In examining the phenomenon as it existed among the Greeks and
Romans, it will be remarked that, while the Greeks seem to have
mainly adopted the ideas of the East, the Roman superstition was
of Italian origin. Their respective expressions for the
predictive or presentient faculty (_manteia_ and _divinatio_), as
Cicero is careful to explain, appear to indicate its different
character with those two peoples: the one being the product of a
sort of madness, the other an elaborate and divine skill. Greek
traditions made them believe that the magic science was brought
from Egypt or Asia by their old philosophic and legislating
sages. Some of the most eminent of the founders of philosophic
schools were popularly accused of encouraging it. Pythagoras (it
is the complaint of Plato) is said to have introduced to his
countrymen an art derived from his foreign travels; a charge
which recalls the names of Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Galileo,
and others, who had to pay the penalty of a premature knowledge
by the suspicion of their cotemporaries. Xenophanes is said
to be the only one of the philosophers who admitted the existence
or providence of the gods, and at the same time entirely
discredited divination. Of the Stoics, Panaetius was the only one
who ventured even to doubt. Some gave credit to one or two
particular modes only, as those of dreams and frenzy; but for the
most part every form of this sort of divine revelation was
implicitly received.[16]
[16] Cicero, in his second book _De Divinatione_, undertakes
to refute the arguments of the Stoics, 'the force of whose
mind, being all turned to the side of morals, unbent itself
in that of religion.' The divining faculty is divisible
generally into the artificial and the natural.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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