Home -> Articoli -> Roma - Magia

An eagle for Augustus

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Lucumon was not the only personage of Rome to that had to do with an eagle. Also to Augustus his future prominence was predicted by one of this royal bird. After all, thanks to all his historians and flatterers, he was always indicated as “the destiny man”, the one that had to reign over Rome. It was normal then that, pointing to his future greatness, they also reported the many special signs that were sent to him from the gods. Not even Alexander succeeded to receive as many as him. For what concerned premonitory dreams everyone, but really everyone, dreamed of him, and in their beds they saw all the favors that the Capitolinus Jupiter dispensed over him. Then how can we be surprised if among all the miracles that marked his life there also was the eagle’s one? Of course with all the centuries that divided his time from the Lucumon’s ones, the bird couldn’t have been the same. but it was of the same kind and behaved just like it. The legend told that a day when Augustus, still a child, was capering around the fields with a piece of bread in his hands, another enterprising eagle lowered itself over him and took off his snack, then rose again and flew in large circle over the child. At the end the beast, looking at the bread in its claws and realizing that this was not the kind of stuff that a decent meat eating bird could devour, descended again on the astonished boy and gave him back his bread.
We can only observe that Jupiter must have had quite a lot of trained eagles.