Many of these warnings were strange portents and prodigies, which the
philosophical writers who recorded them half believed themselves, and
which they were always ready to add to their narratives even if they did
not believe them, on account of the great influence which such an
introduction of the supernatural and the divine had with readers in
those days in enhancing the dignity and the dramatic interest of the
story. These warnings were as follows:

[Sidenote: The tomb and inscription.]

At Capua, which was a great city at some distance south of Rome, the
second, in fact, in Italy, and the one which Hannibal had proposed to
make his capital, some workmen were removing certain ancient sepulchers
to make room for the foundations of a splendid edifice which, among his
other plans for the embellishment of the cities of Italy, Caesar was
intending to have erected there. As the excavations advanced, the
workmen came at last to an ancient tomb, which proved to be that of the
original founder of Capua; and, in bringing out the sarcophagus, they
found an inscription, worked upon a brass plate, and in the Greek
character, predicting that if those remains were ever disturbed, a great
member of the Julian family would be assassinated by his own friends,
and his death would be followed by extended devastations throughout
all Italy.

[Sidenote: Caesar's horses.]

The horses, too, with which Caesar had passed the Rubicon, and which had
been, ever since that time, living in honorable retirement in a splendid
park which Caesar had provided for them, by some mysterious instinct, or
from some divine communication, had warning of the approach of their