The thing that really interests me about this argument from design, though, is the counterfactual: you couldn’t possibly be brought to believe that this empty house was built by mice and weasels, i.e. the ones that still inhabit it. We’re still miles from understanding why Cicero would choose this as an alternative to intelligent design – by contrast, e.g., with the notion of chance emergence advocated by Epicureans elsewhere and indeed in DND too – but a sense of the property frame for the argument, which I discussed in my previous post, gets us closer. Cicero envisions mice and weasels usurping human property, which is absurd on the face of it – especially for a Stoic like Balbus, who presumably shares that school’s view that animals can’t make contracts. But it also taps into deeper Roman anxieties which mice tend to stir up.
The weird thing about mice, from a Roman point of view, is that they’re neither tame nor wild. They don’t fit into the structural division, proposed and demonstrated by Dominic Goguey, between wild animals that you hunt and kill and domestic animals that you exploit and sacrifice. Pliny points out that they’re semiferi, but even that word assign them an in-between status that’s not really appropriate. As Pliny also points out, mice can’t be tamed, because they’re already domestic; but you also can’t get them out of your house, because they’re still wild.
That leaves Romans with no ready-made way to treat mice, mentally or physically. Like many other anomalous animals, mice thereby acquire an oracular value that makes them into a bad omen the sound or sight of which in the senate building is enough to cancel that day’s business. The tendency of mice to chew on whatever objects happen to be to hand throws this oracular value into relief, as Cicero recounts in De div:
“Nos autem ita leves atque inconsiderati sumus, ut, si mures corroserint aliquid, quorum est opus hoc unum, monstrum putemus. Ante vero Marsicum bellum quod clipeos Lanuvii, ut a te dictum est, mures rossent, maxumum id portentum haruspices esse dixerunt; quasi vero quicquam intersit, mures diem noctem aliquid rodentes scuta an cribra corroserint! Nam si ista sequimur, quod Platonis Politian nuper apud me mures corroserunt, de re publica debui pertimescere, aut, si Epicuri de voluptate liber rosus esset, putarem annonam in macello cariorem fore.” (DD 27.59)
Unlike, e.g., shrews, another animal semiferum whose squeaking could call off senate business, mice could signify in a way that was not only negative. By selecting their chew-toys , mice were also able to highlight coming threats with great specificity. Cicero’s particular exempla are clearly jokes, but testimony from elsewhere in the literary tradition shows that mouse-chewing was generally regarded as a prodigy in the way just outlined.
Mice were the object of an attentive anxiety not only because of what they portended, but also because of the real threat they posed. Mice liked to chew on grain most of all, and this made them the farmer’s enemy. In a passage of the Georgics which has been seen as key to the work’s generally pessimistic tone, Vergil depicts them building houses and granaries below the threshing floor which they will fill with the farmer’s crops. Part and parcel with this pessimism is Vergil’s failure to mention the muscipuli, or mousetraps, with which ancient farmers tried to protect their crops. However, these may have had more of a totemic function than an actual effect against the murine hordes.
Mice are a threat that lives inside the domus and which the domus cannot “do without.” Not surprisingly, this leads to their identification with slaves: in Artemidorus’ Oneirocriticon, for instance, dreaming of a mouse means you’ll soon get a new household servant. What they share in common with slaves, in the Roman imagination, is the threat that they pose to the household but also their inability to hold it by true right. These are also the elements of the mouse’s “personality” to which, I believe, Balbus’ design argument refers. It poses the alternative, not between design and no design – for the latter, by Balbus’ lights, is inconceivable – but between the rule of the designer and usurpation by anyone other than the dominus. Thus the logic of property gives rise to an early, and stereotypically Roman, form of gnosticism.