No—­we are sure of nothing; and we are happy if, like Socrates, we only know this—­that we know nothing.  Then, as if in irony, or partly influenced perhaps by the advocate’s love of arguing the case both ways, Cicero demolishes that grand argument of design which elsewhere he so carefully constructs,[1] and reasons in the very language of materialism—­“You assert that all the universe could not have been so ingeniously made without some godlike wisdom, the majesty of which you trace down even to the perfection of bees and ants.  Why, then, did the Deity, when he made everything for the sake of man, make such a variety (for instance) of venomous reptiles?  Your divine soul is a fiction; it is better to imagine that creation is the result of the laws of nature, and so release the Deity from a great deal of hard work, and me from fear; for which of us, when he thinks that he is an object of divine care, can help feeling an awe of the divine power day and night?  But we do not understand even our own bodies; how, then, can we have an eyesight so piercing as to penetrate the mysteries of heaven and earth?”

[Footnote 1:  See p. 168.]

The treatise, however, is but a disappointing fragment, and the argument is incomplete.

III.  THE ‘TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS’.

The scene of this dialogue is Cicero’s villa at Tusculum.  There, in his long gallery, he walks and discusses with his friends the vexed questions of morality.  Was death an evil?  Was the soul immortal?  How could a man best bear pain and the other miseries of life?  Was virtue any guarantee for happiness?

Then, as now, death was the great problem of humanity—­“to die and go we know not where”.  The old belief in Elysium and Tartarus had died away; as Cicero himself boldly puts it in another place, such things were no longer even old wives’ fables.  Either death brought an absolute unconsciousness, or the soul soared into space. “Lex non poena mors”—­“Death is a law, not a penalty”—­was the ancient saying.  It was, as it were, the close of a banquet or the fall of the curtain.  “While we are, death is not; when death has come, we are not”.

Cicero brings forward the testimony of past ages to prove that death is not a mere annihilation.  Man cannot perish utterly.  Heroes are deified; and the spirits of the dead return to us in visions of the night.  Somehow or other (he says) there clings to our minds a certain presage of future ages; and so we plant, that our children may reap; we toil, that others may enter into our labours; and it is this life after death, the desire to live in men’s mouths for ever, which inspires the patriot and the martyr.  Fame to the Roman, even more than to us, was “the last infirmity of noble minds”.  It was so in a special degree to Cicero.  The instinctive sense of immortality, he argues, is strong within us; and as, in the words of the English poet,