have employed the most absurd remedies. Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Augustus wore seal's skin, his successor Tiberius laurel leaves, as a protection against lightning.[1] Pliny recounts how M. Servilius Nonianus, princeps civitatis, fearing opthalmia, had fastened to his neck a piece of linen containing some paper on which were written the Greek letters p and a. This was done before any mention of the disease was allowed to be made to him or by him. Mucianus, thrice consul, carried a live fly around in a bit of white linen for a similar purpose, and of course both men attributed their escape from disease to these bizarre methods.[2] Moreover, much magic has been supposed to have been involved in the numerous Mysteries to which men sought initiation and in the Oriental cults which became so popular. Astrology was seemingly as universally cultivated as in the Middle Ages, and that, too, though perhaps in Roman times it was in appearance less of a science and more of a superstition.
There were occasional imperial edicts against astrologers, it is true, and even sporadic persecution of them. But the explanation of such measures is belief, not scepticism, and they denote not disbelief in the art itself but disapproval of the use to which it was put—such as revealing the fate of the present and the name of the coming ruler. Almost every emperor had an astrologer at his court, and the historians of the period delighted in telling stories of astrologers who foretold their own deaths, or of monarchs who in vain attempted to thwart the decrees of fate.[3] Alexander Seve-
- ↑ Suetonius, Aug., ch. xc; Tiber., ch. lxix. Cited by W. E. H. Lecky. Hist. of European Morals (London, 1899), vol. i, p. 367. Lecky gives a large amount of material on superstition in the Roman Empire.
- ↑ Nat. Hist., bk. xxviii, ch. 5.
- ↑ Bouché Leckrcq. "L'Astrologie dans le monde romain." Revue Hist, vol. lxv, pp. 249 et seq. If we may believe the Roman historians,
