The Nature of the Gods Book

My goal to read this in the original Latin has emerged partially intact: I read big chunks of each book untranslated, but not quite all of it. I read the intervening sections in translation. It was a fascinating way to read a piece of history and piece of philosophy. The slowness (and, mostly, the fact that I was reading it for a class) allowed for a good bit of outside reading, which enriched the experience. It also allowed for an appreciation of Cicero's language, which is really pretty wonderful sometimes. On the other hand, the close focus on translating the material meant that I often couldn't see the forest for the trees (it often felt as if I were just staring really closely at the bark).

Cicero's De natura deorum is a dialogue between three Roman philosophers: the Epicurean Velleius, the Stoic Balbus, and the Academic Skeptic Cotta. I only had the vaguest idea of what these labels entailed going into this text, and in a lot of ways I think that was a good way to approach it. One of Cicero's main reasons for writing his philosophical works was to introduce / expand the audience for Greek philosophy in the Roman world. Because of this, each book acts as a nice encapsulation of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism, all presented in nice Ciceronian prose. Since its manuscripts survived the course of 2000+ years better than the manuscripts of the Greek philosophers who inspired it, De natura deorum provides us with quite a bit of what we know about Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism. It's also gone on to have quite an illustrious history of influencing great thinkers, from Augustine to Aquinas to Milton to Spinoza to Hume to Voltaire.

In the course of three days our three philosophers traverse the theological and philosophical landscape of contemporary Rome: do the gods exist, and if they do, in what manner? What shape do they take, what degree of concern do they have for human affairs? What is the nature of the cosmos, and what does that imply about its gods? And is there any way to know or to prove, really, if the gods exist at all?Despite the fact that they could easily just be mouthpieces, Cicero imbues each of his spokesmen with a nice sense of personality and humanity which breathes a lot of life into the text. Velleius has a nice sardonic wit, Balbus is effusive, Cotta is wary yet earnest. There are passages that are very clever and passages that are very beautiful.

I also like that the dialogue on a wonderfully ambiguous note. Cicero had inserted himself into the dialogue at the beginning of the text, but he's just an observer. Once he arrives and is invited to listen, he essentially disappears and does not speak another word until the work's last line. He the states the following:

Haec cum essent dicta, ita discessimus, ut Velleio Cottae disputatio verior, mihi Balbi ad veritatis similitudinem videretur esse propensior.

Roughly translated, it reads When these things had been said we all went our own way. To Velleius, the argument of Cotta seemed more accurate. But to me, the argument of Balbus seemed to closer to the likeness of the truth.

This is all kinds of fun, particularly because Cicero spends a solid portion of the introduction to his dialogue defending his choice to align with the Academic Skeptics - Cotta's school, not Balbus's - despite their relative unpopularity at the time. Lots of classicist ink has been spilled trying to figure out exactly what Cicero was playing at here: whether he was lying to protect his reputation against accusation of atheism, if he was really a closeted Stoic, or if he was simply demonstrating an application of Skeptical open-mindedness. I'm not sure that anyone really knows or will ever really know. But it's just a fun example of much thought and possibility is packed into almost every line of this text. It's the sort of work you can read over and over again and find new things each time.