In the early 1930s, R.G. Collingwood, a prominent intellectual at Pembroke College, Oxford was concerned about the rise of Nazism and its implications for Britain and Europe, and borrowing a line from Book V of Livy’s Histories, he compared himself to the sacred geese dedicated to Juno in Rome that had warned of a surprise Gallic attack in 390 BC. He wrote in his autobiography in 1939, “I am a professorial goose, and my job is to honk.”
