us's
intervals of worlds. Do not attend, says he, to these idle and
imaginary tales; nor to the operator and builder of the World, the God
of Plato's Timaeus; nor to the old prophetic dame, the [Greek: Pronoia]
of the Stoics, which the Latins call Providence; nor to that round,
that burning, revolving deity, the World, endowed with sense and
understanding; the prodigies and wonders, not of inquisitive
philosophers, but of dreamers!

For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to see that
workhouse of such stupendous toil, in which he makes the world to be
modelled and built by God? What materials, what tools, what bars, what
machines, what servants, were employed in so vast a work? How could the
air, fire, water, and earth pay obedience and submit to the will of the
architect? From whence arose those five forms,[83] of which the rest
were composed, so aptly contributing to frame the mind and produce the
senses? It is tedious to go through all, as they are of such a sort
that they look more like things to be desired than to be discovered.

But, what is more remarkable, he gives us a world which has been not
only created, but, if I may so say, in a manner formed with hands, and
yet he says it is eternal. Do you conceive him to have the least skill
in natural philosophy who is capable of thinking anything to be
everlasting that had a beginning? For what can possibly ever have been
put together which cannot be dissolved again? Or what is there that had
a beginning which will not have an end? If your Providence, Lucilius,
is the same as Plato's God, I ask you, as before, who were the
assistants, what were the engines, what was the plan and preparation of
the whole work? If it is not the same, then why did she make the world
mortal, and not everlasting, like Plato's God?

IX. But I would demand of you both, why these world-builders started up
so suddenly, and lay dormant for so many ages? For we are not to
conclude that, if there was no world, there were therefore no ages. I
do not now speak of such ages as are finished by a certain number of
days and nights in annual courses; for I acknowledge that those could
not be without the revolution of the world; but there was a certain
eternity from infinite time, not measured by any circumscription of
seasons; but how that was in space we cannot understand, because we
cannot possibly have even the slightest idea of time before time was. I
desire, therefore, to know, Balbus