beginning and under Numa, had worshiped their gods without any idol (frag. 38
Cardauns).
Varro (Antiquitates rerum divinarum, esp. frags. 8, 23 Cardauns) aimed to dis-
cover the precise relation between gods and nature. He often followed the Stoic path,
for instance in his belief in the anima mundi, which he identified with fire
and with our own life’s principle (frag. 23 Cardauns =Tert. Nat.2.2.19). He tried
to infer the nature of a god from his name, as the Platonic Cratylushad earlier
attempted to do, and accordingly to give him his domain in the world. Varro adhered
to the Stoic view of the philosopher Dionysius in maintaining that there were three
kinds of gods: the visible ones, like Sol and Luna; the invisible, like Neptune; and
deified men, like Hercules (Tert. Nat.2.2.14 –20 =frag. 23 Cardauns); and he believed
in three doors leading to the heavenly afterlife: in Scorpio, between Leo and Cancer,
and between Aquarius and Pisces (Servius, Georgica1.34). This was a variation on
the Pythagorean doctrine of the two doors. Varro wanted to be buried according
to Pythagorean forms, in a clay sarcophagus with leaves of olive, myrtle, and black
poplar (Plin. Nat.35.160).
Nigidius acted as a private theologian; Varro gave the support of his erudition to
Pompey and later to Caesar; Cicero acted as a statesman and wanted to give new
theological foundations to public religion. Cicero picked up many elements from
Platonism, Stoicism, and Pythagoreanism and explained his most important views in
the Somnium Scipionis, where a heavenly afterlife is promised to benefactors of the
republic. Like the Stoic Cleanthes he conceived the cosmos as a great temple, where
the earth was at the center and the gods appeared as mystic visions; he believed
in the Pythagorean harmonies of heavenly spheres and in the Pythagorean and Chaldean
order of the planets, with the sun in a central position as a leader of the other
heavenly bodies. The human soul was conceived as a god:
Strive on indeed, and be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. Know,
then, that you are a god, if a god is that which lives, feels, remembers, and foresees,
and which rules, governs, and moves the body over which it is set, just as the supreme
God above us rules this universe. (Somnium Scipionisin De republica5.24, 26)The likeness of men to gods is stressed also when he says: “There is really no other
occupation in which human virtue approaches more closely the august function of
the gods than that of founding new towns or preserving those already in existence”
(De republica1.12).
Germanicus, Tiberius’ adoptive son and author of an astrological work, believed
in the divine nature of stars and planets, and consequently did not admit the Stoic
idea of ekpyrosis, that is, the destruction of the whole cosmos, after which it will start
afresh in a new cycle of time. By means of his astrological knowledge he looked for
the secrets of gods, as the Chaldeans and the Pythagoreans did.
In the age of Nero, the philosopher Cornutus, probably a Stoic, composed a the-
ological handbook (Theologiae Graecae compendium, ed. C. Lang, Leipzig 1881),
in which the allegorical interpretation of gods as elements or powers of nature is
developed.
Creating One’s Own Religion 383