The case against divination: an examination of Cicero's De Divinatione

Abstract

Ancient divination had something of the status of modern science. Diviners, like scientists, were expected to offer public comment on all manner of subjects, from strange meteorological phenomena to proposals for military campaigns, from shooting stars to Star Wars. In both cases this public responsibility is based upon a supposed expertise in prediction. And the arguments of those ancient philosophers who attempted to justify such a status for divination run in some ways remarkably parallel to those of modern philosophers who have attempted to justify such a status for science. Thus we are told both by Stoics and by modern Scientific Realists that the world forms a single and unitary physical system, with nothing outside it to prevent the course of events from unfolding in accordance with the adamantine regularities which are the laws whereby nature operates. This determinism, and its consequence that the entire future of the world is already prefigured in the current state of things, makes it possible for us now to tell what will happen later. And that possibility is realised. Scientific predictions, we are told, may not be uniformly correct, but they are correct too often for that to be due to chance. The predictions of diviners, one must likewise concede, are not uniformly correct: nonnumquam ea quae praedicta sunt minus eueniunt (Cicero, De Divinatione, 1.24).