That in later years, in his letters to Lucilius, Seneca should lean to belief in immortality, is natural enough. Epictetus' language, with some fluctuations, leans in the other direction: "When God does not supply what is necessary, he is sounding the signal for retreat--he has opened the door and says to you, Come! But whither? To nothing terrible, but whence you came, to the dear and kin [both neuters], the elements. What in you was fire, shall go to fire, earth to earth, spirit to spirit [perhaps, breath _hoson pneumation eis pneumation_], water to water; {70} no Hades, nor Acheron, nor Cocytus, nor Pyriphlegethon; but all things full of gods and daemons. When a man has such things to think on, and sees sun and moon and stars, and enjoys earth and sea, he is not solitary or even helpless."[147] "This is death, a greater change, not from what now is into what is not, but into what now is not. Then shall I no longer be? You will be, but something else, of which now the cosmos has no need. For you began to be (_egenou_), not when you wished, but when the cosmos had need."[148] On the whole the Stoic is in his way right, for the desire for immortality goes with the instincts he rejected--it is nothing without the affections and human love.[149] But once more logic failed, and the obscure grave witnesses to man's instinctive rejection of Stoicism, with its simple inscription _taurobolio in aeternum renatus_. [Sidenote: The question of the gods] Lastly we come to the gods themselves, and here a double question meets us. Neither on the plurality nor the personality of the divine does Stoicism give a certain note. In the passages already quoted it will have been noticed how interchangeably "God," "the gods" and "Zeus" have been used. It is even a question whether "God" is not an identity with fate, providence, Nature and the Universe.[150] Seneca, as we have seen, dismisses the theory of daemons or _genii_ rather abruptly--"that is what some think." Epictetus definitely accepts them, so far as anything here is definite, and with them, or in them, the ancestral gods. Seneca, as we have seen, is contemptuous of popular ritual and superstition. Epictetus inculcates that "as to piety about the gods, the chief thing is to have right opinions about them," but, he concludes, "to make libations and to sacrifice according to the custom of our fathers, purely and not meanly, nor carelessly, nor scantily, nor above our ability, is a thing which belongs to all to do."[151] "Why do you," he asks, "act the part of a Jew, when you are a Greek?"[152] He also accepts the {71} fact of divination.[153] Indeed, aside perhaps from conspicuous extravagances, the popular religion suffices. Without enthusiasm and without clear belief, the Stoic may take part in the ordinary round of the cults. If he did not believe himself, he pointed out a way to the reflective polytheist by which he could reconcile his traditional faith with philosophy--the