Stoic Meditations

The incidents may have been fictitious; if not, then the fulfillment of the prophecy may have been accidental.

Explore the cause, if you can, of every strange thing that excites your astonishment. If you do not find the cause be assured, nevertheless, that nothing could have happened without a cause.

In periods of fear and of danger, stories of portents are not only more readily believed, but they are invented with greater impunity.

In the case of things that happen now by chance, now in the usual course of nature, it is the height of folly to hold the gods as the direct agents and not to inquire into the causes of such things.

While Hannibal was in exile at the court of King Prusias he advised the king to go to war, but the king replied, ‘I do not dare, because the entrails forbid.’ ‘And do you,’ said Hannibal, ‘put more reliance in a piece of ox-meat than you do in a veteran commander?’

You say, ‘Jupiter’s statue was being set up at the very time the conspiracy was being exposed.’ You, of course, prefer to attribute this coincidence to a divine decree rather than to chance.

Upon my word you Stoics surrender the very city of philosophy while defending its outworks! For, by your insistence on the truth of soothsaying, you utterly overthrow physiology.

Don’t you think, rather, that the bull lost his heart when he saw that Caesar, in his purple robe, had lost his head?

How did the soothsayers manage to agree among themselves what part of the entrails was unfavourable, and what part favourable; or what cleft in the liver indicated danger and what promised some advantage?

You ought to have employed arguments and reason to show that all your propositions were true and you ought not to have resorted to so-called occurrences — certainly not to such occurrences as are unworthy of belief.