“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.
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.”
