11. Myomancy was the bizarre belief that mice and rats could predict the future just by the way they moved – and the Romans even took career advice from rodents!
In ancient times, mice and rats weren’t merely seen as pests. Instead, for many people the rodents had the power to predict the future – that is, if you knew how to read the signs they gave accurately. Indeed, in both ancient Rome and ancient Egypt, some people believed that the sounds rats or mice made could be interpreted as signs of what was to come. At the same time, the way the rodents acted was also closely watched. Above all, rats or mice destroying property or acting aggressively was taken as a sign that bad things were about to happen. And, according to the surviving sources from the time, some notable ancients took such signs very seriously indeed.
The Roman scholar Varus, for instance, wrote that a top cavalry commander Cassius Flamminius resigned his post simply because he saw a ‘warning’ from mice. Similarly, it was written that Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus even stepped down as dictator of Rome in 217BC after a myomancy reading. Away from Rome, meanwhile, the ancient Greek scholar Herodotus wrote that the Assyrian king Sennacherib was planning to invade Egypt in around 700BC. On the eve of the first major battle, however, he awoke to find that rats had been chewing on his soldiers’ bows and arrows, making them useless. Sennacherib took this as a bad omen and made a hasty retreat.