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Updated: June 24, 2025
With all my heart, says Velleius, for I readily agree to what you have hitherto said, and expect still greater things from you. I am unwilling to interrupt you, says Balbus to Cotta, but we shall take another opportunity, and I shall effectually convince you. But * XXVI. Shall I adore, and bend the suppliant knee, Who scorn their power and doubt their deity?
Brutus believed it, and Cato, and that Velleius, and that Balbus, and that Cotta. Or if perchance any of them did not, they lived, and talked, and read, and were as erudite about it, as though they did. The example was good, and the precepts were the best to be had.
LXV. Another, and in my opinion the strongest, proof that the providence of the Gods takes care of us is divination, which both of you, perhaps, will attack; you, Cotta, because Carneades took pleasure in inveighing against the Stoics; and you, Velleius, because there is nothing Epicurus ridicules so much as the prediction of events.
In the first book, Velleius, the Epicurean, sets forth the physical tenets of his sect, and is answered by Cotta, who is of the Academic school. In the second, Balbus, the disciple of the Porch, gives an account of his own system, and is, in turn, refuted by Cotta in the third.
On the one hand, Ctesias and his numerous followers including, among the ancients, Cephalion, Castor, Diodorus Siculus, Nicolas of Damascus, Trogus Pompeius, Velleius Paterculus, Josephus, Eusebius, and Moses of Chorene; among the moderns, Freret, Rollin, and Clinton have given the kingdom a duration of between thirteen and fourteen hundred years, and carried hack its antiquity to a time almost coeval with the founding of Babylon; on the other, Herodotus, Volney, Ileeren, B. G. Niebuhr, Brandis, and many others, have preferred a chronology which limits the duration of the kingdom to about six centuries and a half, and places the commencement in the thirteenth century B.C. when a flourishing empire had already existed in Chaldaea, or Babylonia, for a thousand years, or more.
The conversation ended here, and we parted. Velleius judged that the arguments of Cotta were truest; but those of Balbus seemed to me to have the greater probability. This work was one of Cicero's earlier treatises, though one of those which was most admired by his contemporaries, and one of which he himself was most proud.
That is Regulus's trick, and he has recourse to the scandalous device constantly, for he calls down the anger of the gods, whom he daily outrages, upon the head of his luckless son. Velleius Blaesus, the rich Consular, was stricken with the illness which carried him off, and was desirous of changing his will.
But among men, do we not see a disparity of manners in persons very much alike, and a similitude of manners in persons unlike? If this sort of argument were once to prevail, Velleius, observe what it would lead to. You have laid it down as certain that reason cannot possibly reside in any but the human form.
A still lower level of aim and attainment is shown in another work of the same date as that of Velleius, the nine books of historical anecdotes, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, by Valerius Maximus, whose turgid and involved style is not redeemed by any originality of thought or treatment.
Some two hundred persons were in the conspiracy, but only a portion of them succeeded in breaking the school bounds. Florus says that not more than thirty got out, while Velleius makes the number to have been sixty-four, and Plutarch seventy-eight. Having armed themselves with spits, knives, and cleavers, from a cook's shop, they hastened out of Capua.
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