at needed expression. It
is unfortunately lost, all but one fragment, which he quotes himself in
the first book of his _Tusculans_, and one or two more preserved by the
Christian writer Lactantius, a great admirer of Cicero, who came near to
catching the beauty of his style. The passage quoted by himself is
precious.[838] It insists on the spiritual nature of the soul, which can
have nothing in common with earth or matter of any kind, seeing that it
thinks, remembers, foresees: "ita quicquid est illud, quod sentit, quod
sapit, quod vivit, quod viget, caeleste et divinum, ob eamque rem
aeternum sit necesse est." And in the concluding words he hints strongly
at the _divinity_ of the soul, which is of the same make as God
himself,--of the same immaterial nature as the only Deity of whom we
mortals can conceive. His daughter, therefore, is not only still living
in a spiritual life, but she is in some vague sense divine; that word
_apotheosis_, which he twice uses in the letters, has a real meaning for
him at this moment; and in a fragment of the _Consolatio_ quoted by
Lactantius he makes this quite plain; "Te omnium optimam doctissimamque,
approbantibus dis immortalibus ipsis, in eorum coetu locatam, ad
opinionem omnium mortalium consecrabo."[839]

Undoubtedly Cicero is here under the influence of the Pythagoreans as
well as of his own emotion. In another chapter Lactantius seems to make
this certain;[840] he begins by combining Stoics and Pythagoreans as
both believing the immortality of the soul, goes on to deal with the
Pythagorean doctrine (or one form of it) that in this life we are
expiating the sins of another, and ends by quoting Cicero's _Consolatio_
to that effect: "Quid Ciceroni faciemus? qui cum in principio
Consolationis suae dixit, luendorum scelerum causa nasci homines,
iteravit id ipsum postea, quasi obiurgans eum qui vitam poenam non esse
putet." Another lost book, the _Hortensius_, which was written
immediately after the _Consolatio_, March to May 45,[841] shows in one
or two surviving fragments exactly the same tendency of thought and
reading.[842] Our conclusion then must be that Cicero, always
impressionable, and in his way also religious, had in this year 45 a
real religious experience. He was brought face to face with one of the
mysterious facts of life, and with one of the great mysteries of the
universe, and the religious instinct awoke within him. How many others,
even in that sordid and materialis