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Cicero says that the famous physician Hippocrates has left in writing
that he had suspected that a certain pair of brothers were twins, from
the fact that they both took ill at once, and their disease advanced to
its crisis and subsided in the same time in each of them. Posidonius
the Stoic, who was much given to astrology, used to explain the fact
by supposing that they had been born and conceived under the same
constellation. In this question the conjecture of the physician is by
far more worthy to be accepted, and approaches much nearer to
credibility, since, according as the parents were affected in body at
the time of copulation, so might the first elements of the foetuses
have been affected, so that all that was necessary for their growth and
development up till birth having been supplied from the body of the same
mother, they might be born with like constitutions. Thereafter,
nourished in the same house, on the same kinds of food, where they
would have also the same kinds of air, the same locality, the same
quality of water, which, according to the testimony of medical
science, have a very great influence, good or bad, on the condition
of bodily health, and where they would also be accustomed to the same
kinds of exercise, they would have bodily constitutions so similar that
they would be similarly affected with sickness at the same time and by
the same causes. But, to wish to adduce that particular position of
the stars which existed at the time when they were born or conceived as
the cause of their being simultaneously affected with sickness,
manifests the greatest arrogance, when so many beings of most diverse
kinds, in the most diverse conditions, and subject to the most diverse
events, may have been conceived and born at the same time, and in the
same district, lying under the same sky.
But we know that twins do not only act differently, and travel to very
different places, but that they also suffer from different kinds of
sickness; for which Hippocrates would give what is in my opinion the
simplest reason, namely, that, through diversity of food and
exercise, which arises not from the constitution of the body, but from
the inclination of the mind, they may have come to be different from
each other in respect of health. Moreover, Posidonius, or any other
asserter of the fatal influence of the stars, will have enough to do to
find anything to say to this, if he be unwilling to impose upon the
minds of the uninstructed in things of which they are ignorant. But,
as to what they attempt to make out from that very small interval of
time elapsing between the births of twins, on account of that point in
the heavens where the mark of the natal hour is placed, and which they
call the "horoscope," it is either disproportionately small to the
diversity which is found in the dispositions, actions, habits, and
fortunes of twins, or it is disproportionately great when compared with
the estate of twins, whether low or high, which is the same for both
of them, the cause for whose greatest difference they place, in every
case, in the hour on which one is born; and, for this reason, if the
one is born so immediately after the other that there is no change in
the horoscope, I demand an entire similarity in all that respects them
both, which can never be found in the case of any twins. But if the
slowness of the birth of the second give time for a change in the
horoscope, I demand different parents, which twins can never have.
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