It is apparently an increasingly popular idea that we can ‘cosmically attract’ success to ourselves. Many ancients, with their beliefs in divination and so on, might well have agreed. Not Cicero.

He published his two-book De Divinatione in 44 bc, soon after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In it he takes on his brother Quintus, who champions divinatio as ‘the foreknowledge and foretelling of events that happen by chance’.