty of the State to foster observances, and even to punish their
non-observance--for the benefit of the whole--even though they might not
be in themselves true. He is here together with his brother, or with
those whom, like his brother, he may suppose to have emancipated
themselves from superstition--and tells him or them that though they do
not believe they should feign belief. If the augurs declare by the
flight of birds that such a thing should be done, let it be done,
although he who has to act in the matter has no belief in the birds. If
they declare that a matter has been fixed by fate, let it be as though
it were fixed, whether fixed or no. He repudiates the belief as
unreasonable or childish, but recommends that men should live as though
they believed. In such a theory as this put thus before the reader,