[Footnote 1:  De Nat.  Deor. i. 5.]

[Footnote 2:  “To us, probability is the very guide of life".—­Introd. to Butler’s Analogy.]

“If you ask me what the Deity is, or what his nature and attributes are, I should follow the example of Simonides, who, when the tyrant Hiero proposed to him the same question, asked a day to consider of it.  When the king, on the next day, required from him the answer, Simonides requested two days more; and when he went on continually asking double the time, instead of giving any answer, Hiero in amazement demanded of him the reason.  ‘Because’, replied he, ’the longer I meditate on the question, the more obscure does it appear’".[1]

[Footnote 1:  De Nat.  Deor. i. 22.]

The position of Cicero as a statesman, and also as a member of the College of Augurs, no doubt checked any strong expression of opinion on his part as to the forms of popular worship and many particulars of popular belief.  In the treatise which he intended as in some sort a sequel to this Dialogue on the ’Nature of the Gods’—­that upon ’Divination’—­he states the arguments for and against the national belief in omens, auguries, dreams, and such intimations of the Divine will.[1] He puts the defence of the system in the mouth of his brother Quintus, and takes himself the destructive side of the argument:  but whether this was meant to give his own real views on the subject, we cannot be so certain.  The course of argument employed on both sides would rather lead to the conclusion that the writer’s opinion was very much that which Johnson delivered as to the reality of ghosts—­“All argument is against it, but all belief is for it”.

[Footnote 1:  There is a third treatise, ‘De Fato’, apparently a continuation of the series, of which only a portion has reached us.  It is a discussion of the difficult questions of Fate and Free-will.]

With regard to the great questions of the soul’s immortality, and a state of future rewards and punishments, it would be quite possible to gather from Cicero’s writings passages expressive of entirely contradictory views.  The bent of his mind, as has been sufficiently shown, was towards doubt, and still more towards discussion; and possibly his opinions were not so entirely in a state of flux as the remains of his writings seem to show.  In a future state of some kind he must certainly have believed—­that is, with such belief as he would have considered the subject-matter to admit of—­as a strong probability.  In a speculative fragment which has come down to us, known as ‘Scipio’s Dream’, we seem to have the creed of the man rather than the speculations of the philosopher.  Scipio Africanus the elder appears in a dream to the younger who bore his name (his grandson by adoption).  He shows him a vision of heaven; bids him listen to the music of the spheres, which, as they move in their order, “by a modulation of high and low sounds”, give forth that harmony