ASTROLOGY, DIVINATION, AND COINCIDENCES
91
On the subject of the ox without the heart he asks:
How is it that you think it impossible that an animal can live without a heart, and yet do not think it impossible that its heart could vanish so suddenly, no one knows whither? For myself I know not how much vigor is necessary to carry on vital function, and suspect that if afflicted with any disease, the heart of a victim may be found so withered, and wasted, and small as to be quite unlike a heart.
He then tells him that in trying to prove the truth of the auguries he is overturning the whole system of physics, and concludes his argument in these words:
After having thus destroyed divination by the inspection of entrails, all the rest of the science of the soothsayers is at an end.
Of the head which was discovered he says:
Oh! But a head was found in the Tiber. As if I affirmed that those soothsayers had no skill! What I deny is their divination.
He quotes the old saying of Cato, familiar enough to everybody, that
he wondered that when one soothsayer met another he could help laughing. For of all the events predicted by them, how very few happened! And when one of them does take place, where is the proof that it does not take place by mere accident?
Cicero had little respect for the oracle of Delphi. He thus attacks it:
I now come to you,
Apollo, monarch of the sacred center
Of the great world, full of thy inspiration.
The Pythian priestesses proclaim thy prophecies.
