CICERO AND PSYCHICS.*
Tan .De Divinathme of Cicero is too little read. It is even, it appears, too little edited. For the author of a new American edition of the First Book says that practically no modern commentary on it exists. It is a thousand pities that any of • M. Ttdli Cieeronis de Divinatione Liber Primus.. With commentary bl
A. S. Pease. 2 Vols. Univeisity of Illinois.
Cicero's work should be neglected, for he is one of the educators of modern Europe, and through the dark centuries his books kept reason alive in a world which hardly knew the use of it. Till the Renaissance he was our best interpreter of Greece, as he is now our best interpreter of Rome. His essay on " Divination " is full of light on the ways of thinking of the Ancient World. In these days it would have been published in the " Proceedings " of the Society for Psychical Research, of which its author would have been a member. Indeed, it contains tales of telepathic communications which are strangely reminiscent of Myers and Gurney. But there is a difference, and a profound one, for Cicero, though he wrote as a rationalist and reproduced the work of rationalists, wrote before the days of the " scientific spirit " as we know it. The ghost stories in the De Divinatione are discussed in the light of their ante- cedent probability and not of the evidence for their truth. Wo sometimes forget how new the demand for " scientific " evidence is. Cicero's attitude to communication with another world is interesting for the further reason that Divination proper had become a political business by his time, and Cicero was a politician. Only fifteen years before he wrote this book Julius Caesar had been Consul, having for colleague one Bibulus, who disapproved of all he did. Bibulus shut himself up for his year of office in his own house, and on every day on which Caesar was to pass a measure he sent out to announce an omen which forbade public business on that day. Caesar put through his business undeterred, and the wits said that the Consuls for that year were Julius and Caesar, but theoretically all his measures were invalidated by those omens and could be held void after his death. It was, indeed, time that someone should ask, as Cicero asks, whether it was right to be enslaved thus to " old wives' tales "--amill superstitions obligemur.
This American edition of the De Divinatione, Book One (the Second Book is promised), is a large and learned one. The notes, which deal almost entirely with the subject-matter, occupy about ten times as much space as the text, and are filled with innumer- able references and quotations. The word aguilae alone provokes a list of over thirty references to writers ancient and modern, mostly authorities on folk-lore, and such lists are common throughout the book. The whole commentary is a monument of erudition, and no one henceforward who intends to study the De Divinatione will wish to be without this beautifully printed and elaborate edition. American and English scholarship do not always agree upon the relative importance of different subjects for inquiry, but that only gives American work an added interest for us, and the use by Mr. Pease of formidable polysyllables like inconcinnity,as well as of such technical terms as impetrative and alectryonsmancy, takes nothing from the use- fulness of the book and adds a not unpleasant transatlantic
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