[98]
And yet there
never was another Homer. Again: if it matters
under what aspect of the sky or combination of
the stars every animate being is born, then necessarily the same conditions affect inanimate things
also: can any statement be more ridiculous
than that? Be that as it may, our good friend
Lucius Tarutius of Firmum, who was steeped in
Chaldaic lore, made a calculation, based on the
assumption that our city's birthday was on the
Feast of Pales1 (at which time tradition says it was
founded by Romulus), and from that calculation
Tarutius even went so far as to assert that Rome
was born when the moon was in the sign of Libra
and from that fact unhesitatingly prophesied her
destiny.
1 Celebrated on April 21. Pales was the tutelary god of shepherds.
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.