# 56. Before Great Misfortunes befall a City or a Province they are preceded by Portents or foretold by Men

How it comes about I know not, but it is clear both from ancient and modern cases that no serious misfortune ever befalls a city or a province that has not been predicted either by divination or revelation or by prodigies or by other heavenly signs. There is no need to go far afield to prove this. Everybody knows how, before king Charles VIII of France came to Italy, his coming was frequently foretold by Friar Girolamo Savonarola, and how, in addition to this, it was said that armed hosts had been heard and seen in the sky above Arezzo fighting one with the other. Everybody knows, too, how before the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici the elder, the upper part of the cathedral was struck by a thunderbolt which did much damage to that edifice. Everybody knows also how a short time before Piero Soderini, who had been made gonfalonier for life by the people of Florence, was banished and stripped of his rank, the palace was in like manner struck by lightning.

Plenty of further examples might be cited, but I pass them over lest I should bore you. I shall mention only what Titus Livy has to say about what happened before the Gauls came to Rome; namely, that a plebeian called Marcus Caedicius reported to the senate that, as he was going along the Via Nova, he heard in the middle of the night a voice, louder than a man’s voice, bidding him to go and inform the magistrates that the Gauls were coming to Rome.

The cause of such events should be discussed and explained, I think, by some one versed in things natural and supernatural, and this we are not. It may be, of course, as some philosophers would have it, that the atmosphere is full of spirits, endowed by nature with the virtue to foresee the future, who out of sympathy for men give them warning by means of such signs so that they may look to their defence. Anyhow, whatever be the explanation, there is evidence showing that such things happen, and that, after them, in all provinces there supervene extraordinary and novel events.