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1 Earliest Rome

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Livy, History YXN37.5-9<br />

7.4 The haruspices<br />

scientific ideas, while in fact it is the Greeks who turned out to he prey to<br />

superstitious fears.<br />

See further: Cramer (1954) 48-50*; Walbank (1957-79) in.386-7; on the<br />

details of the chronology, Oost (1953); Meloni (1954).<br />

When the camp was fully fortified, Gaius Sulpidus Gallus, who had been praetor the<br />

previous year and was now military tribune in the second legion,' called a<br />

meeting of the troops with the consul's consent; he told them not to take it as a bad<br />

omen that there was going to be an eclipse of the moon between the second and fourth<br />

hours of the coming night. He said this was a regular natural phenomenon and could<br />

therefore be predicted. It surprised nobody, he said, that the moon should sometimes be<br />

full and sometimes a slim crescent, since the rising and setting of the moon and the sun<br />

are regular occurrences; in the same way they should not regard it as a prodigy that the<br />

moon should be obscured when it was hidden by the earth's shadow. On the night of 3<br />

September

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