The popular assemblies are never consulted at any point. The Roman elite dominates the procedure, especially when one recalls that both pontifices and decemviri consist of senate members. This much is clear, but R. resists making the simple division between belief and political manipulation, insisting instead that Roman religion finds its clearest manifestation in practice and that the leaders recognize their responsibility to ensure proper procedure. R. then turns briefly to the prodigies themselves, and both here and throughout the book it is in the particular that the analysis is weakest and most repetitive. R. is more interesting when he provides ancient criteria for assessing whether particular signs were credible.
Believability depends upon the political power of the witness.
R. sees the political elite acting as a strong filter, deliberately selecting signs that fit into some preconceived notion. In Chapter II R. attempts to construct a model for how known prodigies express Roman uncertainty and angst. Here the comparative method is particularly unhelpful. Following Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, R. posits boundaries and margins as places of unclarity and therefore impure and finds a parallel concern in the existence of the boundary gods Janus and Terminus. Thus far the model is promising.