sing his fault, he says thus towards the end of His
book: "Those who have established laws and ordinances and instituted
monarchies and other governments in towns and cities, have placed human
life in great repose and security and delivered it from many troubles;
and if any one should go about to take this away, we should lead the
life of savage beasts, and should be every one ready to eat up one
another as we meet." For these are the very words of Colotes, though
neither justly nor truly spoken. For if any one, taking away the laws,
should leave us nevertheless the doctrines of Parmenides, Socrates,
Plato, and Heraclitus, we should be far from mutually devouring one
another and leading the life of beasts. For we should fear dishonest
things, and should for honesty alone venerate justice, the gods our
superiors, and magistrates, believing that we have spirits and daemons
who are the guardians and superintendents of human life, esteeming
all the gold that is upon and within the earth not to be equivalent to
virtue; and doing that willingly by reason, as Xenocrates says, which
we now do by force and through fear of the law. When then will our life
become savage, uncivilized, and bestial? When, the laws being taken
away, there shall be left doctrines inciting men to pleasure; when the
world shall bethought not to be ruled and governed by Divine Providence;
when those men shall be esteemed wise who spit at honesty if it is not
joined with pleasure; and when such discourses and sentences as these
shall be scoffed at and derided:--

For Justice has an eye which all things sees;

and again:--

God near us stands, and views whate'er we do;

and once more: "God, as antiquity has delivered to holding the
beginning, middle, and end of the universe, makes a direct line, walking
according to Nature. After him follows Justice, a punisher of those who
have been deficient in their duties by transgressing the divine law."

For they who contemn these things as if they were fables, and think that
the sovereign good of man consists about the belly, and in those other
passages by which pleasure is admitted, are such as stand in need of the
law, and fear, and stripes, and some king, prince, or magistrate, having
in his hand the sword of justice; to the end that they may not devour
their neighbors through their gluttony, rendered confident by their
atheistical impiety. For this is the life of brutes, because brute
beasts know n