This text is part of:
[21]
"Again, if it was the will of Fate that the Roman
army should perish at Lake Trasimenus in the
Second Punic War, could that result have been
avoided if the consul Flaminius had obeyed the signs
and the auspices which forbade his joining battle?1
Assuredly not. Therefore, either the army did not
perish by the will of Fate, or, if it did (and you are
certainly bound as a Stoic to say that it did), the
same result would have happened even if the
auspices had been obeyed; for the decrees of Fate
are unchangeable. Then what becomes of that
vaunted divination of you Stoics? For if all things
happen by Fate, it does us no good to be warned
to be on our guard, since that which is to happen,
will happen regardless of what we do. But if that
which is to be can be turned aside, there is no such
thing as Fate; so, too, there is no such thing as
divination—since divination deals with things that
are going to happen. But nothing is ' certain to
happen' which there is some means of dealing
with2 so as to prevent its happening.
[p. 395]
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.