as this is the manner in which other
philosophers have argued on the same subject, I will take no further
notice of it at present; I rather choose to proceed to what is properly
your own.

I allow that there are Gods. Instruct me, then, concerning their
origin; inform me where they are, what sort of body, what mind, they
have, and what is their course of life; for these I am desirous of
knowing. You attribute the most absolute power and efficacy to atoms.
Out of them you pretend that everything is made. But there are no
atoms, for there is nothing without body; every place is occupied by
body, therefore there can be no such thing as a vacuum or an atom.

XXIV. I advance these principles of the naturalists without knowing
whether they are true or false; yet they are more like truth than those
statements of yours; for they are the absurdities in which Democritus,
or before him Leucippus, used to indulge, saying that there are certain
light corpuscles--some smooth, some rough, some round, some square,
some crooked and bent as bows--which by a fortuitous concourse made
heaven and earth, without the influence of any natural power. This
opinion, C. Velleius, you have brought down to these our times; and you
would sooner be deprived of the greatest advantages of life than of
that authority; for before you were acquainted with those tenets, you
thought that you ought to profess yourself an Epicurean; so that it was
necessary that you should either embrace these absurdities or lose the
philosophical character which you had taken upon you; and what could
bribe you to renounce the Epicurean opinion? Nothing, you say, can
prevail on you to forsake the truth and the sure means of a happy life.
But is that the truth? for I shall not contest your happy life, which
you think the Deity himself does not enjoy unless he languishes in
idleness. But where is truth? Is it in your innumerable worlds, some of
which are rising, some falling, at every moment of time? Or is it in
your atomical corpuscles, which form such excellent works without the
direction of any natural power or reason? But I was forgetting my
liberality, which I had promised to exert in your case, and exceeding
the bounds which I at first proposed to myself. Granting, then,
everything to be made of atoms, what advantage is that to your
argument? For we are searching after the nature of the Gods; and
allowing them to be made of atoms, they cannot be eternal, because
whatever