When to Trust Your Gut Over Fortune Tellers — The Enchiridion

You already know the nature of what you are asking about before you ever reach the diviner. The future event is unknown; whether it can help or harm you in the Stoic sense is not. Anything outside your power is neither good nor evil. Bring desire or aversion and you will approach trembling. First hold that every outcome is indifferent to you because right use stays in your power and no one can take that away. Then come to the gods as counselors with confidence, and when counsel arrives remember whose advice you neglect if you disobey.

Epictetus limits divination the way Socrates did: only when the whole question is the event and reason or art cannot discover the matter. That is practical uncertainty, not moral escape. When it is your duty to share a friend's danger or your country's, you do not consult the oracle about whether you will share it. Unfavorable auspices may mean death, mutilation, or exile portended. Reason still directs you to stand by friend and country anyway.

The closing sharpens the point with the greater diviner. The Pythian God cast from the temple the man who neglected to save his friend. Oracles may describe hazards; they do not grant licence for cowardice on duties you already know. Prepare for any answer on practical questions. On moral ones, do not outsource conscience to signs.