CHAPTER XXI 



HALLEY AND THE MESSENGERS OF THE GODS 



As we wander nowadays among the broken pillars and moulder- 

 ing columns which tell of the grandeur that was Rome, the time 

 seems long. Yet may we hardly doubt that, could we be 

 transported back to the days when these were palaces, arches 

 and temples of marble, we should find a civilisation and a 

 society which in its polish, its elegance, its urbanity of manners, 

 its scepticism and audacity of thought, would differ from our 

 own only in the minor essentials of a different fashion of dress, 

 of speech, of dining, and their like. Some things have changed, 

 however, and one of these is the singular belief singular now 

 to us in signs, in portents, haruspices, good and evil omens. 



Cicero was a highly enlightened man, dipping into all the 

 science of his time, writing out his views in a sensuous and 

 flowing Latin whose charm the intervening centuries have not 

 dimmed. On fate he wrote like a philosopher ; on divination, 

 the reading of the future from the entrails of chickens or the 

 turn of a sieve, he wrote with a faith that one might expect to 

 find in a fishwife or a child. He is hurt because the great 

 Democritus, whom he so much admires, should treat the subject 

 so lightly ; he adduces a whole row of names of the eminent 

 and the learned to indicate how wrong it is of the Abderan 

 sceptic to consider so little a belief which had been unquestion- 

 ingly entertained by so many excellent minds. The views of 

 Cicero were but the refinement of the gross superstitions which 

 then dominated not merely the cultured society of Rome, but 

 the whole world. You perceive it in many ways. 



The death of Caesar was a momentous event ; by common 

 suffrage he was voted a god ; the shows and pageants of earth 

 seemed too slight to do honour to the passing of this god-like 

 man. As heralding his demise, does not Horatio tell us in the 

 play : 



The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead 

 Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets." 



