[55]
How, then, did portents or their interpreters help
the Spartans of long ago, or our Pompeian friends
in more recent times? If these signs you speak of
are to be considered as sent by the gods, why were
they so obscure? For, if we had the right to know
what was going to happen, it should have been stated
to us clearly: or, if the gods did not wish us to know,
they should not have told us—even in riddles.
26. "Now every sort of conjecture—and
divination depends on conjecture—is often applied
by the wit of man to many different and even contradictory uses. As in judicial causes the prosecutor
draws one inference and the lawyer for the defendant
another from the same set of facts, and yet the
inferences of both are plausible; so, in all investigations in which it is customary to employ conjecture,
ambiguity is found. Moreover, in the case of things
[p. 435]
that happen now by chance now in the usual course
of nature (sometimes too mistakes are caused by
taking appearance for reality), it is the height of
folly to hold the gods as the direct agents and not
to inquire into the causes of such things.
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
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