Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/97

89] I. Opponents of astrology.—Astrology, as we have seen, was very popular. Yet there was some scepticism as to its truth beyond the ridicule of satirists, who perhaps at bottom were themselves believers in the art. Outside of Christian writers the three chief opponents of astrology in the Roman world, judging by the works that have come down to us, were—Cicero who lived before the Empire in the constitutional sense can be said to have begun—in his De Divinatione; Favorinus, a Gaul who resided at Rome in the reigns of Hadrian and Trajan, and was a friend of Plutarch, and whose arguments against astrology have been preserved only in the pages of Aulus Gellius; and Sextus Empiricus, a physician who flourished at about the beginning of the third century of our era.

When, however, we come to examine both the men and their arguments, we somehow do not find their assault upon astrology especially impressive or satisfactory. First, as to the men. Gellius says that he heard Favorinus make the speech the substance of which he repeats, but that he is unable to state whether the philosopher really meant what he said or argued merely in order to exercise and to display his genius. There was reason for this perplexity of