[Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero]@TWC D-Link bookCicero’s Tusculan Disputations BOOK VI 36/51
He is represented as a prophet in the Philoctetes of Sophocles.
And in the AEneid he is also represented as king of part of Epirus, and as predicting to AEneas the dangers and fortunes which awaited him. [112] This short passage would be very obscure to the reader without an explanation from another of Cicero's treatises.
The expression here, _ad investigandum suem regiones vineae terminavit_, which is a metaphor too bold, if it was not a sort of augural language, seems to me to have been the effect of carelessness in our great author; for Navius did not divide the regions, as he calls them, of the vine to find his sow, but to find a grape. [113] The Peremnia were a sort of auspices performed just before the passing a river. [114] The Acumina were a military auspices, and were partly performed on the point of a spear, from which they were called Acumina. [115] Those were called _testamenta in procinctu_, which were made by soldiers just before an engagement, in the presence of men called as witnesses. [116] This especially refers to the Decii, one of whom devoted himself for his country in the war with the Latins, 340 B.C., and his son imitated the action in the war with the Samnites, 295 B.C.
Cicero (Tusc.i.
37) says that his son did the same thing in the war with Pyrrhus at the battle of Asculum, though in other places (De Off.
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