Prayer to Jupiter

An augur before taking the auspices in the Thebaid. Before interpreting the flight, he explains what his craft rests on.

The explanation is set in a parenthesis and is pure theology: you "add meaning to swift wings and fill the birds with the future". The bird knows nothing and decides nothing; it is a carrier. A sign is not an animal's behaviour but a message placed inside it, and the whole Roman science of augury rests on that distinction.

Then a list of rivals: Cirrha (that is, Delphi), the sounding oaks of Dodona among the Molossians in Chaonia, "parched Ammon" in the Libyan desert, the Lycian lots. The four most famous oracles of the Greek world are named in order to be declared no more reliable than the flight of birds. Statius puts a defence of Roman divination into the mouth of a Greek seer.

Invideat — let him envy. The oracles are described as competing institutions, and jealousy among them is taken for granted.

The book has been corrected: the card cited 2.471-496; the prayer stands in book III.