Part 33

Thus it seems that the importance of the augurs belongs to Roman public law, and not to the history of Roman religious experience. It will be found fully explained, in that connection, in Mommsen's Staatsrecht, or in Dr. Greenidge's volume on Roman Public Life. All we have to note here is the complete secularisation of what was once really a part of the Roman religion; the augurs themselves were public men and could hold magistracies, and their art of interpretation came to be used for secular and political purposes only. They could declare a magistrate vitio creatus, whether they had been present at the taking of the auspices or not; they could also on appeal stop the proceedings at a public assembly, whether for election or legislation; it may be said of them that in one way or another they had a veto on every public transaction. As Cicero expresses it in his ius divinum, in the second book of his work on the constitution: "Quae augur iniusta nefasta vitiosa dira defixerit inrita infectaque sunto, quique non paruerit, capital esto." But in spite of the fine words iniusta nefasta vitiosa, there was no religious principle involved in this solemn injunction. When Bibulus in 59 B.C. sought as consul to stop Caesar's proceedings by using his right of spectio, all he had to do was to announce that he was going to look for lightning (obnuntiare); and if there had been the smallest remnant of religious belief left in the Roman mind about such transactions, it would quietly have acquiesced, in the conviction that Jupiter would send lightning to the Roman magistrate who asked for it; as it was, Caesar took no notice, and the Roman people only laughed. Caesar was at the time, let us note, the head of the Roman religion, pontifex maximus. So with the augurs as the interpreters of the magisterial spectio; proud as Cicero was of becoming an augur, with all the old surviving elective ritual, he never, we may be sure, believed for a moment that he had the power of interpreting the will of the gods. A century before his augurship the whole business of public divination had been regulated by statute, like any other secular matter; and in his own day it was an open question with men of education whether there were such a thing as divination at all. True, as we shall see, the illegitimate forms of divination were at this very time gaining ground, as the current of superstition increased in strength which marks this last period of the republic; but the augur's art and the spectio of the magistrate were still surviving as mere constitutional fossils, and were not destined to share largely in Augustus' heroic attempt to put fresh life into the ius divinum. Vile damnum, as Tacitus said of the foreign quacks banished to Sardinia by Tiberius; for neither in the sphere of religion nor later in that of politics can the art of divination be said to have had any lasting value.

I have not dealt at any length with the augurs and the State system of divination, but I hope I have said enough to show that, as I hinted at the beginning of this lecture, it affords an excellent illustration of the way in which the religious instinct, the desire to be in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, was first soothed and satisfied, then hypnotised and paralysed, by the formalisation and gradual secularisation of religious processes. The desire to obtain the sanction of the Power by seeking for favourable signs or omens seems to be a universal instinct of human nature, though a perverse one; if left to itself it will apparently pass into the region of harmless folklore, where it does not seriously interfere with human progress, either secular or religious; but where, as at Rome, it is taken up into the ritual of a religious system, and is further allowed to express itself mechanically in the region of public law, it exhausts itself rapidly, loses all its original significance, and becomes a clog on human progress.

In ancient Italy this instinct for divination was nowhere so strongly and so perversely developed into a mechanical system as in Etruria, and it is highly probable that this development contributed largely to the rapid political and moral decay of the Etruscan people. The narrow aristocratic constitution of the Etruscan cities, worked by a kind of priestly nobility, seems to have afforded great opportunities for the cultivation of the perverse art which (as we are now beginning to recognise) this people had brought with them from the East. I have already suggested that an Etruscan dominion at Rome had very probably unfortunate results in developing and formalising the art of the augurs. But the age of the Tarquinii was not the only one in which the sinister influence of this strange people was brought to bear on Roman religious institutions; and before I close this lecture I must say a very few words about a second invasion of Etruscan perversity, which began some two centuries and a half later. This was the result of that renewed religio, that feeling of anxiety and sometimes of despair characteristic of the last half of the third century B.C., the perilous era of the Punic wars, with which I shall deal more particularly in the next lecture. The state religion could not soothe it; neither pontifices nor augurs had any sufficient native remedy for it, and as the ritual of worship was reinforced from Greece and the East, so the ritual of divination was reinforced from Etruria.

The Etruscans seem to have educated their diviners with care and system. We do not know the details of such education, but it seems likely that there were schools of these prophets, by means of which the art was handed down and developed. The word for the person thus trained was haruspex in its Italian form as known to us, though it had an Etruscan original. The art acquired was of three kinds—the interpretation of lightning; the explanation and interpretation of the entrails of victims, and especially of the liver; and, thirdly, the explanation and expiation of portents and prodigia. All three departments seem to have been carried to an extreme degree of perverse development. To give an idea of it I need but refer to recent discussions of the relation between the divisions marked on a bronze model of a victim's liver (found in 1877 at Piacenza), in which are written the Etruscan names of a great number of deities, and the somewhat similar divisions of the templum of the heavens as given by Martianus Capella in explanation of the celestial dwellings of the Italian deities. A study of this unprofitable subject, of which the only interest lies in the illustration it offers of the prostitution of human ingenuity, will be found in a little work by Carl Thulin, published in the series called Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten.

Just as the Roman authorities had recourse from time to time to the Sibylline books, so also they occasionally, though not apparently before the Punic wars, sought the help of the trained Etruscan diviners. We shall come across instances of this in the next two lectures, and I need not specify them now. They seem to have used their art in all its departments; and in the most degraded of these, the examination of entrails, it was found so convenient to have their services in a campaign that in course of time one at least seems to have accompanied every Roman army. The complicated art of augury might in fact be dispensed with if you had a haruspex ready and willing at a moment's notice to give you a good report of the victim's liver. To keep up the supply of experts, the senate, probably in the second century B.C., determined to select and train ten boys of noble family in each Etruscan city. This was the last service that the degenerate Etruscan people rendered to its conquerors, and a more degrading one it is impossible to imagine. These foreign diviners were never admitted to the dignity of a collegium; they rather played the part of the domestic chaplain kept to say grace before meat. For a moment they attract our attention in connection with the persecution of Cicero by his political enemies, and the consecratio after his exile of the site of his house on the Palatine hill. For a moment again we meet with them in the reign of Claudius, who was interested in the Etruscans and wrote a work about them, and once raised the question in the senate of the revival of the haruspices and their art—such part of it, at least, as might seem worth preserving—"ne vetustissima Italiae disciplina per desidium exolesceret." And strange to say, though in fact no part of this ancient Italian discipline was in the least worth preserving, it survived in outward form into the fourth century of the empire. We read with astonishment in the code of the Christian emperor Theodosius, that if the imperial palace or other public buildings are struck by lightning the haruspices are to be consulted, according to ancient custom, as to the meaning of the portent. Thirteen years after the death of Theodosius, in 408, Etruscan experts offered their services to Pompeianus, prefect of Rome, to save the city from the Goths. Pompeianus was tempted, but consulted Innocent, the Bishop of Rome, who "did not see fit to oppose his own opinion to the wishes of the people at such a crisis, but stipulated that the magic rites should be performed secretly." What followed is uncertain. "The Christian historian says that the rites were performed, but were unavailing; the pagan Zosimus affirms that the aid of the Tuscans was declined." So hard died the futile arts of the most unfruitful of all Italian races.

NOTES TO LECTURE XIII

Stanley's Jewish Church (ed. 1906), vol. i. p. 398 foll.

Hist. de divination dans l'antiquite, vol. i. p. 7 foll.; divination is "contemplative," magic "active." But this learned author did not deal with divination except as it existed in Greece and Italy; and in view of our present extended knowledge this differentia is not instructive.

See Tylor's article in the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and his Gifford Lectures, Pt. ii. ch. iv.; Haddon, Magic and Fetishism, p. 40. Bouche-Leclercq, Hist. de divination dans l'antiquite, vol. i. p. 7, distinguishes divination from magic; but his knowledge of the subject was limited to civilised races.

Mr. Marett seems doubtful about it: see his Threshold of Religion, pp. 42 and 83. In the latter passage he says that it may or may not be treated as a branch of magic, and may be "originally due to some dim sort of theorising about causes, the theory engendering the practice rather than the practice the theory." I should doubt whether, when the facts have been fully collected, this will be the conclusion to which they point.

Evolution of the Aryan, Drucker's translation, p. 369.

Ib. pp. 364, 374.

A curious survival of divination from the agricultural period, which was taken over by the State, but not fixed to a day in the calendar, is the augurium canarium. The exta of red puppies which had been sacrificed were consulted, apparently with a view to ascertain the probability of the corn ripening well (Festus, p. 285, quoting Ateius Capito). See R.F. p. 90, and the references there given; also Cic. de Legibus, ii. 20; Fest. 379; and Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, p. 2328.

See above, p. 102.

See Dr. Jevons' account in Gardner and Jevons, Manual of Greek Antiquities, ch. vii.

Bouche-Leclercq in the introduction to his first volume (p. 3) expresses a different opinion. He thinks that the benefit conferred by divination in the conduct of life was the most valuable part of religion. With this I entirely disagree.

Cic. de Divinatione, ii. 51.

See Bouche-Leclercq, iv. 119 foll. In a recently published essay, De antiquorum daemonismo, by J. Tamburnino (Giessen, 1909), the only genuine Roman evidence adduced of possession is Minucius Felix, Octavius, ch. 27, i.e. it belongs to the late second century A.D. In the so-called Italian oracles there is no question of it: e.g. the lots at Praeneste were worked by a boy (Cic. de Div. ii. 86).

Livy i. 36; Cic. de Div. i. 17. It is Dion. Hal. iii. 70 who says that his art was Etruscan.

Bouche-Leclercq, iv. 120.

For Carmenta see R.F. 167 and 291 foll. For Fortuna, ib. 223 foll.; cp. 170 foll.

Aug. de Civ. Dei, iv. 11; he uses the plural Carmentes; see R.F. as above. Virgil, Aen. viii. 336.

As "superstitiosi vates" in the passage of Ennius quoted below. In his imaginary ius divinum Cicero uses the word for "fatidici" authorised by the State (de Legg. ii. 20). He is perhaps thinking of the haruspices.

Ribbeck, Fragm. tragicorum Romanorum, p. 55. For hariolus outside the play-writers, Cic. de Nat. Deor. i. 20. 55, where it is combined with haruspices, augures, vates, and coniectores (interpreters of dreams). Ad Att. viii. 11. 3.

Cato, R.R. ch. 54; cp. Columella, i. 8 and xi. 1.

See P. Regell, De augurum publicorum libris, p. 6 "Omnia illa auguria quae futurarum rerum aliquid predicunt ... augurum publicorum disciplinae abroganda sunt: aut privati sunt augurii, aut Tuscorum disciplinae." Cp. Cic. de Har. Resp. 9. 18.

Cic. de Div. i. 16. 28; Val. Max. ii. 1. 1.

La Religione nella vita domestica, i. 153 foll.; 232 foll.

Cic. de Div. i. 16, 28.

This fragment is preserved in Gellius vii. 6. 10. Nigidius may be responsible for many of Pliny's omens. Regell, op. cit. p. 8.

Hor. Odes, iii. 27. 1 foll.

Exactly the same misfortune occurred in the middle ages. The monks had abundant opportunity of observation, but were occupied with other matters, and have left behind them no works on natural history.

See above, p. 169 foll.

Livy vi. 12.

See the fragment of Ennius' Annales in Cic. de Div. i. 107.

Wissowa, R.K. p. 450; Lex coloniae Genetivae, 66 and 67.

Livy vi. 41.

See a good account in the Dict. of Antiquities, vol. i. 252 and 255; and Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "auspicia."

Roman Public Life, p. 162.

Wissowa, R.K. 451, note 2; Marq. 241.

Mommsen, Staatsrecht, i. 86.

Wissowa, R.K. 451, note 7; Plut. Quaest. Rom. 99; Pliny, Ep. 4. 8. Plutarch asks why an augur can never be deprived of his office, and answers that the secrecy of his art made it impossible. Cp. Paulus, 16.

The latest authoritative account of the auspicia is in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v., where the necessary literature and material will be found for a study of an extremely complicated subject.

The technical term was templum minus, in contradistinction to the templum maius, i.e. the space in which he was to look for signs. See Bouche-Leclercq, iv. 197; Fest. 157. The usual place was the arx, where was the auguraculum, on which the magistrate taking the auspices "pitched his tent" (tabernaculum), looking to the east, with the north as his left or lucky side. Von Jhering, op. cit. p. 364, makes some ingenious use of this procedure to support his theory that the origin of such institutions is to be found in the period of migration.

That the division of the templum into regiones was necessary only for the auguria caelestia, and not for the observation of birds, is the conclusion drawn by Wissowa (R.K. 457, note 2) from the words of Cicero (de Legibus, ii. 21) in his ius divinum: "caelique fulgura regionibus ratis temperanto" (i.e. the magistrates).

Cicero expressly says that even old Cato complained of the neglect of the auspicia by the college: de Div. i. 15. 28; above, in sec. 25, he had said the same thing of the augurs of his own day, i.e. including himself. We know of a work on the auspicia by M. Messalla, an augur, from which Gellius, xiii. 15, quotes a lengthy extract (cp. ch. 14). This man was consul in 53 B.C.; Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Lit., ii. 492. Just at the same time Appius Claudius, Cicero's predecessor as governor of Cilicia, wrote libri augurales, to which Cicero more than once alludes in his correspondence with Appius: ad Fam. iii. 9. 3 and 11. 4. It is plain that the old augural lore is now treated only as a curiosity, of which the secrecy need no longer be respected.

P. Regell, De augurum publicorum libris, whose excellent little work has never been superseded, thinks (p. 19) that the libri were the result of the neglect of the art, i.e. that it was necessary to put it in writing, because otherwise it would be forgotten. "Tota eius vita," he says, "lenta est mors." The lore was complete about the time of the decemvirate, but decreta must have been continually added (p. 23). The nucleus may be represented in Cicero, de Legibus, ii. 20. 21, and perhaps existed in Saturnian verse (Festus, 290). The additions in the way of decree or comment would probably range over the fourth and third centuries B.C. like those of the pontifices. No doubt the Hannibalic war had the effect of diminishing the importance of the lore, as the next lecture should show. On the whole we may put the great period of the college between the decemvirate and the war with Hannibal.

This is the opinion of Bouche-Leclercq, op. cit. vol. iv. p. 205 foll.; cp. Wissowa, R.K. p. 457. Cicero calls the augurs "interpretes Iovis Optimi maximi" (de Legibus, ii. 20), and herein could hardly have made a mistake, as he was himself an augur. As the great deity was of Etruscan origin in this form, I should conjecture that the college took new ground and gained new influence under the Etruscan dynasty.

Cp. also Mueller-Deecke, Die Etrusker, ii. 165 foll. Our knowledge comes chiefly from the learned but obscure writer Martianus Capella (ed. Eyssenhardt), who wrote under the later Empire.

For these meetings see Cic. de Div. i. 41. 90; Regell, p. 23. They were obsolete in Cicero's time, but seem to have still existed in the time of Scipio Aemilianus: Cic. Lael. 2. 7.

Staatsrecht, i. 73 foll.; Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 172 foll.

The best account of the constitutional power of the augurs is in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopaedie, s.v. "augur," vol. i. p. 2334 foll.; cp. Wissowa, R.K. 457-8.

De Legibus, ii. 21.

The outward form of co-optatio was still preserved, like our "election" of a bishop by a chapter. Cicero was co-opted by Hortensius after nomination by two other augurs. See his interesting account of this in his Brutus, ch. i. The survival may be taken as throwing light on the original secrecy and closeness of the collegium.

For the leges Aelia et Fufia, cf. Greenidge, op. cit. p. 173. The Stoics of the last century B.C. were divided on this point. See below, p. 399. In the second book of his de Divinatione, following the Academic or agnostic school, he himself confutes his brother Quintus' argument for divination contained in Bk. I.

This is the view of Thulin, Die Goetter des Martianus Capella und der Bronzeleber von Piacenza (Giessen, 1906), p. 7 foll., and it seems at present to hold the field: see Gruppe, Die mythologische Literatur aus den Jahren 1898-1905, p. 336.

Mueller-Deecke, vol. ii. p. 7 foll.

See Deecke's note on p. 12 of Mueller-Deecke, vol. ii. It is possibly connected with hariolus.

Wissowa, R.K. p. 470, and Mueller-Deecke, vol. ii. 165 foll.

See above, note 50.

References to Livy will be found in Wissowa, R.K. p. 473, note 11. One of these, to Livy xxvii. 16. 14, is worth quoting as suggesting that a haruspex might give useful advice in spite of his art: "Hostia quoque caesa consulenti (Fabio) deos haruspex, cavendum a fraude hostili et ab insidiis, praedixit."

They were not sacerdotes publici Romani, nor is a collegium mentioned till the reign of Claudius: Tac. Ann. xi. 15. The proper term seems to have been ordo, which occurs in inscriptions of the Empire: Marq. p. 415.

typo fixed: 54: See the oration De haruspicum responsis (especially 5. 9), the genuineness of which is now generally acknowledged. Asconius quotes it as Cicero's (ed. Clark, p. 70): so also Quintilian, v. 11. 42.

Tac. Ann. 11. 15.

The haruspices mentioned in inscriptions (above, note 56) were not the genuine article; they were Romans and equites. Probably this was only one of the many ways of finding dignity or employment for persons of good birth under the Empire.

Cod. Theod. xvi. 10. 1 (of the year 321 A.D.), quoted by Wissowa, R.K. p. 475, note 1. In ix. 16. 3. 5, however, the practice of consulting such experts is strictly prohibited.

The story is told in Prof. Dill's Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, ed. 1, p. 41.