Both brothers distinguished divination from the natural sciences and assigned it a place by itself.[[206]] Quintus said that medical men, pilots and farmers foresee many things, yet their arts are not divination. “Not even Pherecydes, that famous Pythagorean master, who prophesied an earthquake when he saw there was no water in a well usually full, should be regarded as a diviner rather than a physicist.”[[207]] In like manner Tully pointed out that the sick seek a doctor, not a soothsayer, that diviners cannot instruct us in astronomy, that no one consults them concerning philosophic problems or ethical questions, that they can give us no light on the problems of the natural universe, and that they are of no service in logic, dialectic or political science.[[208]] Such would be the ideal condition, but in practice, as we have seen much reason to believe, divination, at least in the broad sense, was confused with science and with other subjects to no small extent both under the Empire and in the Middle Ages. A doctor might be something of a diviner as well: the astrologer was skilled in astronomy; “mathematicus” came within a short time after Cicero’s own day to be the word regularly used to denote a soothsayer;[[209]] Pierre du Bois and Bodin found astrology an aid to political science.
Cicero, however, went further than the assertion that divination had no connection with science and declared that it was contrary to science. Such a figment, he scornfully affirmed, as that the heart will vanish from a corpse for one man’s benefit and remain in the body to suit the future of another, was not believed even by old wives now-a-days.[[210]] Nay more, he asked, how can the heart vanish from the body? Surely it must be there while life lasts, and can it disappear in an instant?
Believe me, you are abandoning the citadel of philosophy while you defend its outposts. For in your effort to prove soothsaying true you utterly pervert physiology.... For there will be something which either springs from nothing or suddenly vanishes into nothingness. What scientist ever said that? The soothsayers say so? Are they then, do you think, to be trusted rather than scientists?[[211]]
Cicero does not think they are.
Also he shows that the methods of divination are not scientific. He asks: Why did Calchas deduce from the devoured sparrow that the Trojan war would last ten years rather than ten weeks or ten months?[[212]] He points out that the art is conducted in different places according to quite different rules of procedure, even to the extent that a favorable omen in one locality is a sinister warning elsewhere.[[213]] In short, whether he got his idea from the Greeks or not, he has come, long before most men had reached that point, to have a clear idea of the essential contradiction between science and magic. “Quid igitur,” he asks, “minus a physicis dici debet quam quidquam certi significari rebus incertis?”[[214]]
Besides this sharp separation of divination from science and besides his rejection of tradition, a third creditable feature of Cicero’s book is his question: What intimate connection, what bond of natural causality can there be between the liver or heart or lung of a fat bull and the divine eternal cause of things which rules the world?[[215]] He refuses to believe in any extraordinary bonds of sympathy between things which, in so far as our daily experience and our knowledge of nature’s workings can inform us, have absolutely no connection. He appeals to the canons of common sense. In fact, it is generally true throughout his treatise that where he cannot disprove, he pooh-poohs superstition.
On the whole Cicero’s attitude probably represents the most enlightened scepticism to be found in the ancient world. Though some of his arguments seem weak, he deserves credit for having argued at all. Against what they were pleased to call magic, men, especially during the Middle Ages, were apt to rant rather than reason.
But, alas, unless we assume that the famous Dream of Scipio is a purely imaginative production, that the fantastic beliefs there set forth (borrowed, no doubt, from Greek thought) are presented for dramatic purposes alone and do not represent Cicero’s actual views, we must grant that our sceptical Cicero believed in some magic after all. For the Dream, despite its author’s animadversions against Chaldæan astrology, speaks of Jupiter as a star wholesome and favorable to the human race, of Mars as most unfavorable.[[216]] Also it calls the numbers seven and eight perfect and speaks of their product as signifying the fatal year in Scipio’s career.[[217]]
CHAPTER VII
The Last Century of the Empire
We come now to consider some indications of the intermixture of magic with learning in the last century of the Roman Empire, the border-time of the Middle Ages. It was a time when interest in science was slight and when the ability to use florid rhetoric was apparently the chief aim of those who assumed to be the highest intellectual class. What science there was was largely permeated with magic, as a glance at a few men of intellectual prominence then will illustrate.