ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some remarks about the setting of the dialogue of Cicero. The conversation takes place when Cicero takes up an invitation to visit Gaius Cotta at his home on the day of the Latin Festival. He finds a conversation already under way between Cotta, and two other friends: Senator Gaius Velleius, and Quintus Lucilius Balbus. Cicero remarks that he has had the luck to find representatives of three schools of philosophy and only Marcus Piso is missing from a complete representation of all the reputable schools. Velleius gives to Aristotle four notions of the nature of god. None of them is precisely transparent, but it is possible to make some sense of all of them as loose descriptions of Aristotelian doctrine. It seems likely that the eternity of the cosmos was one of the main themes of On Philosophy.
