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How does it happen that
you understand the one fact, that the bull could
not have lived without a heart and do not realize
the other, that the heart could not suddenly have
vanished I know not where? As for me, possibly
I do not know what vital function the heart performs; if I do I suspect that the bull's heart, as the
result of a disease, became much wasted and shrunken
and lost its resemblance to a heart. But, assuming
that only a little while before the heart was in the
sacrificial bull, why do you think it suddenly disappeared at the very moment of immolation?
Don't you think, rather, that the bull lost his heart
when he saw that Caesar in his purple robe had
lost his head?1
"Upon my word you Stoics surrender the very
city of philosophy while defending its outworks!
For, by your insistence on the truth of soothsaying,
[p. 413]
you utterly overthrow physiology. There is a head
to the liver and a heart in the entrails, presto! they
will vanish the very second you have sprinkled
them with meal and wine! Aye, some god will
snatch them away! Some invisible power will
destroy them or eat them up! Then the creation
and destruction of all things are not due to nature,
and there are some things which spring from nothing
or suddenly become nothing. Was any such statement ever made by any natural philosopher? 'It
is made,' you say, 'by soothsayers.' Then do you
think that soothsayers are worthier of belief than
natural philosophers?
1 Cicero plays on the common use of cor as= intelligence; cf. Caesar's remark on a like occasion (Suet. Iul. Caesar 77) that it was no prodigy si pecudi cor defuisset, “if a brute wanted wits.”
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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