ife they call) both fortunes find,
They being have, but that before the birth
They nothing were, nor shall be when once dead.

For these are not the expressions of a man who denies those that are
born to be, but rather of him who holds those to be that are not yet
born or that are already dead. And Colotes also does not altogether
accuse him of this, but says that according to his opinion we shall
never be sick, never wounded. But how is it possible, that he who
affirms men to have being both before their life and after their death,
and during their life to find both fortunes (or to be accompanied both
by good and evil), should not leave them the power to suffer? Who then
are they, O Colotes, that are endued with this privilege never to be
wounded, never to be sick? Even you yourselves, who are composed of
atoms and voidness, neither of which, you say, has any sense. Now there
is no great hurt in this; but the worst is, you have nothing left that
can cause you pleasure, seeing an atom is not capable to receive those
things which are to effect it, and voidness cannot be affected by them.

But because Colotes would, immediately after Democritus, seem to inter
and bury Parmenides, and I have passed over and a little postponed his
defence, to bring in between them that of Empedocles, as seeming to
be more coherent and consequent to the first reprehensions, let us now
return to Parmenides. Him, then, does Colotes accuse of having broached
and set abroad certain shameful and villanous sophistries; and yet by
these his sophisms he has neither rendered friendship less honorable,
nor voluptuousness or the desire of pleasures more audacious and
unbridled. He has not taken from honesty its attractive property or its
being venerable or recommendable of itself, nor has he disturbed the
opinions we ought to have of the gods. And I do not see how, by saying
that the All (or the universe) is one, he hinders or obstructs our
living. For when Epicurus himself says that the All is infinite, that it
is neither engendered nor perishable, that it can neither increase
nor be diminished, he speaks of the universe as of one only thing. And
having in the beginning of his treatise concerning this matter said,
that the nature of those things which have being consists of bodies and
of vacuum, he makes a division (as it were) of one thing into two parts,
one of which has in reality no subsistence, being, as you yourselves
term it, impalpa