And Latona,[1] arguing her case with Athene, on account of the latter being incensed at her for having brought forth in the temple, says:
"Man-slaying spoils
Torn from the dead you love to see. And these
To you are not unclean. But you regard
My parturition here a horrid thing,
Though other creatures in the temple do
No harm by bringing forth their young."
It is natural, then, that having a superstitious dread of those irascible [gods], they imagine that all events are signs and causes of evils. If a mouse bore through an altar built of clay, and for want of something else gnaw through an oil flask; if a cock that is being fattened crow in the evening, they determine this to be a sign of something.
Of such a one Menander gives a comic description in The Superstitious Man:
"A. Good luck be mine, ye honoured gods!
Tying my right shoe's string,
I broke it."
"B. Most likely, silly fool,
For it was rotten, and you, niggard, you
Would not buy new ones."[2]
It was a clever remark of Antiphon, who (when one regarded it as an ill omen that the sow had eaten her pigs), on seeing her emaciated through the niggardliness of the person that kept her, said, Congratulate yourself on the omen that, being so hungry, she did not eat your own children.
"And what wonder is it," says Bion, "if the mouse, finding nothing to eat, gnaws the bag? "For it were wonderful if (as Arcesilaus argued in fun) "the bag had eaten the mouse."
Diogenes accordingly remarked well to one who wondered at finding a serpent coiled round a pestle: "Don't wonder; for it would have been more surprising if you had seen the pestle coiled round the serpent, and the serpent straight."
