Cicero and De divinatione: an augur against divination
In 44 BC Cicero, a member of the college of augurs, wrote the most important ancient treatise on divination. Its structure, arguments and ironies.
It is one of the most interesting paradoxes of Roman culture: the most complete ancient text on divination, and at the same time the sharpest criticism of it, was written by an augur. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a member of the college since 53 BC, composed De divinatione between 45 and 44 BC, in the last months of Caesar's dictatorship, and completed it immediately after his death.
A dialogue between brothers
The work is a dialogue in two books, set in Cicero's villa at Tusculum. In the first book his brother Quintus speaks, defending divination with arguments drawn mainly from Stoic philosophy and with a long series of historical examples. In the second book Marcus replies, subjecting those arguments to close criticism, following the method of the Academy and in particular of the philosopher Carneades.
Quintus distinguishes two broad forms of divination. The first is artificial, that is, based on techniques and observations: it includes haruspicy, augury, the interpretation of prodigies and astrology. The second is natural and shows itself in dreams and in prophecies uttered in a state of inspiration. This division, taken up for centuries, remains a useful tool for finding one's way among the practices of the ancient world.
The ironies of an augur
In the second book Cicero does not spare his sarcasm. He asks why a god should reveal himself to a farmer by emerging from a clod of earth, as in the myth of Tages, and observes that the sacred chickens eat greedily simply because they are kept hungry. He also recalls a quip attributed to Cato the Elder, who wondered that a haruspex did not laugh when he met another haruspex.
These passages have made De divinatione a classic of critical thought. Cicero examines omens one by one, proposes natural explanations, and shows that many stories were constructed after the event and that coincidences are remembered more than failures. He does not attack the gods, but the idea that they communicate with human beings through signs so uncertain and contradictory.
Religion and the state
And yet Cicero does not call for the abolition of the auspices. He believes they should be preserved for the benefit of the Republic and out of regard for popular opinion. In De legibus, written a few years earlier, he had described the right of the augurs as the highest and most important in the state. The position is not contradictory: for Cicero public religion is a civic structure to be respected, even when philosophical reason questions its foundations.
This was a widespread attitude among the Roman elite of the late Republic, which distinguished between the religion of the philosophers, that of the poets and that of the state. Public ceremonies were to be celebrated scrupulously because they held the community together, while discussion of their truth could take place freely in villas and in books.
De divinatione is also our main source for much of what we know about the Etrusca disciplina and augury. Without it we would know less well the myth of Tages, the story of Attus Navius and the omens of Caesar. That is why the work has enjoyed such a long fortune: read by Christian authors, by humanists and by modern philosophers, it remains a starting point for anyone who wants to understand ancient divination.