[127]
56. "Moreover, since, as will be shown elsewhere,1
all things happen by Fate, if there were a man whose
soul could discern the links that join each cause
with every other cause, then surely he would never
be mistaken in any prediction he might make. For
he who knows the causes of future events necessarily
knows what every future event will be. But since
such knowledge is possible only to a god, it is left
to man to presage the future by means of certain
[p. 363]
signs which indicate what will follow them. Things
which are to be do not suddenly spring into existence, but the evolution of time is like the unwinding
of a cable: it creates nothing new and only unfolds
each event in its order. This connexion between
cause and effect is obvious to two classes of diviners:
those who are endowed with natural divination and
those who know the course of events by the observation of signs. They may not discern the causes
themselves, yet they do discern the signs and
tokens of those causes. The careful study and
recollection of those signs, aided by the records of
former times, has evolved that sort of divination,
known as artificial, which is divination by means of
entrails, lightnings, portents, and celestial phenomena.
1 The genuineness of the words, id quod . . . ostendetur, is doubted because (1) in the extant portions of Cicero's work on Fate the opposite of the position here contended for is taken; and (2) they indicate that Marcus, forgetting for the moment that Quintus is talking, imagines that he himself is the speaker. However, the MSS. support the reading adopted.
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.