[16]
By the use of reason the physician foresees the
progress of a disease, the general anticipates the
enemy's plans and the pilot forecasts the approach
of bad weather. And yet even those who base
their conclusions on accurate reasoning are often
mistaken: for example, when the farmer sees his
olive-tree in bloom he expects also, and not unreasonably, to see it bear fruit, but occasionally he is
disappointed. If then mistakes are made by those
who make no forecasts not based upon some reasonable and probable conjecture, what must we think of
the conjectures of men who foretell the future by
means of entrails, birds, portents, oracles, or dreams?
I am not ready yet to take up one by one the various
kinds of divination and show that the cleft in the
liver, the croak of a raven, the flight of an eagle,
the fall of a star, the utterances of persons in a
frenzy, lots, and dreams have no prophetic value
whatever; I shall discuss each of them in its turn—
now I am discussing the subject as a whole.
[p. 389]
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.