B.C. 46, ÆT. 60
to you: and that not with such words as I should use to
console one utterly crushed and bereft of all hope of restoration,
but as to one of whose rehabilitation I have no more
doubt than I remember that you had of mine. For when
those men had driven me from the Republic, who thought
that it could not fall while I was on my feet, I remember
hearing from many visitors from Asia, in which country you
then were, that you were emphatic as to my glorious and
rapid restoration. If that system, so to speak, of Tuscan
augury which you had inherited from your noble and excellent
father did not deceive you, neither will our power of
divination[1] deceive me; which I have acquired from the
writings and maxims of the greatest savants, and, as you
know, by a very diligent study of their teaching, as well as
by an extensive experience in managing public business,
and from the great vicissitudes of fortune which I have encountered.
And this divination I am the more inclined to
trust, from the fact that it never once deceived me in the
late troubles, in spite of their obscurity and confusion. I
would have told you what events I foretold, were I not
afraid to be thought to be making up a story after the event.
Yet, after all, I have numberless witnesses to the fact that I
warned Pompey not to form a union with Cæsar, and afterwards
not to sever it. By this union I saw that the power
of the senate would be broken, by its severance a civil war
be provoked.[2] And yet I was very intimate with Cæsar,
and had a very great regard for Pompey, but my advice was
- ↑ By "our divination" Cicero may mean to include the augural
science as known to the college of augurs. But though he plays round
the subject, we need not suppose that he really thought that he had
learnt to predict events thereby. What follows seems rather to point
to Milton's
"Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain,"though the two ideas are (perhaps purposely) confused.
- ↑ This prediction seems rather slender capital on which to set up business as a prophet. Pompey and Cæsar combined for the express purpose of checkmating the senate, and if they quarrelled difficulties would be sure to follow. Besides, he puts quite a different complexion on it elsewhere (2 Phil. § 24), representing the remark as an aspiration expressed to Pompey after the war had begun. But "I told you so" is a gratification that few can resist.
