While Ennius, like Lucretius, gives little indication of humour, yet the folly and superstition of his times provoke him into tones of contemptuous irony, especially where he has to expose the arts of false prophets and fortune-tellers. The men of the manliest temper and the strongest understanding in ancient times were most intolerant of this mischievous form of imposture and credulity. Thus Thucydides, in general so reserved in his expression of personal feeling, treats, with a manifest irony, all supernatural pretences to foresee or control the future. The tone in which Ennius writes of such professions reminds us of Milton's grim contempt for
Eremites and friars
White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery.
Thus, in a fragment of Book xi. of the Annals, the fears excited by the prophets and diviners at the commencement of the war with Antiochus are encountered with the pertinent question—
Satin' vates verant aetate in agenda?
Thus too the pretensions and the ignorance of astrologers are exposed in a line of one of the dramas—
Quod est ante pedes nemo spectat: caeli scrutantur plagas.
And the following passage may be quoted as applicable to charlatans of every kind, in every age and country—
Sed superstitiosi vates, impudentesque arioli,