M. Tullius Cicero, Divination
William Armistead Falconer, Ed.

[27] Natural divination, on the other hand, according to your view, is the result—'the effusion,' as it were—of mental excitement, or it is the prophetic power which the soul has during [p. 401] sleep while free from bodily sensation and worldly cares. Moreover, you derived every form of divination from three sources—God, Fate, and Nature.¹ And although you could not give a reason for any kind of divination, still you carried on the war by marshalling an astonishing array of examples from fiction.² Of such a course I wish to say emphatically that it is not becoming in a philosopher to introduce testimony which may be either true by accident, or false and fabricated through malice. You ought to have employed arguments and reason to show that all your propositions were true and you ought not to have resorted to so-called occurrences—certainly not to such occurrences as are unworthy of belief.