This chapter surveys the broader social contexts for dissection, in four sections: public performance, animals, religion, and popular conceptions of anatomy. The first section offers the context for public displays of dissection, namely competing types of performance, including sophistic lectures, legal proceedings, and the general spectacle of the streets. The second focuses on animals and the various circumstances outside scientific dissection in which bodies were cut into and opened, with specific attention on butchery, veterinary practice, pharmacology, magic, and staged animal shows in the arena. The third turns to religious contexts, encompassing the practices of animal sacrifice and divination from entrails, as well as the Italic votive tradition, which included artistic representations of various internal organs, and the Egyptian practice of embalmment. Finally, there is a sketch of popular experience with and conceptions of bodily rupture and anatomy, ranging from postmortem punishments, public executions and gladiatorial displays in the arena, and military violence to literary descriptions of gore, artistic depictions of bodies, and intellectual engagement with anatomy.

In Book 1 of On divination, Cicero’s brother Quintus, who is not a Stoic, presents the Stoic case that all the many forms of divination at Rome are channels of divine communication. He does so explicitly in response to the arguments of On the nature of the gods, to strengthen the case that the gods care for us. I argue that his speech, which scholars have often called confused, can be better understood once we see it as a continuation of On the nature of the gods. For he speaks about not the, or even one, Stoic defence of divination, but rather two different Stoic views. The first is the view of Chrysippus, according to which divination was an art of interpreting messages from the gods. This view was challenged by the skeptic Carneades, and Cotta reissued some of this challenge in On the nature of the gods. Quintus recruits a new view in answer to this challenge, according to which some divination (e.g. augury, haruspicy, astrology) is artificial in that its divination meaning is first discovered by an art, but some is natural, in that some dreams and oracles have divinatory meaning without the use of an art.

In Book 2 of On divination, Cicero’s own character attacks Quintus’ speech from Book 1, which argued that the gods give us information through our divinatory practices. Cicero, as a skeptic, aims to frustrate rash assent to Quintus’ view. He is an augur, a Roman state diviner. In the speech, he says that an augur may give the arguments he does, because augury, though often misunderstood, is not supposed to be a divinatory practice. The speech is in two parts. In the first, Cicero attacks Quintus’ argument that divination is a way to foretell chance events, on the grounds that Quintus speech is also founded on Stoic determinism. I argue that Cicero’s speech is unfair in its treatment of Quintus’ understanding of chance. In the second part, often using statistical and rhetorical arguments, Cicero concedes that Quintus’ stories of true divinatory predictions are accurate, but argues that this data cannot prove that divinatory practices reliably yield information from the gods. Scholars have often accused Cicero of arguing against straw men in this speech. I concede that this is sometimes so, but argue that this fact does not refute my overall case that On divination is a creative unity.