The question of how to treat ancient accounts of miracles, omens, and divine intervention is one of the most methodologically uncomfortable in ancient history. The naive rationalist approach — strip out all supernatural content, read the rest as reliable — runs into immediate problems. The supernatural and natural are completely intertwined in most ancient sources. Livy's accounts of Roman battles are full of prodigies and auspices that aren't decorative insertions — they reflect the Romans' actual understanding of how events worked.

The functional approach — treat religious beliefs as social facts that shaped behavior, regardless of metaphysical truth — is methodologically sounder. If Roman commanders genuinely consulted the auspices before battle, and genuinely believed a bad omen was catastrophic for morale, then the omen functionally affected the battle outcome.

What we shouldn't do is pretend the problem doesn't exist. Ancient sources were written by people with a fundamentally different theory of causation than ours, and taking them seriously as historical witnesses means taking seriously what they thought they were witnessing.