Miscellanies 7.4.24

Naturally, then, people who become superstitious about gods quick to anger think that everything that happens is a sign and a cause of evils: if a mouse digs through an altar made of clay, or, having nothing else, chews through a sack; if a rooster being raised crows in the evening, they take this as a sign of something. Such a man Menander mocks in The Superstitious Man: “May some good befall me, O most honored gods! For in tying on my right sandal I broke the strap.” “Naturally, you fool; it was rotten, and you are a skinflint who won't buy new ones.” Antiphon's remark is charming. When someone took it as an omen that a sow had eaten her piglets, he saw that she was wasted with hunger because of the stinginess of her keeper and said, “Rejoice at the sign: hungry as she is, she did not eat your children.” “And what is surprising,” says Bion, “if the mouse chewed through the sack when it found nothing to eat? What would have been surprising is if, as Arcesilaus jokingly proposed, the sack had eaten the mouse.”