United States or Isle of Man ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
That by Trollope is able but quite partisan. On the philosophy, consult also Zeller's 'Eclectics. Date and Circumstances of Composition. The date at which the Cato Maior was written can be determined with almost perfect exactness. A mention in Cicero's work entitled De Divinatione shows that the Cato Maior preceded that work by a short time.
During the ensuing year, which is the last of his life, in the midst of the confusion and anxieties consequent on Cæsar's death, and the party warfare of his Philippics, he found time to write the De Naturâ Deorum, De Divinatione, De Fato, De Senectute, De Amicitiâ, De Officiis, and Paradoxa, besides the treatise on Rhetorical Common Places above mentioned.
De Divinatione, i. 91. PLINY, Natural History, vii. 57, 3. The manuscripts give 720, but the whole context proves that figure to be far too low, neither does it accord with the writer's thought, or with the other statements which he brings together with the aim of showing that the invention of letters may be traced to a very remote epoch.
By the way, it has been a maxim with legislators not to give checks to the present superstition, but to make the best use of it, as that which is always the most powerful with the people; otherwise, though Plutarch, being a priest, was interested in the cause, there is nothing plainer than Cicero, in his book "De Divinatione" has made it, that there was never any such thing as an oracle, except in the cunning of the priests.
Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams, translation of third edition by A. A. Brill, 1913. Aristotle: Parva Naturalia, De divinatione per somnium, Ch. I, Oxford ed., Vol. III, 463 a. DESERVEDLY the foundation of Greek Medicine is associated with the name of Hippocrates, a native of the island of Cos; and yet he is a shadowy personality, about whom we have little accurate first-hand information.
It is thus that is discussed the nature of the gods in this work of Cicero, which is indeed a discussion on the different schools of philosophy, each in the position which it had reached in his time. The De Natura Deorum is followed by two books, De Divinatione, and by the fragment of one, De Fato. Divination is the science of predicting events.
"Chaldæi ... diuturnâ observatione siderum scientiam putantur effecisse, ut prædeci posset quid cuique eventurum et quo quisque fato natus esset." CICERO, De Divinatione, i. 1, 2. It would now, perhaps, be possible, thanks to recent discoveries, to give more precise and circumstantial details than those of Laplace.
Then, as if realising that his true work in life was to mould his native language into a vehicle of abstract thought, he sets to work with amazing swiftness and copiousness to reproduce a whole series of Greek philosophical treatises, in a style which, for flexibility and grace, recalls the Greek of the best period the De Finibus, the Academics, the Tusculans, the De Natura Deorum, the De Divinatione, the De Officiis.
The Marius was written two years after this, and we have a passage from it, quoted by the author in his De Divinatione, containing some fine lines. It tells the story of the battle of the eagle and the serpent. Virgil has reproduced the picture with his own peculiar grace of words. His version has been translated by Dryden, but better, perhaps, by Christopher Pitt.
Accordingly, he repaired or rebuilt many temples, and both by precept and example strove to restore the traditional respect for divine things. But he must have experienced a grave difficulty in the utter absence of religious conviction which had become general in Rome. The authors of the De Divinatione and the De Rerum Natura could not have written as they did, without influencing many minds.
Word Of The Day