1. If we glance over the latter part of the book of prodigies, compiled by the otherwise unknown writer Julius Obsequens from the records of the pontifices quoted in Livy's history, we can get a fair idea of the kind of portent that was troubling the popular mind. They are much the same as they always had been in Roman history,--earthquakes, monstrous births, temples struck by lightning, statues overthrown, wolves entering the city, and so on; they are extremely abundant in the terrible years of the Social and Civil Wars, become less frequent after the death of Sulla, and break out again in full force with the murder of Caesar. They were reported to the pontifices from the places where they were supposed to have occurred, and if thought worthy of expiation were entered in the pontifical books. We may suppose that they were sent in chiefly by the uneducated. But among men of education we have many examples of this same nervousness, of which two or three must suffice. Sulla, as we know from his own Memoirs, which were used directly or indirectly by Plutarch, had a strong vein of superstition in his nature, and made no attempt to control it. In dedicating his Memoirs to Lucullus he advised him "to think no course so safe as that which is enjoined by the [Greek: daimon] (perhaps his genius) in the night";[572] and Plutarch tells us several tales of portents on which he acted, evidently drawn from this same autobiography. We are told of him that he always carried a small image of Apollo, which he kissed from time to time, and to which he prayed silently in moments of danger.[573] Again, Cicero tells us a curious story of himself, Varro, and Cato, which shows that those three men of philosophical learning were quite liable to be frightened by a prophecy which to us would not seem to have much claim to respect.[574] He tells how when the three were at Dyrrachium, after Caesar's defeat there and the departure of the armies into Thessaly, news was brought them by the commander of the Rhodian fleet that a certain rower had foretold that within thirty days Greece would be weltering in blood; how all three were terribly frightened, and how a few days later the news of the battle at Pharsalia reached them. Lastly, we all remember the vision which appeared to Brutus on the eve of the battle of Philippi, of a huge and fearsome figure standing by him in silence, which Shakespeare has made into the ghost of Caesar and used to unify his play. According to Plutarch, the Epicurean Cassius, as Lucretius would have done, attempted to convince his friend on rational grounds that the vision need not alarm him, but apparently in vain.[575]