Here, too, he explains his own conduct in a beautiful passage. "My fellow-citizens," says he, "will pardon me, or perhaps will rather thank me, for that when the Republic fell into the power of one man I neither hid myself nor did I desert them; nor did I idly weep, or carry myself as though angry with the man or with the times; nor yet, forsooth, so flattering the good fortune of another, that I should have to be ashamed of what I had done myself. For I had learned this lesson from the philosophy of Plato--that there are certain changes in public affairs. They will be governed now by the leaders of the State, then by the people, sometimes by a single man."[304] This is very wise, but he goes to work and altogether destroys his brother's argument. He knows that he is preaching only to a few--in such a manner as to make his preaching safe. His language is very pleasing, always civil, always courteous; but not the less does he turn the arguments of his brother into ridicule. And we feel that he is not so much laughing at his brother as at the gods themselves--they are so clearly wooden gods--though he is aware how necessary it is for the good of the State that they shall be received. He declares that, in accordance with the theory of his brother--meaning thereby the Stoics--"it is necessary that they, the gods, should spy into every cottage along the road, so that they may look after the affairs of men."[305] It is playful, argumentative, and satirical. At last he proposes to leave the subject. Socrates would also do so, never asking for the adhesion of any one, but leaving the full purport of his words to sink into the minds of his audience. Quintus says that he quite agrees to this, and so the discourse De Divinatione is brought to an end. Of his book on fate we have only a fragment, or the middle part of it. It is the desire of Cicero to show that, in the sequence of affairs which men call Life, it matters little whether there be a Destiny or not. Things will run on, and will be changed, or apparently be changed, by the action of men. What is it to us whether this or that event has been decreed while we live, and while each follows his own devices? All this, however, is a little tedious, taken at the end of so long a course of philosophy; and we rise at last from the perusal with a feeling of thankfulness that all these books of Chrysippus of which he tells us, are not still existent to be investigated.