In the second, he endeavors to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer to what he has advanced in the first, in order that the most ancient poets, who never dreamed of these things, may seem to have been Stoics.

Diogenes the Babylonian was a follower of the doctrine of Chrysippus; and in that book which he wrote, entitled "A Treatise concerning Minerva," he separates the account of Jupiter's bringing-forth, and the birth of that virgin, from the fabulous, and reduces it to a natural construction.
XVI.

Thus far have I been rather exposing the dreams of dotards than giving the opinions of philosophers.

Not much more absurd than these are the fables of the poets, who owe all their power of doing harm to the sweetness of their language; who have represented the Gods as enraged with anger and inflamed with lust; who have brought before our eyes their wars, battles, combats, wounds; their hatreds, dissensions, discords, births, deaths, complaints, and lamentations; their indulgences in all kinds of intemperance; their adulteries; their chains; their amours with mortals, and mortals begotten by immortals.
To these idle and ridiculous flights of the poets we may add the prodigious stories invented by the Magi, and by the Egyptians also, which were of the same nature, together with the extravagant notions of the multitude at all times, who, from total ignorance of the truth, are always fluctuating in uncertainty.
Now, whoever reflects on the rashness and absurdity of these tenets must inevitably entertain the highest respect and veneration for Epicurus, and perhaps even rank him in the number of those beings who are the subject of this dispute; for he alone first founded the idea of the existence of the Gods on the impression which nature herself hath made on the minds of all men.

For what nation, what people are there, who have not, without any learning, a natural idea, or prenotion, of a Deity?
Epicurus calls this [Greek: prolepsis]; that is, an antecedent conception of the fact in the mind, without which nothing can be understood, inquired after, or discoursed on; the force and advantage of which reasoning we receive from that celestial volume of Epicurus concerning the Rule and Judgment of Things.
XVII.