Diatribe de Prodigiosis Crucibus

agitation, as the Sacred History records of Balaam’s ass; and Pliny says that in the year 676 of the City, a cock and also an ox spoke in the suburbs of Rome shortly before the death of Julius Caesar, saying they were driven in vain, because not grain but men would soon be lacking, in the year 710 of the City. To this relate the various schemata of bodies assumed from the element of the air, the sweating of images, and voices of the woods and stones, striking as if from a grove or the ether, examples of which are everywhere obvious.

The third class are those which are indeed subject to the pure rule of nature, yet are so far removed from the perfect understanding of men as they are more occult due to the varied confluence of causes; and thus not undeservedly did the most wise Hippocrates judge that in all things there is something τὸ θεῖον, or Divine, which extends as widely as the manifold constitution of things, species, and individuals extends. For of all divine things which express some mark of their more occult character, some indeed, from the foundation of the world, were immediately [destined] by an immutable law, and by their very own