[34]
18. "I agree, therefore, with those who have
said that there are two kinds of divination: one,
which is allied with art; the other, which is devoid
of art. Those diviners employ art, who, having
learned the known by observation, seek the unknown
by deduction. On the other hand those do without
art who, unaided by reason or deduction or by signs
which have been observed and recorded, forecast
the future while under the influence of mental
excitement, or of some free and unrestrained
emotion. This condition often occurs to men while
dreaming and sometimes to persons who prophesy
while in a frenzy—like Bacis of Boeotia, Epimenides
of Crete and the Sibyl of Erythraea.1 In this latter
class must be placed oracles—not oracles given by
means of' equalized lots'2 —but those uttered under
the impulse of divine inspiration; although divination by lot is not in itself to be despised, if it has
the sanction of antiquity, as in the case of those
lots which, according to tradition, sprang out of the
[p. 265]
earth3 ; for in spite of everything, I am inclined to
think that they may, under the power of God, be
so drawn as to give an appropriate response. Men
capable of correctly interpreting all these signs of
the future seem to approach very near to the divine
spirit of the gods whose wills they interpret, just as
scholars4 do when they interpret the poets.
1 This Sibyl was Herophile, who finally went to Cumae.
2 What is meant by aequatis sortibus is not known.
3 These were small oak tablets which were in the temple of Fortuna at Praeneste (ii. 41. 86), and had words engraved on them.
4 Cf. Plato, Ion 533 seq. where the rhapsodist Ion claims a θεία δύναμις in interpreting Homer.
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.