Definition of "prodigy"

He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him.

1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter XXXII, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, page 153

These on the farther bank now stood and gazed, / By Heaven alarm’d, by prodigies amazed: / A signal omen stopp’d the passing host, / Their martial fury in their wonder lost.

1717, Homer, [Alexander] Pope, transl., “Book XII”, in The Iliad of Homer, volume III, London: […] W[illiam] Bowyer, for Bernard Lintott […]

Prodigies and Portents have infected the beſt VVritings of Antiquity; and have ſo blotted and deformed our modern Annals, that (vvith greater Juſtice than Polybius has obſerv'd it, of the former) they may be rather called Tragedies than History.

1727, William Warburton, “Part I”, in A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles, as Related by Historians. […], London: […] Thomas Corbett, […], page 1

John Foxe believed that special prodigies had heralded the Reformation.

1971, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Folio Society, published 2012, page 87