The Prodigious Ways of Resilience

The present paper aims to accomplish an analysis of Cicero's De divinatione from the perspective of religious resilience. Three examples of intuitive divination, stemming from Cicero's own experience and linked to perhaps the most troubling times of the author's life, are used within the treatise to reassert the author's political status in the Republic: the dream of Quintus (1.58), the dream of Marcus (1.59), and a case of prophecy fulfilled in the aftermath of the battle of Pharsalus (1.68–69). We contend that personal resilience is a common end for these three passages. In order to make that point, we first examine the means through which these acts of producing resilience (i. e., specific performances that are meant to re-establish the status of those that execute them) are carried out. This brings us to the final and essential question of the paper, i. e., the role of religion as an instrument of resilience in Cicero's De divinatione.