[129]
63. "The question now arises as to which is
the more probable: do the immortal gods, who are
[p. 517]
of surpassing excellence in all things, constantly
flit about, not only the beds, but even the lowly
pallets of mortals, wherever they may be, and when
they find someone snoring, throw at him dark and
twisted visions, which scare him from his sleep and
which he carries in the morning to a dream-expert
to unravel? or does nature bring it to pass that
the ever-active soul sees in sleep phantoms of
what it saw when the body was awake? Which is
more consonant with philosophy: to explain these
apparitions by the superstitious theories of fortune-telling hags, or by an explanation based on natural
causes? But even if it were possible to draw trustworthy inferences from dreams, it could not be done
by those who profess to have that power; for their
fraternity is composed of the most shallow and the
most ignorant of men. Yet your Stoics assert that
no one can be a diviner unless he is a ' wise man.'
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.