And yet throughout the whole powerful poem we have testimony to the pupillary character of Roman thought in relation to Grecian. However much the earnest student may outgo his masters in emphasis and zeal of utterance, he never transcends the original irrationality of asserting that "the Gods" exist; albeit it is their glory to do nothing. It is in picturing their ineffable peace that he reaches some of his finest strains of song, [782] though in the next breath he repudiates every idea of their control of things cosmic or human. He swears by their sacred breasts, proh sancta deum pectora, and their life of tranquil joy, when he would express most vehemently his scorn of the thought that it can be they who hurl the lightnings which haply destroy their own temples and strike down alike the just and the unjust. It is a survival of a quite primitive conception of deity, [783] alongside of an advanced anti-religious criticism. The explanation of the anomaly seems to be twofold. In the first place, Roman thought had not lived long enough--it never did live long enough--to stand confidently on its own feet and criticize its Greek teachers. In Cicero's treatise On the Nature of the Gods, the Epicurean and the Stoic in turn retail their doctrine as they had it from their school, the Epicurean affirming the existence and the inaction of the Gods with equal confidence, and repeating without a misgiving the formula about the Gods having not bodies but quasi-bodies, with not blood but quasi-blood; the Stoic, who stands by most of the old superstitions, professing to have his philosophical reasons for them. Each sectarian derides the beliefs of the other; neither can criticize his own creed. It would seem as if in the habitually militarist society, even when it turns to philosophy, there must prevail a militarist ethic and psychosis in the intellectual life, each man choosing a flag or a leader and fighting through thick and thin on that side henceforth. On the other hand, the argumentation of the high-priest Cotta in the dialogue turns to similar purpose the kindred principle of civic tradition. He argues in turn against the Epicurean's science and the Stoic's superstition, contesting alike the claim that the Gods are indifferent and the claim that they govern; and in the end he brazenly affirms that, while he sees no sound philosophic argument for religious beliefs and practices, he thinks it is justifiable to maintain them on the score of prescription or ancestral example. Here we have the senatorial or conservative principle, [784] availing itself of the skeptical dialectic of Carneades. In terms of that ideal, which prevailed alike with believers and indifferentists, [785] and mediated between such rival schools as the Epicurean and Stoic, we may partly explain the Epicurean theorem itself. For the rest, it is to be understood as an outcome partly of surviving sentiment and partly of forced compromise