  Epicurus had insisted on the existence of the gods, but the mode of existence he attributed to them has become a matter of controversy. They have only ‘quasi-bodies’, for example, and are constituted by nothing more than the wafer-thin and lightning-fast ‘images’ (Latin simulacra, see above  § 4)  which according to Epicurus enter our eyes and minds to become the stuff of vision, imagination and dreams. Some scholars take this constitution out of simulacra to describe a highly attenuated mode of biological being which somehow makes the immortal gods an exception to the rule that compounds must eventually disintegrate, so that they are able to live on forever, not in any world like ours (since all worlds must themselves eventually perish) but in the much safer regions between worlds. Others, who doubt such a realist interpretation, take the reduction of gods to simulacra to be Epicurus’ way of saying that these immortal beings are our own intuitive thought-constructs, our personal idealizations of the ideally tranquil life to which we naturally aspire, and that he is not committed to the further view that such beings must actually exist as living organisms somewhere in the universe. Epicurus’ recorded instruction to think of god as a blessed and immortal being does not help us choose between the two readings. It would probably be a mistake to assume that any text or texts of Epicurus were available to resolve the ambiguity definitively, similar ambiguities being an endemic characteristic of much religious discourse (the most famous case in antiquity was Plato’s account of the creation in his Timaeus, on whose interpretation his followers never agreed despite possessing his entire works). Lucretius shows signs of assuming the realist view of the gods (2.153–4, 6.76–7), yet his account of the origin of religion (5.1169–82) leans more towards the idealist reading. Disappointingly, the actual exposition of the gods’ nature that he promises us (5.155) never materializes. One may wonder whether he ever located in his massive Epicurean source the explicit account of the gods’ mode of being that he was expecting to find there.