The Testimony of Cicero 47
will die at the age of seventy-two in the archonship of Pytharatus", but
there were not any fated causes why it should occur like this; rather,
what happened certainly was going to happen as it [indeed did] happen.
- And those who say that what is going to occur is immutable and that
a true future statement cannot be converted into a false one are not in
fact asserting the necessity of fate, but merely indicating what our words
mean. But those who introduce an eternal series of causes are the ones
who strip the human mind of free will and bind it by the necessity of fate.
But so much for this; let us move on. Chrysippus reasons thus. "If
there is a motion without a cause, not every proposition, which the
dialecticians call an axioma, will be either true or false. For what will not
have effective causes will be neither true nor false. But every proposition is
either true or false. Therefore, there is no motion without a cause. 21.
And if this is so, everything which happens happens in virtue of prior
causes; and if this is so, all things happen by fate. So it is shown that
whatever happens happens by fate."
First of all, if I here chose to agree with Epicurus and deny that every
proposition is either true or false, I would rather accept that blow than
approve of the claim that all things happen by fate. For that claim is at
least subject to debate, but this latter is intolerable. And so Chrysippus
exerts all his efforts to persuade us that every axioma is either true or
false. Just as Epicurus fears that if he should concede this, he must
concede that whatever happens happens by fate (for if one of the two is
true from eternity, it is also certain, and if certain, then necessary too:
that is how he thinks that necessity and fate are confirmed), so Chrysippus
feared that, if he did not maintain that every proposition was either true
or false, he could not maintain that everything happened by fate and as
a result of eternal causes of future events.
22. But Epicurus thinks that the necessity of fate can be avoided by
the swerve of an atom. And so a third kind of motion appears, in addition
to weight and collision, when an atom swerves by a minimal interval (he
calls it an elachiston [smallest]); and he is forced to concede, in fact if
not in his words, that this swerve is uncaused. For an atom does not
swerve because it is struck by another atom. For how can one be struck
by another if the atomic bodies are moving, owing to their weight,
downward in straight lines, as Epicurus thinks? It follows that, if one
atom is never displaced by another, then one atom cannot even contact
another. 23. From which it is also concluded that if an atom exists and
it does swerve, it does so without cause. Epicurus introduced this line
of reasoning because he was afraid that if an atom always moved by its
natural and necessary heaviness, we would have no freedom, since our