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.

Cicero then moves on to fate. Let us assume, he argues, that everything is indeed controlled by fate. In that case, it is hard to see what advantages divinatio can bring. If something is fated, no amount of divination can enable you to steer clear of it (he quotes the fate of Julius Caesar). If it is possible to steer clear of it, divinatio has no value. And after all, if it does not deal in certainties, what possible advantage can it confer?

Dismissing all such paraphernalia – horoscopes, oracles, auspices, dreams – as superstition, Cicero expresses the view that what counts is true religion, which is associated with the knowledge of the nature of the universe. This, he says elsewhere, is governed by god, by means of right reason. That underlies, explains and enables us to understand both how the universe works, and also that virtuous behaviour is the finest expression there is of the use of such reason.

No doubt those ‘cosmically attracting’ success talk and think of little else. Or perhaps they take Oprah Winfrey’s view that ‘the way you think creates reality for yourself’. The consequences of that infantile eyewash can be seen all around us.