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Omens

“To Carthage then I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves,” writes Saint Augustine before he was a saint.

A strange and lovely phrase: there sang all around me in my ears.

A kind of omen, or so I’ve come to think it—a kind of description of an omen.

In Greek the word is ἡπατοσκοπία. It means inspecting the liver. What is most inner becomes most outer and then the future might be known. The blood flows through the body, whispering the secrets the liver cleanses it of, secrets that, like Augustine’s song heard in Carthage, come first from the air itself, molecules adhering to the blood cells coursing past the lungs, turning red the blood that circulates the rumor through the body entire. Some augur comes to cut the abdomen open and read there in the entrails what is to be read. I might call it the creation of the mind. It has to learn to see itself outside of itself. It can’t be kept a secret. It must spill out. Like a poem.

Of course, the augurs don’t perform this action on themselves. Not like poets do.

Maybe, more than teach us what to fear, they teach us how to do so. Maybe hope follows, or not. Nothing they warn of do they speak of plainly, those omens. They elicit the interpretation that in their obscurity they frustrate. In the silence we feel when we witness the omen, we learn something about quietness: that we cannot speak into the omen’s speaking. So seldom is it charged with peace, that quiet. Often we call it mystery, by which we mean helplessness. We want a teacher, but none exists—or the ones who call themselves teachers we don’t know how to wholly trust. Instead of a teacher we get an empty space. It floats in the head or above it. Fill me up, it says. But we don’t know how to fill it. Or it’s just a banner with a headline scrolling past on the nightly news. The Dow Jones Industrial Report. Or the Sphinx with a riddle made just for you.

Throughout their history the Romans took note of the omens that worried them. It begins at the beginning:

. . . landed near Laurentum, called also Troy, near the river Numicius, along with his son by Creusa—Ascanius or Ilus. There his followers ate their tables, which were of parsley or of the harder portions of bread loaves; for they had no real tables. Furthermore, a white sow leaped from his boat and running to the Alban mount, named after her, gave birth to a litter of thirty, which indicated that in the thirtieth year his children should get fuller possession of both land and sovereignty. Since he had heard of these portents beforehand from an oracle he ceased his wandering, sacrificed the sow, and prepared to found a city.

I guess some oracles predict omens, and if this happens to you, as it happened to Aeneas, then you’re always on the lookout lest, in missing the sign, Rome never gets founded.

Not that he knew.

Alba is the city he founds. It is the mother of Rome. Rome is founded by Romulus. His mother was a wolf.

Another, of Lucius Tarquinius:

“When Tullius had at length reached boyhood he went to sleep on a chair once in the daytime and a quantity of fire seemed to leap forth from his head. Tarquinius, seeing it, took a lively interest in the boy.”

And of Tarquin, Lucius’s son or grandson, whose tyranny ended the reign of kings in Rome:

Once the Sibyl came to Tarquin carrying many books “gifted with divine inspiration” and offering to sell them at a high price. When Tarquin refused she burned some of them and offered what remained at the same price. When he declined to purchase them again she burned more and offered what remained for the same price as before. Impressed by her audacity, he bought the few books that remained for the cost of what it would have been to buy them all in the first place. Though no one could understand the contents of the pages, many men came to read them to glimpse the truth of what they held. One man copied out some pages for his own use, and when this deed was found out, Tarquin thrust the man between “two hides sewn together and drowned, in order that neither earth nor water nor sun might be defiled by his death.” They killed the man who copied from the ominous books by making him into a book, binding him between covers. The death between those covers wouldn’t contaminate the world. Afterward, this punishment became standard for those who committed parricide. The copied word is the child of the original, τόκος to λόγος, a token of the first power, and it steals the force that doesn’t belong to it. Just as a child does when he kills his own father. He pretends his pages are the first ones.

Sometimes it seems safer to write down nothing at all. I wonder, writing about omens, if the quotes around all these words that are not mine, words copied from other books, will exculpate me from my guilt in copying them down.

And more of Tarquin:

“Out of his garden vultures drove the young of eagles, and in the men’s hall, where he was having a banquet with his friends, a huge serpent appeared and drove him and his companions from the table. . . . But as Apollo declared that he should be driven from his domain only when a dog should use human speech, he was inspired with confident hope, thinking the oracle could never be fulfilled.”

Omens abound when Rome by her enemies is threatened:

“On the Capitol blood is reported to have issued for three days from the altar of Jupiter, also honey on one day and milk on another—if anybody can believe it; and in the Forum a bronze statue of Victory set upon a stone pedestal was found standing on the ground below, without anyone’s having moved it; and, as it happened, it was facing in that direction from which the Gauls were already approaching.”

“Meanwhile portents had occurred which threw the people of Rome into great fear. A river in Picenum ran the colour of blood, in Etruria a good part of the heavens seemed to be on fire, at Ariminum a light like the day blazed out at night, in many portions of Italy three moons became visible in the night time, and in the Forum a vulture perched for several days.”

Even in the midst of battle, eyes stay lively for omens:

“Meanwhile a wolf in pursuit of a hind entered the space between the two armies, and darting toward the Romans, passed through their ranks. This encouraged them, for they looked upon him as belonging to themselves, since, according to tradition, a she-wolf had reared Romulus.”

But my favorite omens emanate from the Punic Wars. The truer the threat, and Hannibal—who, not taking advantage of a battle won in which he could have overrun Rome, spends the rest of his life lamenting the error, chanting to himself, O Cannae, Cannae!—seemed a god of threat himself, the wilder the form an omen takes:

Now Heaven had indicated beforehand what was to come to pass. For in Rome an ox talked with a human voice, and another at the Ludi Romani hurled himself out of a house into the Tiber and perished, many thunderbolts fell, and blood in one case was seen issuing from sacred statues, whereas in another it dripped from the shield of a soldier, and the sword of another soldier was carried off by a wolf from the very midst of the camp. And in the case of Hannibal, many unknown wild beasts went before him leading the way, as he was crossing the Iberus, and a vision appeared to him in a dream. He thought once that the gods, sitting in assembly, sent for him and bade him march with all speed to Italy and receive from them a guide for the way, and that by this guide he was commanded to follow without turning around. He did turn, however, and saw a great tempest moving along and an immense serpent following in its wake.

Other examples:

“A hermaphrodite lamb was born, and a swarm of . . . was seen, two serpents glided under the doors of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, the doors as well as the altar in the temple of Neptune ran with copious sweat, in Antium bloody ears were seen by some reapers, elsewhere a woman with horns appeared and many thunderbolts . . . into temples . . .”

Plutarch records “that shields sweated blood, that ears of corn were cut at Antium with blood upon them, that blazing, fiery stones fell from on high, and that the people of Falerii saw the heavens open and many tablets fall down and scatter themselves abroad, and that on one of these was written in letters plain to see, ‘Mars now brandisheth his weapons.’”

Lastly, and oddly, a favorite, after the death of Scipio Africanus:

“And this in particular seems to me to have been the meaning of the mass of stones that had poured down from heaven, falling upon some of the temples and killing men, and of the tears of Apollo. For the god had wept for three days, so that the Romans on the advice of the soothsayers voted to hew the statue in pieces to sink it in the sea.”

The ocean that is made of tears and in its grieving wears the stone away.

The god of prophecy crying while the stonecutters cut him limb from limb to throw the severed stones into the sea.

Some fear far above the clouds. That there is a weight there waiting to fall. That the gods etch in clouds as on stones the messages that might rain down. That a tempest rains down a library. That a book cracks open a head.

Is it omen when the world begins to speak for itself, long weary of being spoken of or for. The passive voice refuses its position. The accusative wants to accuse. That old contract by which the names name the things of the world rests on a secret agreement that those things keep silent. But then a shield begins to bleed, a statue cry, a vulture presides over Law, and language doesn’t work the right way anymore. It doesn’t describe what it names. It does different work. It beseeches. Then the words that come out our mouths beg the things we name to tell us what they mean.

A child in the moonlight looking up at the moon cups her hands around her ears.

O Cannae, Cannae!

There sings all around me in my ears the song I cannot listen to hear.