M. Tullius Cicero, Divination
William Armistead Falconer, Ed.

[48] "I am not a hopeless sceptic on the subject of such warnings really being sent by the gods; however, I do not know that they are and I want to learn the actual facts from you. Again, when certain other events occurred as they had been foretold by diviners and I attributed the coincidence to chance, you talked a long time about chance. You said, for example, 'For the Venus-throw to result from one cast of the four dice might be due to chance; but if a hundred Venus-throws resulted from one hundred casts this could not be due to chance.'¹ In the first place I do not know why it could not; but I do not contest the point, for you are full of the same sort of examples—like that about the scattering of the paints and that one about the hog's snout,² and you had very many other examples besides. You also mentioned that myth from Carneades about the head of Pan³ —as if the likeness could not have been the result of chance! and as if every block of marble did not necessarily have within it heads worthy of Praxiteles! For his masterpieces were made by chipping away the marble, not by adding anything to it; and when, after much chipping, the lineaments of a face were reached, one then realized that the work now polished and complete had always been inside the block.