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

"And Aristotle, who was endowed with a matchless and almost godlike intellect,—is he in error, or is he trying to lead others into error in the following account of his friend, Eudemus¹ the Cyprian? Eudemus, while on his way to Macedonia, reached Pherae, then a very famous city of Thessaly, but groaning under the cruel sway of the tyrant, Alexander.² There he became so violently ill that the physicians despaired of his recovery. While sick he had a dream in which a youth of striking beauty told him that he would speedily get well; that the [p. 283] despot Alexander would die in a few days, and that he himself would return home five years later. And so, indeed, the first two prophecies, as Aristotle writes, were immediately fulfilled by the recovery of Eudemus and by the death of the tyrant at the hands of his wife's brothers. But at the end of five years, when, in reliance upon the dream, he hoped to return to Cyprus from Sicily, he was killed in battle before Syracuse. Accordingly the dream was interpreted to mean that when his soul left the body it then had returned home.