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[37] How does it happen that you understand the one fact, that the bull could not have lived without a heart and do not realize the other, that the heart could not suddenly have vanished I know not where? As for me, possibly I do not know what vital function the heart performs; if I do I suspect that the bull's heart, as the result of a disease, became much wasted and shrunken and lost its resemblance to a heart. But, assuming that only a little while before the heart was in the sacrificial bull, why do you think it suddenly disappeared at the very moment of immolation? Don't you think, rather, that the bull lost his heart when he saw that Caesar in his purple robe had lost his head?1

"Upon my word you Stoics surrender the very city of philosophy while defending its outworks! For, by your insistence on the truth of soothsaying, [p. 413] you utterly overthrow physiology. There is a head to the liver and a heart in the entrails, presto! they will vanish the very second you have sprinkled them with meal and wine! Aye, some god will snatch them away! Some invisible power will destroy them or eat them up! Then the creation and destruction of all things are not due to nature, and there are some things which spring from nothing or suddenly become nothing. Was any such statement ever made by any natural philosopher? 'It is made,' you say, 'by soothsayers.' Then do you think that soothsayers are worthier of belief than natural philosophers?

1 Cicero plays on the common use of cor as= intelligence; cf. Caesar's remark on a like occasion (Suet. Iul. Caesar 77) that it was no prodigy si pecudi cor defuisset, “if a brute wanted wits.”

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load focus Latin (William Armistead Falconer, 1923)
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