it was a god, everlasting, eternal, never born and never dying, but
round in his shape! Parmenides thought that it was fire that moved the
earth. Leucippus believed it to be "plenum et inane." What "full and
empty" may mean I cannot tell; but Democritus could, for he believed in
it--though in other matters he went a little farther! Empedocles sticks
to the old four elements. Heraclitus is all for fire. Melissus imagines
that whatever exists is infinite and immutable, and ever has been and
ever will be. Plato thinks that the world has always existed, while the
Pythagoreans attribute everything to mathematics.[279] "Your wise man,"
continues Cicero, "will know one whom to choose out of all these. Let
the others, who have been repudiated, retire."

"They are all concealed, these things--hidden in thick darkness, so
that no human eye can have power enough to look up into the heavens or
down on to the earth. We do not know our own bodies, or the nature or
strength of their component parts. The doctors themselves, who have
opened them and looked at them, are ignorant. The Empirics declare that
they know nothing; because, as soon as looked at, they may change. * * *
Hicetas, the Syracusan, as Theophrastus tells us, thinks that the
heavens and the sun and the moon and the stars all stand still, and that
nothing in all the world moves but the earth. Now what do you, followers
of Epicurus, say to this?"[280] I need not carry the conversation on any
farther to show that Cicero is ridiculing the whole thing. This Hicetas,
the Syracusan, seems to have been nearer the mark than the others,
according to the existing lights, which had not shone out as yet in
Cicero's days. "But what was the meaning of it all? Who knows anything
about it? How is a man to live by listening to such trash as this?" It
is thus that Cicero means to be understood. I will agree that Cicero
does not often speak out so clearly as he does here, turning the whole
thing into ridicule. He does generally find it well to say something in
praise of these philosophers. He does not quite declare the fact that
nothing is to be made of them; or, rather, there is existing in it all
an under feeling that, were he to do so, he would destroy his character
and rob himself of his amusement. But we remember always his character
of a philosopher, as attributed to Cato, in his speech during his
Consulship for Murena. I have told the story when giving an account of
the speech. "He w