[100]
48. “There remain the two kinds of divination which we are said to derive from nature and
not from art—vaticination and dreams,—these,
my dear Quintus, if agreeable to you, let us now
discuss.”
“Delighted, I assure you,” said he, “for I am in
entire accord with the views which you have so far
expressed. To be quite frank, your argument has
merely strengthened the opinion which I already
had, for my own reasoning had convinced me that
the Stoic view of divination smacked too much of
superstition. I was more impressed by the reasoning of the Peripatetics, of Dicaearchus, of ancient
times, and of Cratippus,1 who still flourishes. According to their opinion there is within the human soul
some sort of power—' oracular,' I might call it—by
which the future is foreseen when the soul is inspired
by a divine frenzy, or when it is released by sleep
and is free to move at will. I should like very much
to learn your views of these two classes of divination
and by what arguments you disprove them.”
[p. 485]
1 At the time of the dialogue, 45 B.C., Cratippus was lecturing in Athens and had as one of his pupils Marcus, the only son of Marcus Cicero.
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.