Homer’s birds and serpents foresaw nothing

Moreover, if birds of omen fight with birds of omen, and if, as Celsus says, the prophetic birds and the other irrational animals, having a divine nature, notions of the divine and foreknowledge of the future, foretold such things to others, then Homer’s sparrow would not have nested where a serpent was going to destroy her and her young, nor would the serpent in the same poet have failed to guard against being seized by the eagle.

For Homer, so admirable a poet, says this about the first: “Then a great sign appeared: a serpent, blood-red on its back, terrible, which the Olympian himself sent forth into the light, darted out from beneath the altar and sped to the plane tree. There were the young of a sparrow, helpless nestlings, on the topmost bough, cowering under the leaves, eight of them, and the mother that bore them was the ninth. There it devoured them as they chirped piteously, while the mother fluttered round, wailing for her dear young; then, coiling itself, it caught her by the wing as she shrieked around it. But when it had eaten the sparrow’s young and the mother herself, the god who had shown it made it conspicuous; for the son of crooked-counselling Cronus turned it to stone. And we stood and marvelled at what had come to pass. So, when the dread portents of the gods broke in upon the hecatombs…” (Homer, Iliad 2.308–321).

And about the second he says: “For a bird had come upon them as they were eager to cross, an eagle flying high, skirting the host on the left, bearing in its talons a monstrous blood-red serpent, alive and still writhing; and it had not yet forgotten the fight, for it struck its captor on the breast beside the neck, bending itself backward; and the eagle, stung with pain, flung it from him to the ground and cast it down in the midst of the throng, and itself, with a scream, flew off on the blasts of the wind. And the Trojans shuddered when they saw the glittering snake lying in their midst, a portent of Zeus who bears the aegis” (Homer, Iliad 12.200–209).

Was the eagle, then, prophetic, and the serpent not prophetic, although the augurs use this animal too? What, then? Since the arbitrary choice of one over the other is easily refuted, would not the view that both are prophetic be refuted as well? For if the serpent had been prophetic, would it not have guarded against suffering this from the eagle? One could find countless other examples like these, showing that it is not the animals that have in themselves a prophetic soul. Rather, according to the poet and most men, “the Olympian himself sent it forth into the light” (Homer, Iliad 2.309); and in a certain sign Apollo too uses a hawk as his messenger, for the “falcon” is said to be “Apollo’s swift messenger” (Homer, Odyssey 15.526).