ing remarkable
passage from Tacitus: "My judgment wavers," he says, "I dare not say
whether it be fate and necessity immutable which governs the changing
course of human affairs--or just chance. Among the wisest of the
ancients, as well as among their apes, you will find a conflict of
opinion. Many hold fixedly the idea that our beginning and our end--that
man himself--is nothing to the Gods at all. The wicked are in prosperity
and the good meet tribulation. Others believe that Fate and the facts
of this world work together. But this connection they trace not to
planetary influences but to a concatenation of natural causes. We choose
our life that is free: but the choice once made, what awaits us is fixed
and ordered. Good and evil are different from the vulgar opinion of
them. Often those who seem to battle with adversity are to be accounted
blessed; but the many, even in their prosperity, are miserable. It needs
only to bear misfortune bravely, while the fool perishes in his wealth.
Outside these rival schools stands the man in the street. No one will
take from him his conviction that at our birth are fixed for us the
things that shall be. If some things fall out differently from what was
foretold, that is due to the deceit of men that speak what they know
not: calling into contempt a science to which past and present alike
bear a glorious testimony" (Ann. vi, 22).

(20) Manili Astronomicon Liber II, ed. H. W. Garrod, Oxford,
1911, p. lxix, and II, ll. 84-86.

(21) Pliny: Natural History, Bk. XVIII, Chap. XXV, Sect.
57.

Cato waged war on the Greek physicians and forbade "his uilicus all
resort to haruspicem, augurem, hariolum Chaldaeum," but in vain; so
widespread became the belief that the great philosopher, Panaetius (who
died about 111 B.C.), and two of his friends alone among the stoics,
rejected the claims of astrology as a science (Garrod). So closely
related was the subject of mathematics that it, too, fell into
disfavor, and in the Theodosian code sentence of death was passed upon
mathematicians. Long into the Middle Ages, the same unholy alliance
with astrology and divination caused mathematics to be regarded with
suspicion, and even Abelard calls it a nefarious study.

The third important feature in Babylonian medicine is the evidence
afforded by the famous Hammurabi Code (circa 2000 B.C.)--a body of laws,
civil and religious, many of which relate to the medical profession.
This ex