Glad at leaving Troy behind them, gazed upon the fish at play,[p. 253] Then, did the fact that so many illustrious captains and kings suffered shipwreck deprive navigation of its right to be called an art? And is military science of no effect because a general of the highest renown recently lost his army and took to flight?2 Again, is statecraft devoid of method or skill because political mistakes were made many times by Gnaeus Pompey, occasionally by Marcus Cato, and once or twice even by yourself? So it is with the responses of soothsayers, and, indeed, with every sort of divination whose deductions are merely probable; for divination of that kind depends on inference and beyond inference it cannot go.
Nor could get their fill of gazing—thus they whiled the time away.
Meantime, as the sun was setting, high uprose the angry main;
Thick and thicker fell the shadows; night grew black with blinding rain.
[24]
14. "'But,' it is objected, 'sometimes predictions are made which do not come true.' And pray
what art—and by art I mean the kind that is dependent on conjecture and deduction—what art, I say,
does not have the same fault? Surely the practice of
medicine is an art, yet how many mistakes it makes!
And pilots—do they not make mistakes at times?
For example, when the armies of the Greeks and
the captains of their mighty fleet set sail from Troy,
they, as Pacuvius says,1
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.