They preserved them from the evils that menaced them, sending
signs which men interpreted. These are called Omens. "When a city,"
says Herodotus,[57] "is about to suffer some great misfortune, this is
usually anticipated by signs. The people of Chios had omens of their
defeat: of a band of one hundred youths sent to Delphi but two
returned; the others had died of the plague. About the same time the
roof of a school of the city fell on the children who were learning to
read; but one escaped of the one hundred and twenty. Such were the
anticipating signs sent them by the deity."
The Greeks regarded as supernatural signs, dreams, the flight of birds
in the heavens, the entrails of animals sacrificed--in a word,
everything that they saw, from the tremblings of the earth and
eclipses to a simple sneeze. In the expedition to Sicily, Nicias, the
general of the Athenians, at the moment of embarking his army for the
retreat, was arrested by an eclipse of the moon; the gods, thought he,
had sent this prodigy to warn the Athenians not to continue their
enterprise. And so Nicias waited; he waited twenty-seven days offering
sacrifices to appease the gods.
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