admiration. Those men could pierce to the marrow of a mystery
instantly. If the Rosetta-stone idea had been introduced it
would have defeated them, but entrails had no embarrassments for
them. Entrails have gone out, now–entrails and dreams. It was
at last found out that as hiding-places for the divine intentions
they were inadequate.
A part of the wall of Valletri in former times been struck
with thunder, the response of the soothsayers was, that a native
of that town would some time or other arrive at supreme power.–
BOHN’S SUETONIUS, p. 138.
“Some time or other.” It looks indefinite, but no matter,
it happened, all the same; one needed only to wait, and be
patient, and keep watch, then he would find out that the thunder-
stroke had Caesar Augustus in mind, and had come to give notice.
There were other advance-advertisements. One of them
appeared just before Caesar Augustus was born, and was most
poetic and touching and romantic in its feelings and aspects.
It was a dream. It was dreamed by Caesar Augustus’s mother,
and interpreted at the usual rates:
Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched
to the stars and expanded through the whole circuit of heaven
and earth.–SUETONIUS, p. 139.
That was in the augur’s line, and furnished him no
difficulties, but it would have taken Rawlinson and Champollion
fourteen years to make sure of what it meant, because they would
have been surprised and dizzy. It would have been too late to be
valuable, then, and the bill for service would have been barred
by the statute of limitation.
In those old Roman days a gentleman’s education was not
complete until he had taken a theological course at the seminary
and learned how to translate entrails. Caesar Augustus’s
education received this final polish. All through his life,
whenever he had poultry on the menu he saved the interiors and
kept himself informed of the Deity’s plans by exercising upon
those interiors the arts of augury.
In his first consulship, while he was observing the
auguries, twelve vultures presented themselves, as they had done
to Romulus. And when he offered sacrifice, the livers of all
the victims were folded inward in the lower part; a circumstance
which was regarded by those present who had skill in things of
that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of great and wonderful
fortune.–SUETONIUS, p. 141.
“Indubitable” is a strong word, but no doubt it was
justified, if the livers were really turned that way. In those
days chicken livers were strangely and delicately sensitive to
coming events, no matter how far off they might be; and they
could never keep still, but would curl and squirm like that,
particularly when vultures came and showed interest in that
approaching great event and in breakfast.
II
We may now skip eleven hundred and thirty or forty years,
which brings us down to enlightened Christian times and the
troubled days of King Stephen of England. The augur has had his
day and has been long ago forgotten; the priest had fallen heir
to his trade.
King Henry is dead; Stephen, that bold and outrageous
person, comes flying over from Normandy to steal the throne from
Henry’s daughter. He accomplished his crime, and Henry of
Huntington, a priest of high degree, mourns over it in his
Chronicle. The Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated Stephen:
“wherefore the Lord visited the Archbishop with the same judgment
which he had inflicted upon him who struck Jeremiah the great
priest: he died with a year.”
Stephen’s was the greater offense, but Stephen could wait;
not so the Archbishop, apparently.
The kingdom was a prey to intestine wars; slaughter, fire,
and rapine spread ruin throughout the land; cries of distress,
horror, and woe rose in every quarter.
That was the result of Stephen’s crime. These unspeakable
conditions continued during nineteen years. Then Stephen died as
comfortably as any man ever did, and was honorably buried. It
makes one pity the poor Archbishop, and with that he, too, could
have been let off as leniently. How did Henry of Huntington know
that the Archbishop was sent to his grave by judgment of God for
consecrating Stephen? He does not explain. Neither does he