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92 For Chrysippus has filled an entire volume with your oracles, many of which, as I said before, I consider utterly false, and many others only true by accident, as often happens in any common conversation. Others, again, are so obscure and involved that their very interpreters have need of other interpreters; and the decisions of one lot have to be referred to other lots. Another portion of them are so ambiguous that they require to be analyzed by the logic of dialecticians. Thus, when Fortune uttered the followed oracle respecting Crœsus, the richest king of Asia,

that monarch expected he should ruin the power of his enemies; but the empire that he ruined was his own. Whichever result had ensued, the oracle would have been true.

The use I make of divination is to show that in its diversified forms it was sustained by means similar to those employed by astrologers, and exerted the same kind of influence over the minds of men. Its supports were the occasional occurrence of striking coincidences which the superstition of the people accepted, while they were prevented from carefully examining the whole subject, both by fear of the consequences of unbelief to themselves personally, and by their habit of mind, which was in all respects the reverse of scientific. Also, many of the most powerful intellects were paralyzed by the opinion that if divination were given up belief in the gods must be renounced, and from that they shrank.

Many astrologers and diviners were undoubtedly wise men, acquainted with the laws of physics so far as they had been discovered, and with the progress of war and current events. They were as able to form rational conjectures of the future as any of their contemporaries. Some were masters of magic, skilful in sleight-of-hand, and were also capable of practising ventriloquism. When they exercised this