It is interesting to note that as Pliny’s magic was not his own, so Cicero’s scepticism did not originate wholly with himself. As his other philosophical writings draw their material largely from Greek philosophy, so the second book of the De Divinatione is supposed to have been under considerable obligations to Clitomachus and Pansetius.[201] As for the future, the De Divinatione was known in the Middle Ages but its influence seems to have often been scarcely that intended by its author.
One of the main points in the argument of Quintus had been his appeal to the past. What race or state, he asked, has not believed in some form of divination?
For before the revelation of philosophy, which was discovered recently, public opinion had no doubt of the truth of this art; and after philosophy came forth no philosopher of authority thought otherwise. I have mentioned Pythagoras, Democritus, Socrates. I have left out no one of the ancients save Xenophanes. I have added the Old Academy, the Peripatetics, the Stoics. Epicurus alone dissented.[202]
When Tully’s turn to speak came, he rudely disturbed his brother’s reliance upon tradition. “I think it not the part of a philosopher to employ witnesses, who are only haply true, often purposely false and deceiving. He ought to show why a thing is so by arguments and reasons, not by events, especially those I cannot credit.”[203] “Antiquity,” Cicero declared later, “has erred in many respects.”[204] The existence of the art of divination in every age and nation had little effect upon him. There is nothing, he asserted, so widespread as ignorance.[205]
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.