[32]
But grant that these absurdities of
Democritus are true—when do we ever
consult entrails to learn about crops or health, or
when have we acquired information on these partiticulars from a soothsayer after he had made an
inspection of entrails? The soothsayers warn us of
dangers by fire and flood and sometimes they prophesy the inheritance, sometimes the loss, of money;
they discuss the favourable and the unfavourable
cleft; they view the head of the liver with the
utmost care from every side. If, perchance, the
liver's head should be wanting they regard it as the
most unpropitious sign that could have happened.
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
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.