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The Tusculan questions of Marcus Tullius Cicero in five books
The Tusculan questions of Marcus Tullius Cicero in five books Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: death was not a destruction, involving a total and absolute demolition, but rather a certain migration and change of life, which, with illustrious men and women... more », was usually an introduction into heaven; in the rest, though retained upon earth, yet the soul would be permanent. From this opinion, even our ancestors were persuaded That Romulus enjoys with gods the light Of heaven's eternal day, as Ennius has said, in accordance with the popular creed; and with the Greeks, and thence gliding to us, and even to the ocean, Hercules is held for so great and so helpful a god: hence Bacchus, the son of Semele, became a god, and the brothers Tyndaridas, of the same celebrity of fame, are reported not only helpers in battles, to the victory of the Roman people, but even to have been the messengers to announce it. What! was not Ino, the daughter of Cadmus, called Leucothea by the Greeks, and received by our countrymen as the goddess of the morning ? What! that we may dispense with naming more, was not all heaven, almost, peopled with human offspring ? Indeed, were I to scrutinize ancient monuments, and endeavour to ferret out what Grecian writers have left upon record, it would be found that even the great gods themselves, as reputed, proceeded from among ourselves, to take their rank in heaven. Inquire whose sepulchres are shown in Greece; recollect, since you are initiated, the traditions of the mysteries; then, at length, you will have some conception of the extent of these deifications. But also they who had not yet learned physics, which began to be treated manyyears after, persuaded themselves of as much only as could be gathered from the admonition of nature : the reasons and causes of things were not within their reach ; they were often influenced by visions, and especially...« less