On the Nature of the GodsCicero
About On the Nature of the Gods
() is Cicero's dialogue on theology, written in 45 BC as part of the philosophical series composed after his daughter's death and during his exclusion from politics under Caesar. The scene is the house of the pontifex Cotta at Rome, set fictionally in the mid-70s BC. Three speakers present the main Hellenistic positions: Velleius the Epicurean, Balbus the Stoic, and Cotta the Academic skeptic. Cicero himself is present as a silent listener.
Book I gives Velleius's case: the gods are eternal, perfectly happy beings in human form, free from labor and unconcerned with the world; creation at a moment in time and divine providence are rejected as absurd. Cotta then attacks Epicurean theology on the form of the gods and their exemption from care of human affairs. Book II is Balbus's long defense of Stoic theology: the order of the universe, the consensus of mankind, divination, and the four causes Cleanthes listed for belief in the gods (foreknowledge, the benefits of nature, terror at storms and prodigies, and the regularity of the heavens). The world itself is rational; providence governs; chance cannot explain so fair an order. Book III, partly lost, contains Cotta's reply: stories of divine appearances are idle, Cleanthes's causes fail, reason ascribed to the cosmos is unwarranted, and providence is hard to square with human misery. The dialogue ends with Cicero's cautious verdict that Balbus's case seemed to him to come nearer the truth, while Velleius preferred Cotta.
The work is a principal Latin source for Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic views of the gods. Christian writers from Lactantius to Augustine knew it; Hume shaped his on its pattern of successive speakers without a final dogmatic close.