which naturally proceed from it--water, earth, and air. He attributes
divinity to the sun, moon, stars, and universal space, the grand
container of all things, and to those men likewise who have obtained
immortality. He maintains the sky to be what men call Jupiter; the air,
which pervades the sea, to be Neptune; and the earth, Ceres. In like
manner he goes through the names of the other Deities. He says that
Jupiter is that immutable and eternal law which guides and directs us
in our manners; and this he calls fatal necessity, the everlasting
verity of future events. But none of these are of such a nature as to
seem to carry any indication of divine virtue in them. These are the
doctrines contained in his first book of the Nature of the Gods. In the
second, he endeavors to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musaeus,
Hesiod, and Homer to what he has advanced in the first, in order that
the most ancient poets, who never dreamed of these things, may seem to
have been Stoics. Diogenes the Babylonian was a follower of the
doctrine of Chrysippus; and in that book which he wrote, entitled "A
Treatise concerning Minerva," he separates the account of Jupiter's
bringing-forth, and the birth of that virgin, from the fabulous, and
reduces it to a natural construction.

XVI. Thus far have I been rather exposing the dreams of dotards than
giving the opinions of philosophers. Not much more absurd than these
are the fables of the poets, who owe all their power of doing harm to
the sweetness of their language; who have represented the Gods as
enraged with anger and inflamed with lust; who have brought before our
eyes their wars, battles, combats, wounds; their hatreds, dissensions,
discords, births, deaths, complaints, and lamentations; their
indulgences in all kinds of intemperance; their adulteries; their
chains; their amours with mortals, and mortals begotten by immortals.
To these idle and ridiculous flights of the poets we may add the
prodigious stories invented by the Magi, and by the Egyptians also,
which were of the same nature, together with the extravagant notions of
the multitude at all times, who, from total ignorance of the truth, are
always fluctuating in uncertainty.

Now, whoever reflects on the rashness and absurdity of these tenets
must inevitably entertain the highest respect and veneration for
Epicurus, and perhaps even rank him in the number of those beings who
are the subject of this dispute; for he alone first f