Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
John C. Rolfe, Ed.

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“[p. 15] players with dice or counters on a board will win? Or, forsooth, do they know important things, but not those which are unimportant; and are unimportant things more difficult to understand than the important? But if they claim knowledge of great matters and say that they are plainer and easier to be understood, I should like,” said he, “to have them tell me, in this observation of the whole world, in comparison with such mighty works of nature, what they regard as great in the trifling and brief fortunes and affairs of men. And I should like to have them answer this question also,” said he: “if the instant in which man at birth is allotted his destiny is so brief and fleeting, that at that same moment not more than one can be born with the same conjunction under the same circle of the heavens, and if therefore even twins have different lots in life, since they are not born at the same instant—I ask them to tell me,” said he, “how and by what plan they are able to overtake the course of that fleeting moment, which can scarcely be grasped by one's thoughts, or to detain and examine it, when in the swift revolution of days and nights even the briefest moments, as they say, cause great changes?” Then, finally, he asked what answer could be made to this argument, that human beings of both sexes, of all ages, born into the world under different positions of the stars and in regions widely separated, nevertheless sometimes all perished together by the same kind of death and at the same moment, either from an earthquake, or a falling building, or the sack of a town, or the wreck of the same ship. “This,” said he, “of course would never happen, if the natal influence assigned to the birth ”