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.
On the whole Cicero’s attitude probably represents the most enlightened scepticism to be found in the ancient world. Though some of his arguments seem weak, he deserves credit for having argued at all. Against what they were pleased to call magic, men, especially during the Middle Ages, were apt to rant rather than reason.
But, alas, unless we assume that the famous Dream of Scipio is a purely imaginative production, that the fantastic beliefs there set forth (borrowed, no doubt, from Greek thought) are presented for dramatic purposes alone and do not represent Cicero’s actual views, we must grant that our sceptical Cicero believed in some magic after all. For the Dream, despite its author’s animadversions against Chaldaean astrology, speaks of Jupiter as a star wholesome and favorable to the human race, of Mars as most unfavorable.[216] Also it calls the numbers seven and eight perfect and speaks of their product as signifying the fatal year in Scipio’s career.[217]
CHAPTER VII
The Last Century of the Empire
We come now to consider some indications of the intermixture of magic with learning in the last century of the Roman Empire, the border-time of the Middle Ages. It was a time when interest in science was slight and when the ability to use florid rhetoric was apparently the chief aim of those who assumed to be the highest intellectual class. What science there was was largely permeated with magic, as a glance at a few men of intellectual prominence then will illustrate.
Marcellus of Bordeaux, court physician of Theodosius I, and a writer upon medicine, throws some light upon the state of medicine in his day. He affirmed that pimples might be removed by wiping them the instant you saw a falling-star. He said that a tumor could be cured if one half of a root of vervain were tied about the sufferer’s neck and the other half suspended over a fire. His theory was that as the vervain dried up in the smoke of the fire, the tumor would by force of magic sympathy likewise dry up and disappear. Marcellus added for the benefit of unpaid physicians that so persistent would be the sympathetic bond established that if the root of the vervain were later thrown into water, its absorption of moisture would produce a return of the tumor.[218]
Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote at the close of the fourth century, and who has been regarded by his critics from Gibbon down as a historian of distinguished merit, gives us an idea of mental conditions in his time, and was himself not free from belief in magic. It is true that in declaiming against the degeneracy of the Roman aristocracy he ridicules their trust in astrology, saying that many of them deny the existence of higher powers in heaven, yet think it imprudent to appear in public or dine or take a bath without first having consulted an almanac as to Mercury’s whereabouts or the exact position of the moon in Cancer.[219] Yet he believed in omens, portents and auspices, as the following citations will indicate and as one might show by other passages.
The first passage is one in which Ammianus speaks of Alexandria as formerly having been a great place of learning and as eveh in his degenerate days a considerable intellectual centre. According to him, it is a sufficient recommendation for any medical man if he say that he was educated at Alexandria.[220]
There whatever lies hidden is laid bare by geometry; music is not utterly forgotten nor harmony neglected; among some men, though their number may not be great, the motion of the world and stars is still a matter of consideration; there are not a few of those skilled in numbers.
This is not all. “Besides these things they cherish the science which reveals the decrees of fate.”[221]
The Emperor Julian was continually inspecting entrails of victims and interpreting dreams and omens, and even proposed to reopen a prophetic fountain which Hadrian was said to have blocked up for fear that others, like himself, might win the imperial throne through obedience to its predictions.[222] The mention of such practices of Julian leads Ammianus in another passage to attempt a justification of divination as a science worthy of the study and respect of the most erudite and intelligent. He says:
Inasmuch as to this ruler, who was a man of culture and an inquirer into all branches of learning, malicious persons have attributed the use of evil arts to learn the future, we shall briefly indicate how a wise man is able to acquire this by no. means trivial variety of knowledge. The spirit behind all the elements, seeing that it is incessantly and everywhere active in the prophetic movement of everlasting bodies, bestows upon us the gift of divination by those methods which we acquire through divers studies; and the forces of nature, propitiated by various rites, as from exhaustless springs provide mankind with prophetic utterances.[223]
211
Bk. ii, ch. 16. “Urbem philosophiae, mihi crede, proditis dum castella defenditis. Nam dum aruspicinam veram esse vultis, phy- siologiam totam pervertitis. Caput est in jecore, cor in extis: iam abscedet, simul ac molam et vinum insperseris; deus id eripiet, vis aliqua conficiet, aut exedet. Non ergo omnium dnteritus atque obitus natura conficiet; et erit aliquid quod aut ex nihilo oriatur, aut in nihilum subito occidat. Quis hoc physicus dixit unquam? Aruspices dicunt? His igitur quam physicis potius credendum existimas?”
215
Bk. ii, ch. 12. “Atqui divina cum rerum natura tanta tamque praeclara in omnes partes motusque diffusa, quid habere potest commune, non dicam gallinacum fel (sunt enim qui vel argutissima haec exta esse dicant) sed tauri opimi jecur aut cor aut pulmo, quid habet naturale, quo declarari possit quid futurum sit?”
216
“Deinde est hominum generi prosperus et salutaris ille fulgor qui dicitur Jovis. Turn rutilus horribilisque terris, quem Martium dicitis. Deinde subter mediam fere regionem Sol obtinet, dux et princeps et moderator luminum reliquorum, mens mundi et temperatio,”
217
“Nam cum aetas tua septenos octies solis anfractus reditusque converterit, duoque hi numeri, quorum uterque plenus, alter altera de causa habetur, circuitu naturali summam tibi fatalem confecerint,
218
These recipes are given in Frazer’s
219
Ammianus Marcellinus.
220
221
223
Bk. xxi, ch. i, sec. 7. “Et quoniam erudito et studioso cognitionum acquainted with the first book only of