supposed to have occurred, and if thought worthy of expiation were entered in the pontifical books.  We may suppose that they were sent in chiefly by the uneducated.  But among men of education we have many examples of this same nervousness, of which two or three must suffice.  Sulla, as we know from his own Memoirs, which were used directly or indirectly by Plutarch, had a strong vein of superstition in his nature, and made no attempt to control it.  In dedicating his Memoirs to Lucullus he advised him “to think no course so safe as that which is enjoined by the [Greek:  daimon] (perhaps his genius) in the night";[572] and Plutarch tells us several tales of portents on which he acted, evidently drawn from this same autobiography.  We are told of him that he always carried a small image of Apollo, which he kissed from time to time, and to which he prayed silently in moments of danger.[573] Again, Cicero tells us a curious story of himself, Varro, and Cato, which shows that those three men of philosophical learning were quite liable to be frightened by a prophecy which to us would not seem to have much claim to respect.[574] He tells how when the three were at Dyrrachium, after Caesar’s defeat there and the departure of the armies into Thessaly, news was brought them by the commander of the Rhodian fleet that a certain rower had foretold that within thirty days Greece would be weltering in blood; how all three were terribly frightened, and how a few days later the news of the battle at Pharsalia reached them.  Lastly, we all remember the vision which appeared to Brutus on the eve of the battle of Philippi, of a huge and fearsome figure standing by him in silence, which Shakespeare has made into the ghost of Caesar and used to unify his play.  According to Plutarch, the Epicurean Cassius, as Lucretius would have done, attempted to convince his friend on rational grounds that the vision need not alarm him, but apparently in vain.[575]

2.  Lucretius had denied the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, as the cause of so much of the misery which he believed it to be his mission to avert.  Caesar, in the speech put into his mouth by Sallust, in the debate on the execution of the conspirators on December 5, 63, seems to be of the same opinion, and as Cicero alludes to his words in the speech with which he followed Caesar, we may suppose that Sallust was reporting him rightly.[576] The poet and the statesman were not unlike in the way in which they looked at facts; both were of clear strong vision, without a trace of mysticism.  But such men were the exception rather than the rule; Cicero probably represents better the average thinking man of his time.  Cicero was indeed too full of life, too deeply interested in the living world around him, to think much of such questions as the immortality of the soul; and as a professed follower of the Academic school, he assuredly did not hold any dogmatic opinion on it.  He was at no time really affected by Pythagoreanism, like