Would Cicero have sided with Oprah Winfrey?

It is apparently an increasingly popular idea that we can ‘cosmically attract’ success to ourselves. Many ancients, with their beliefs in divination and so on, might well have agreed. Not Cicero.

He published his two-book De Divinatione in 44 bc, soon after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In it he takes on his brother Quintus, who champions divinatio as ‘the foreknowledge and foretelling of events that happen by chance’. But who needs it, replies Cicero. In real life you turn to experts to deal with your problems: if you are ill you go to the doctor, if you want to know right from wrong you go to the philosopher.

Besides, the diviner’s position makes no logical sense. How can something which happens ‘by chance’ be predicted? It is a contradiction in terms. And if something were really to happen ‘by chance’, even a god would not be able to predict it, let alone a diviner.