I’ve been reading Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars, a collection of chatty biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors.
Suetonius always mentions the various omens of good and bad fortune that the Caesars noted before their accessions/battles/deaths. Most of them seem pretty straightforward, but one has thrown me for a loop.
In the bio on Vespasian, before he becomes Emperor, Suetonius records this little tidbit:
A couple of things got me about this omen of good fortune:
-
Why was a human hand just lying about? Did the Romans normally just cut off peoples’ hands and scatter them about the cross-roads?
-
Didn’t any of the servants notice this dog wandering about with an unusual treat? (“Fluffius, bring that here, right now!”)
-
Having someone’s chopped off hand dropped under your table while you’re breakfasting is a good thing? WTF?
Just a WAG, but I think the Romans were among the populations to cut off the hand of theives or other criminals as punishment. That might explain where the hand came from. Also, as a superstitious (or religious with lots of omens, etc) people, the Romans probably thought that a lot of weird stuff was good or bad luck. As for the dog - if he was a stray, I wouldn’t think he’d be looked at twice, since dogs have to eat somehow, right?
Just off the top of my head, the crossroads was traditionally the place where the gallows was located (sometimes a constructed gallows, sometimes merely a tree), where people were hanged and left to rot while hanging. After the body disintegrates past a certain point, pieces start to fall off–like hands.
And there’s this.
http://home.att.net/~asylumofshadows/wickedsuperstitions.htm
I, myself, need no such dramatic gestures to stay out of E. St Louis.
I find that good taste does the trick. 