Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/349

 A sinus in Tegulis. 41

a statue of Victory on the top of the Temple of Concord at Rome was struck by hghtning and rolled down till it was stopped by other similar statues which served as mitefixae or cornice-ornaments.^ The night before Julius Caesar was murdered, Calpurnia dreamed that the pediment, which by decree of the Senate adorned his house, had fallen.- A more doubtful omen was that given to Ti. Gracchus on the day of his assassination ; ravens or crows (corui) dropped from the gutter a piece of tile at his feet.^ Was the badness of the omen due to the birds, the tile, or both } The claims of the former are pretty obvious ; for the latter, we may note that Ovid {Fasti, ii. 535) says that offerings to the dead should be laid out on a tegula or roofing-tile. However, a couple of lines further on he calls it testa or pot-sherd. It was probably no more than a cheap substitute for a plate (he insists on the simplicity and cheap- ness of the whole ritual), for, of course, it could never again be used for any other purpose. A mediaeval German (and probably earlier) form of divination was to sit on the house-roof and trace a circle with a sword, ut ibi uideres et intellegeres quid tibi in seqiienti anno futur urn esset.'^ When the ceremonies attending the completion of a house were over, it was customary at Ansbach in the eighteenth century to throw a glass from the housetop, which by breaking or remaining undamaged foretold the death or long life of the housemaster.^ It was, perhaps, well for their peace of mind that the local glassware was none of the finest.

Germany also furnishes us with one of the very few instances of good magic in connection with the roof. The church several times, from the eighth century on, fulmi- nated against the custom of putting children on the roof aut super fornacem (.^ on the chimney), to cure fever. As Ecgbert of York is one of the objectors, presumably the

1 Livy, xxvi. 23, 4. = Jul. Obsequens, 67. => Ibid. 27 «.


 * Grimm, op. cit. p. 407. ^Ibid. p. 459.