Epicurus and Cicero: Each one with his God and with his Religion
Keywords:
Epicuros, God, Cicero, ReligionAbstract
This article is concerned with showing how Epicurus’ conception of gods and religion promoted great conflicts and indecision among the Latins, and to do so by analyzing the opinions registered by Cicero in the De natura deorum. The article is fundamentally restricted to the first chapter of that work, i.e. to the debate between the senator Gaius Vellei (an adherent and defender of Epicurus’ opinions) and the pontifex Gaius Aurelius Cotta (an adherent of the skeptical philosophy defended by members of Plato’s Academy). Cotta was Julius Caesar’s uncle. There are two frankly different conceptions: one, that of the Latins which traces the paths in which religion (from the Greeks to the Latins and onwards) insisted on promoting an efficient consortium of political power and popular force to maintain it; the other, that of Epicurus which was characterized by the dissolution of this consortium and by proposing ideals that still today have not achieved an effective success.
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