but says they have something like body; and says they have no
blood, but something like blood.

XXVI. It seems an unaccountable thing how one soothsayer can refrain
from laughing when he sees another. It is yet a greater wonder that you
can refrain from laughing among yourselves. It is no body, but
something like body! I could understand this if it were applied to
statues made of wax or clay; but in regard to the Deity, I am not able
to discover what is meant by a quasi-body or quasi-blood. Nor indeed
are you, Velleius, though you will not confess so much. For those
precepts are delivered to you as dictates which Epicurus carelessly
blundered out; for he boasted, as we see in his writings, that he had
no instructor, which I could easily believe without his public
declaration of it, for the same reason that I could believe the master
of a very bad edifice if he were to boast that he had no architect but
himself: for there is nothing of the Academy, nothing of the Lyceum, in
his doctrine; nothing but puerilities. He might have been a pupil of
Xenocrates. O ye immortal Gods, what a teacher was he! And there are
those who believe that he actually was his pupil; but he says
otherwise, and I shall give more credit to his word than to another's.
He confesses that he was a pupil of a certain disciple of Plato, one
Pamphilus, at Samos; for he lived there when he was young, with his
father and his brothers. His father, Neocles, was a farmer in those
parts; but as the farm, I suppose, was not sufficient to maintain him,
he turned school-master; yet Epicurus treats this Platonic philosopher
with wonderful contempt, so fearful was he that it should be thought he
had ever had any instruction. But it is well known he had been a pupil
of Nausiphanes, the follower of Democritus; and since he could not deny
it, he loaded him with insults in abundance. If he never heard a
lecture on these Democritean principles, what lectures did he ever
hear? What is there in Epicurus's physics that is not taken from
Democritus? For though he altered some things, as what I mentioned
before of the oblique motions of the atoms, yet most of his doctrines
are the same; his atoms--his vacuum--his images--infinity of
space--innumerable worlds, their rise and decay--and almost every part
of natural learning that he treats of.

Now, do you understand what is meant by quasi-body and quasi-blood? For
I not only acknowledge that you are a better judge of it than