is made of atoms must have had a beginning: if so, there were
no Gods till there was this beginning; and if the Gods have had a
beginning, they must necessarily have an end, as you have before
contended when you were discussing Plato's world. Where, then, is your
beatitude and immortality, in which two words you say that God is
expressed, the endeavor to prove which reduces you to the greatest
perplexities? For you said that God had no body, but something like
body; and no blood, but something like blood.

XXV. It is a frequent practice among you, when you assert anything that
has no resemblance to truth, and wish to avoid reprehension, to advance
something else which is absolutely and utterly impossible, in order
that it may seem to your adversaries better to grant that point which
has been a matter of doubt than to keep on pertinaciously contradicting
you on every point: like Epicurus, who, when he found that if his atoms
were allowed to descend by their own weight, our actions could not be
in our own power, because their motions would be certain and necessary,
invented an expedient, which escaped Democritus, to avoid necessity. He
says that when the atoms descend by their own weight and gravity, they
move a little obliquely. Surely, to make such an assertion as this is
what one ought more to be ashamed of than the acknowledging ourselves
unable to defend the proposition. His practice is the same against the
logicians, who say that in all propositions in which yes or no is
required, one of them must be true; he was afraid that if this were
granted, then, in such a proposition as "Epicurus will be alive or dead
to-morrow," either one or the other must necessarily be admitted;
therefore he absolutely denied the necessity of yes or no. Can anything
show stupidity in a greater degree? Zeno,[89] being pressed by
Arcesilas, who pronounced all things to be false which are perceived by
the senses, said that some things were false, but not all. Epicurus was
afraid that if any one thing seen should be false, nothing could be
true; and therefore he asserted all the senses to be infallible
directors of truth. Nothing can be more rash than this; for by
endeavoring to repel a light stroke, he receives a heavy blow. On the
subject of the nature of the Gods, he falls into the same errors. While
he would avoid the concretion of individual bodies, lest death and
dissolution should be the consequence, he denies that the Gods have
body,