[78]
Coelius has added the further notable
fact that, at the very time this disastrous battle
was going on, earthquakes of such violence occurred
in Liguria, in Gaul, on several islands, and in every
part of Italy, that a large number of towns were
destroyed, landslips took place in many regions,
the earth sank, rivers flowed upstream, and the sea
invaded their channels.
36. "Trustworthy conjectures in divining
are made by experts. For instance, when Midas,
the famous king of Phrygia, was a child, ants filled
his mouth with grains of wheat as he slept. It was
predicted that he would be a very wealthy man; and
so it turned out. Again, while Plato was an infant,
asleep in his cradle, bees settled on his lips and this
was interpreted to mean that he would have a rare
sweetness of speech. Hence in his infancy his future
eloquence was foreseen.
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.