[59]
But are
we simple and thoughtless enough to think it a
portent for mice to gnaw something, when gnawing
is their one business in life? 'But,' you say, ' the
fact that just before the Marsian War mice gnawed
the shields at Lanuvium was pronounced by the
soothsayers to be a very direful portent.'1 As if it
mattered a whit whether mice, which are gnawing
something day and night, gnawed shields or sieves!
Hence, by the same token, the fact that, at my
house, mice recently gnawed my Plato's Republic
should fill me with alarm for the Roman republic;
or if they had gnawed my Epicurus On Pleasure
I should have expected a rise in the market price
of food!2
[p. 439]
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.