On the Nature of the Gods

A dialogue in three books in which the main Hellenistic schools debate whether gods exist, what they are like and whether they care for us. It is set in the house of Gaius Cotta in Rome during a religious festival, with a young Cicero listening. In Book I the Epicurean Velleius mocks the craftsman god of Plato's Timaeus and the Stoic world-god, and argues that the gods are blessed, immortal, human in form and untroubled by our affairs. Cotta, an Academic sceptic and also a Roman priest, takes his arguments apart. In Book II the Stoic Balbus argues at length that the gods exist and govern the world by providence, pointing to the order of the heavens and the fit between living things and their environments. In Book III Cotta criticises the Stoic case, though part of the text is lost. At the close Cicero says Balbus' view seemed nearer to the truth.

It gathers the main ancient arguments for and against divine design in one debate, and David Hume took its form as a model for his own Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.