The day on which any calamity happened has been considered an unfortunate day, and there has been a feeling everywhere, and in some nations a religious obligation, against transacting any important business on that day. For on such a day our thoughts are likely to be of misfortune. For a similar reason, any untoward occurrence in commencing an undertaking has been considered ominous of failure; and often, doubtless, has really contributed to it by putting the persons engaged in the enterprise more or less out of spirits; but the belief has equally prevailed where the disagreeable circumstance was, independently of superstition, too insignificant to depress the spirits by any influence of its own. All know the story of Cæsar's accidentally stumbling in the act of landing on the African coast; and the presence of mind with which he converted the direful presage into a favorable one by exclaiming, "Africa, I embrace thee." Such omens, it is true, were often conceived as warnings of the future, given by a friendly or a hostile deity; but this very superstition grew out of a pre-existing tendency; the god was supposed to send, as an indication of what was to come, something which people were already disposed to consider in that light. So in the case of lucky or unlucky names. Herodotus tells us how the Greeks, on the way to Mycale, were encouraged in their enterprise by the arrival of a deputation from Samos, one of the members of which was named Hegesistratus, the leader of armies.
Cases may be pointed out in which something which could have no real effect but to make persons think of misfortune, was regarded not merely as a prognostic, but as something approaching to an actual cause of it. The εὐφήμει of the Greeks, and favete linguis, or bona verba quæso, of the Romans, evince the care with which they endeavored to repress the utterance of any word expressive or suggestive of ill fortune; not from notions of delicate politeness, to which their general mode of conduct and feeling had very little reference, but from bona fide alarm lest the event so suggested to the imagination should in fact occur. Some vestige of a similar superstition has been known to exist among uneducated persons even in our own day: it is thought an unchristian thing to talk of, or suppose, the death of any person while he is alive. It is known how careful the Romans were to avoid, by an indirect mode of speech, the utterance of any word directly expressive of death or other calamity; how instead of mortuus est they said vixit; and "be the event fortunate or otherwise" instead of adverse. The name Maleventum, of which Salmasius so sagaciously detected the Thessalian origin (Μαλόεις, Μαλοέντος), they changed into the highly propitious denomination, Beneventum; Egesta into Segesta; and Epidamnus, a name so interesting in its associations to the reader of Thucydides, they exchanged for Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word suggestive of damnum or detriment.
"If a hare cross the highway," says Sir Thomas Browne,(230) "there are few above threescore that are not perplexed thereat; which notwithstanding is but an augurial terror, according to that received expression, Inauspicatum dat iter oblatus lepus. And the ground of the conceit was probably no greater than this, that a fearful animal passing by us portended unto us something to be feared; as upon the like consideration the meeting of a fox presaged some future imposture." Such superstitions as these last must be the result of study; they are too recondite for natural or spontaneous growth. But when the attempt was once made to construct a
