This text is part of:
[14]
"And you went on to say that even the foreknowledge of impending storms and rains by means
of certain signs was not divination, and, in that
connexion, you quoted a number of verses from my
translation of Aratus. Yet such coincidences' happen
by chance,' for though they happen frequently they
do not happen always. What, then, is this thing
you call divination—this 'foreknowledge of things
that happen by chance '—and where is it employed?
You think that 'whatever can be foreknown by
means of science, reason, experience, or conjecture
is to be referred, not to diviners, but to experts.'
It follows, therefore, that divination of' things that
happen by chance' is possible only of things which
cannot be foreseen by means of skill or wisdom.
Hence, if someone had declared many years in
advance that the famous Marcus Marcellus, who
was consul three times, would perish in a shipwreck,
[p. 387]
this, by your definition, undoubtedly would have
been a case of divination, since that calamity could
not have been foreseen by means of any other skill or
by wisdom. That is why you say that divination is the
foreknowledge of such things as depend upon chance.
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.