s in the bed and on the throne
of Jupiter, who gives life to all the world.

9. Auguries and auspices are not collected from the will of birds who
are themselves ignorant of the future (for there is no one so silly as
to say they understand it); but God directs the flight of birds, so that
the sound of their beaks, or the motion of their feathers, whether quiet
or disturbed, indicates the character of the future. For the kindness
of the deity, whether it be that men deserve it, or that he is touched
by affection for them, likes by these acts to give information of what
is impending.

10. Again, those who attend to the prophetic entrails of cattle, which
often take all kinds of shapes, learn from them what happens. Of this
practice a man called Tages was the inventor, who, as is reported, was
certainly seen to rise up out of the earth in the district of Etruria.

11. Men too, when their hearts are in a state of excitement, foretell
the future, but then they are speaking under divine inspiration. For the
sun, which is, as natural philosophers say, the mind of the world, and
which scatters our minds among us as sparks proceeding from itself, when
it has inflamed them with more than usual vehemence, renders them
conscious of the future. From which the Sibyls often say they are
burning and fired by a vast power of flames; and with reference to these
cases the sound of voices, various signs, thunder, lightning,
thunderbolts, and falling stars, have a great significance.

12. But the belief in dreams would be strong and undoubted if the
interpreters of them were never deceived; and sometimes, as Aristotle
asserts, they are fixed and stable when the eye of the person, being
soundly asleep, turns neither way, but looks straight forward.

13. And because the ignorance of the vulgar often talks loudly, though
ignorantly, against these ideas, asking why, if there were any faculty
of foreseeing the future, one man should be ignorant that he would be
killed in battle, or another that he would meet with some misfortune,
and so on; it will be enough to reply that sometimes a grammarian has
spoken incorrectly, or a musician has sung out of tune, or a physician
been ignorant of the proper remedy for a disease; but these facts do not
disprove the existence of the sciences of grammar, music, or medicine.

14. So that Tully is right in this as well as other sayings of his, when
he says, "Signs of future events are shown by the gods; if