f
as though angry with the man or with the times; nor yet, forsooth, so
flattering the good fortune of another, that I should have to be
ashamed of what I had done myself. For I had learned this lesson from
the philosophy of Plato--that there are certain changes in public
affairs. They will be governed now by the leaders of the State, then by
the people, sometimes by a single man."[304] This is very wise, but he
goes to work and altogether destroys his brother's argument. He knows
that he is preaching only to a few--in such a manner as to make his
preaching safe. His language is very pleasing, always civil, always
courteous; but not the less does he turn the arguments of his brother
into ridicule. And we feel that he is not so much laughing at his
brother as at the gods themselves--they are so clearly wooden
gods--though he is aware how necessary it is for the good of the State
that they shall be received. He declares that, in accordance with the
theory of his brother--meaning thereby the Stoics--"it is necessary that
they, the gods, should spy into every cottage along the road, so that
they may look after the affairs of men."[305] It is playful,
argumentative, and satirical. At last he proposes to leave the subject.
Socrates would also do so, never asking for the adhesion of any one, but
leaving the full purport of his words to sink into the minds of his
audience. Quintus says that he quite agrees to this, and so the
discourse De Divinatione is brought to an end.

Of his book on fate we have only a fragment, or the middle part of it.
It is the desire of Cicero to show that, in the sequence of affairs
which men call Life, it matters little whether there be a Destiny or
not. Things will run on, and will be changed, or apparently be changed,
by the action of men. What is it to us whether this or that event has
been decreed while we live, and while each follows his own devices? All
this, however, is a little tedious, taken at the end of so long a course
of philosophy; and we rise at last from the perusal with a feeling of
thankfulness that all these books of Chrysippus of which he tells us,
are not still existent to be investigated.

Such is the end of those works which I admit to have been philosophical,
and of which it seems he understood that they were the work of about
eighteen months. They were all written after Caesar's triumph--when it
was no longer in the power of any Roman to declare his opinion either in
the Se