e confidence in the liver of a beast, than in so old and
experienced a captain as I am?" Marcellus, who had been five times consul,
and was augur, said, that he had discovered a method of not being put to a
stand by the sinister flight of birds, which was, to keep himself close
shut up in his litter.

Cicero explains himself upon the subject of auguries without ambiguity or
reserve. Nobody was more capable of speaking pertinently upon it than
himself, (as M. Morin observes in his dissertation upon the same subject.)
As he was adopted into the college of augurs, he had made himself
acquainted with their most abstruse secrets, and had all possible
opportunity of informing himself fully in their science. That he did so,
sufficiently appears from the two books he has left us upon divination, in
which, it may be said, he has exhausted the subject. In the second,
wherein he refutes his brother Quintus, who had espoused the cause of the
augurs, he combats and defeats his false reasonings with a force, and at
the same time with so refined and delicate a raillery, as leaves us
nothing to wish; and he demonstrates by proofs, each more convincing than
the other, the falsity, contrariety, and impossibility of that art. But
what is very surprising, in the midst of all his arguments, he takes
occasion to blame the generals and magistrates, who on important
conjunctures had contemned the prognostics; and maintains, that the use of
them, as great an abuse as it was in his own opinion, ought nevertheless
to be respected, out of regard to religion, and the prejudices of the
people.(81)

All that I have hitherto said tends to prove, that Paganism was divided
into two sects, almost equally enemies of religion; the one by their
superstitious and blind regard for auguries, the other by their
irreligious contempt and derision of them.

The principle of the first, founded on one side upon the ignorance and
weakness of man in the affairs of life, and on the other upon the
prescience of the Divinity and his almighty providence, was true; but the
consequence deduced from it in favour of auguries, false and absurd. They
ought to have proved that it was certain, that the Divinity himself had
established these external signs to denote his intentions, and that he had
obliged himself to a punctual conformity to them upon all occasions: but
they had nothing of this in their system. These auguries and divinations
therefore were the effect and inventio