Chapter V: The Worship of Sacred Utensils 489 (13)

It is uncertain what prompted the college, or rather its head, to begin making these records, though there is no doubt about the fact. But it would be natural enough that those who had charge of the calendar, which would necessitate some record of years for purposes of intercalation, should go on to mark the names of the consuls and such striking events as would make a year memorable. In any case this was what actually happened. The pontifex maximus, we are told with precision, kept a _tabula_, or whited board, on which these events were noted down, with the consuls' names attached to them, or possibly a kind of almanac, made out for the whole year, on which they could append their notes to particular days.[579] This yearly _tabula_ was no doubt at first kept secret, like all the pontifical documents, but sooner or later, perhaps at the same time as the publication of the _fasti_ and _legis actiones_, it was exposed to public view in or at the Regia.[580] This went on for at least two centuries, and the records, which in the nature of things must have grown in length and detail as events became more startling and numerous, were edited in eighty books by the pontifex maximus P. Mucius Scaevola in 123 B.C.--the year of the first tribunate of C. Gracchus. The large number of these books has long been a stumbling-block to the learned, for we are expressly told that the _annales maximi_, as the records were called, were (in spite of their name) of a very meagre character; and many conjectures have quite recently been made to explain it.[581] But guessing is almost useless, seeing that there are no data for it. The editor may have added matter of his own, amplifying and adorning after the manner of writers of his day; or he may have worked in the contents of other pontifical books, _libri_ or _commentarii pontificales_. The point for us is simply the continued activity of the pontifex maximus in this work, which must have become almost entirely secular in character. The notes may have been jejune, but they were probably accurate, and free from the perversions of family vanity or such lengthy rhetorical ornamentation as became the universal fashion among private writers of annalistic history. They were, we may suppose, exactly what our modern historical conscience demands. But all that is left of them, or almost all, is the list of consuls (_fasti consulares_) and of triumphs (_fasti triumphales_) which in their present form must, or at least may, have been extracted from them.[582] On the whole, we may reckon them as the most valuable work of the college; and they may be taken as marking a growing sense of the importance of Rome and her history, the commemoration of which is thus committed to an official who, as an individual, had invariably served the State well, and in whom all classes had perfect confidence.[583]

One important part of the work of the college in this century must have been the adjustment of the civic religion of the Italian communities to that of Rome. What deities were to be made citizens of Rome? Which were to be left in their old homes undisturbed? No doubt many other questions must have called for attention in religious matters after the conquest of Italy, but this is the one of which we know most. The temple foundations of this period have all been carefully put together (chiefly from Livy's invaluable records) by Aust,[584] and show that there was a certain tendency to bring in deities from outside, not so much because they represented some special need of the Romans, corn or art or industry, as two centuries earlier, but simply because they were deities of the conquered whom it might be prudent to adopt. The great Juno Regina of Veii was long ago induced by _evocatio_ to migrate to Rome; Fors Fortuna from Etruria, Juturna from Lavinium, Minerva Capta from Falerii, Feronia, a famous Latin goddess from Capena, Vortumnus from Volsinii,[585] all attest the same liberal tone in religious matters which on the whole marks the secular Italian policy of the Senate in this period. If we had but more information about the former, we should be able to understand the latter far better. We should like to know why in some cases the chief deity of a community came to Rome, while in others there is not trace of migration. The famous Vacuna of Reate, for example, never left her home in the Apennines, possibly because she was a kind of Vesta, who could not be spared from Reate, and was not wanted at Rome.[586]

The list of foundations also points to other tendencies and experiences of the time. We might guess that there was some attempt, with the aid of pontifical skill, to encourage agriculture or give it a fresh start after the invasion of Pyrrhus; for between 272 and 264, the years of the pacification of Italy, we find temples built to four agricultural deities, three indigenous Roman ones, Consus, Tellus, Pales, and one Etruscan garden god, Vertumnus.[587] Then we have a group of foundations in honour of deities connected with water--Juturna, Fons, Tempestates, which seem to have some reference to the naval activity of the first Punic war; they all fall between 259 and 241 B.C.[588] Lastly, we notice a fresh accession of deified abstractions,--Salus (an old deity in a new form), Spes, Honos et Virtus, Concordia, and Mens.[589] I am glad to find that the latest investigator of these religious abstractions is at one with me in believing that they simply mark a developed stage in the religious bent of the earliest Roman. If the old Romans had the habit of spiritualising a great variety of material objects, in other words, if they were in an advanced animistic stage, there seems to be no reason why they should not have begun to spiritualise mental concepts also (for which they had words, as for the material objects), even at a very early period. The whole psychological aspect of such abstractions is most interesting, but I must pass it over here, merely suggesting that each of these abstractions was doubtless deified for some particular reason, under the direction, or with the sanction, of the pontifices.[590]

But we have not as yet reached what is, after all, for our purposes the most instructive part of the work of the pontifices--I mean the archives or memoranda (_libri_ or _commentarii_) which they kept, and from which, indirectly, much of what I have had to say about the _ius divinum_ has been drawn. It is here that we see the policy of maintaining the _pax deorum_ carried to its highest point. These books contained a vast collection of formulae for every kind of process in which the deities were in any way concerned; here was the complete _pharmacopoeia_ of the _ius divinum_.[591] We must remember that the pontifex maximus and his assessors had to be ready at any moment with the correct formula for all religious acts, whether extraordinary, like the _devotio_ of Decius or the expiation of some startling "prodigium," or belonging to the ordinary course of city life, such as prayers in sacrificial ritual, _vota_ both public and private, charters (_leges_) of newly founded temples, and so on. The idea that the spoken formula (ultimately, as we saw, derived from an age of magic) was efficient only if no slip were made, seems to have gained in strength instead of diminishing, as we might have expected it to do with advancing civilisation; and the pontifices not only responded to its importunity, but actually stimulated it. _Vires acquirit eundo_ are words which apply well in all ages to the passion for organisation and precision. Though we cannot prove it, I myself have little doubt that the members of the college, or some of them, collected and invented formulae simply for the pleasure of doing it, and that the work became as congenial to them as the systematisation of the law to Jewish scribes after the captivity, or as casuistry to the confessors of the middle ages. When the art of writing became familiar to experts, the natural and primitive desire of the Roman to have exactness in the spoken word affected him also in his relations with the word as written. The scribe and the Pharisee found their opportunity. The whole public religion of the State, and to some extent also the private religion of the family, became a mass of forms and formulae, and never succeeded in freeing itself from these fetters.

We can best illustrate this superfluity of priestly zeal in that strange list of forms of invocation called _Indigitamenta_, which I have already explained with the help of Wissowa.[592] Working upon the old Roman animism, and the popular fondness for formulae, the pontifices drew up those lists in the fourth and third centuries B.C., which have so seriously misled scholars as to the genuine primitive religious ideas of the Romans. They are in the main priestly inventions, the work of ingenious formulators. We may even be tempted to look on them as an attempt to rivet the yoke of priestly formalism on the life of the individual as well as on the life of the State as a whole. But if ever this was the intention, it was too late. A people that was beginning to get into touch with the civilisation of Hellas could not possibly bear such a yoke. In the last lecture we have already seen a tendency towards emotional religion independent of the old State worship; the philosophy of individualism was to complete the work of emancipation in the last two centuries B.C. The old State religion remained, but in stunted form and with paralysed vitality; Rome was the scene of an _arrested religious development_. The feeling, the religious instinct (_religio_) was indeed there, though latent; the Romans were human beings, like the rest of us. But as we go on with the story we shall find that, when trouble or disaster brought it out of its hiding-place, it was no longer possible to soothe it on Roman principles or by Roman methods. These methods--in other words, the _ius divinum_ as formulated by the authorities--had been meant to soothe it, and had indeed so effectually lulled it to sleep, that when at last it awoke again they had lost the power of dealing with it. When the craving did come upon the Roman, which in time of peril or doubt has come upon individuals and communities in all ages, for support and comfort from the Unseen, it had to be satisfied by giving him new gods to worship in new ways, gods from Greece and the East, some of them concealed under Latin names, but still aliens, not citizens of his own State, aliens with whom he had little or nothing in common, who had no home in his patriotic feeling, no place in his religious experience.[593] As I said at the beginning of the last lecture, we must not underrate the religiousness of the Roman character, which was never entirely lost; but the secret of its comparative uselessness lies in this--that the natural desire to be right with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, and to know more of that Power, became weakened and destroyed by an over-scrupulous attention to the means taken to realise it, and by the introduction of foreign methods which had no root in the mental fibre of the people, and reflected no part of its experience. Religion was effectually divorced from life and morality.

NOTES TO LECTURE XII

[556] See Mulder, _De notione conscientiae, quae et
qualis fuerit Romanis_, Leyden, 1908, cap. 2. On p. 56
he quotes Luthard (_Die antike Ethik_, p. 131), who says
of the Roman religion that it was even more an affair of
the State than with any other people; hence its peculiar
legal character. Though Mulder overworks his point, his
chapter (especially p. 61 foll.) is full of interest.

[557] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 431. The first chapter of
Ambrosch's _Studien und Andeutungen_, in which the
nature and history of the Regia was first really
investigated, is still valuable. An excellent short
account is given by Mr. Marindin in his article in the
_Dict. of Antiquities_, ed. 2. It is now generally
maintained that the Regia in historical times was rather
a building for sacred purposes than a residence for a
man and his family, and this I hold to be correct; but
it may for all that have originally been the residence
of the Rex and of the Pont. Max. when the Rex had
disappeared.

[558] See Schanz, _Gesch. der roem. Literatur_, i. 43,
where a succinct account is given of modern opinion as
to the so-called _ius Papirianum_. The main argument for
the late date of the collection is that Cicero does not
seem to have known of it when he wrote the letter _ad
Fam._ ix. 21 in 46 B.C. This of course in no way affects
the primitive character of the rules themselves.

[559] The inference that the rules were found in the
_Libri pontificum_ is inevitable in any case, but seems
proved by the fact that one of them, that relating to
the _spolia opima_, is stated by Festus, p. 189 (_s.v._
"opima"), to have been extracted from those books.

[560] Festus, _s.v._ "pellices" and _s.v._ "plorare,"
which latter word is interpreted as = _inclamare_.

[561] The _divi parentum_ are here generally taken as
those of the particular family, and this may have been
so; but cf. Wissowa, _R.K._ 192.

[562] For the attempts of Pais in Italy and Lambert in
France to date the Tables at the end of the fourth
century or later, see Schanz, _op. cit._ i. 41. In
Germany opinion is universally in favour of the
traditional date.

[563] See _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p.
135.

[564] On the religious character of _confarreatio_ see
De Marchi, _La Religione nella vita privata_, i. p. 145
foll.

[565] Cic. _de Domo_, 12. 14; Gellius, v. 19.

[566] See, _e.g._ Launspach, _State and Family in Early
Rome_, p. 256 foll. The last three chapters of this
little book, on Patria potestas, Marriage, and
Succession, will be found useful by those who cannot
enter into the many disputes and difficulties which have
arisen out of the attempts of writers on Roman law to
adjust legal ideas to the dim early history of Rome.
Binder, in his work _Die Plebs_, starts from the
improbable hypothesis that the plebs was the population
of the Latin part of the city as distinct from that
Sabine part on the Quirinal, which he believes to have
been the only patrician body; and he further believes
that the plebs lived originally under "Mutterrecht," the
patres under "Vaterrecht." Such a condition of society
would, of course, have greatly added to the pontifical
work of religious adjustment; it would have been more
than even the pontifices could have successfully
achieved.

[567] See above, note 7. Binder, _Die Plebs_, p. 488
foll., discusses, and in the main rejects, the arguments
of Pais and Lambert.

[568] So Huvelin, in a paper in _L'Annee sociologique_,
1905-6, p. 1 foll., criticised by Hubert et Mauss,
_Melanges d'histoire des religions_, p. xxiii. foll.

[569] From the religious point of view the _legis
actiones_ are best explained in Marquardt, 318 foll. Cp.
Muirhead, _Roman Law_, ed. 1899, pp. 246-7; Greenidge,
_Roman Public Life_, index _s.v._ "legis actio," and
especially p. 87.

[570] The famous passage of Pomponius is in the
_Digest_, i. 2. 2, sec. 6 (for the work of Aelius, see
_Dig._ i. 2. 2, 38) "ex his legibus ... actiones
compositae sunt, quibus inter se homines disceptarent:
quas actiones ne populus prout vellet institueret,
certas sollemnesque esse voluerunt.... Omnium tamen
harum et interpretandi scientia et actiones apud
collegium pontificum erant, ex quibus constituebatur,
quis quoquo anno praeesset privatis."

[571] Livy ix. 46 "civile ius, repositum in penetralibus
pontificum, evulgavit (Cn. Flavius), fastosque circa
forum in albo proponit, ut quando lege agi posset
sciretur." Cp. Val. Max. ii. 5. 2. _Civile ius_ is here
usually taken as meaning the procedure; but this is a
passage which may give some countenance to those who
would put the publication of the XII. Tables later than
the traditional date.

[572] For the relation of the Flamines, Vestals, and Rex
sacrorum to the pontifex maximus, see Wissowa, _R.K._
432 foll.

[573] See above, p. 283. For the eclipse, Cic. _Rep._ i.
16. 25; and for the various scientific determinations of
its exact date, Schanz, _Gesch. der roem. Lit._ vol. i.
(ed. 2) p. 37. "Ex hoc die," writes Cicero, "quem apud
Ennium et in maximis annalibus consignatum videmus,
superiores solis defectiones reputatae sunt."

[574] Cic. _Brutus_, 55 "longe plurimum ingenio
valuisse."

[575] _De Orat._ iii. 33. 134.

[576] See _Dict. of Classical Biography_, _s.v._
"Coruncanius."

[577] _Nat. deor._ ii. 165. Coruncanius is mentioned as
one of those whom the gods love, if indeed they take an
interest in human affairs.

[578] See above, p. 100 foll.; and _Roman Festivals_, p.
3.

[579] Our knowledge of this _tabula_ chiefly depends on
a passage in the Danielian scholiast on Virg. _Aen._ i.
373: "ita enim annales conficiebantur. Tabulam dealbatam
quotannis pontifex maximus habuit, in qua praescriptis
consulum nominibus et aliorum magistratum, digna
memoratu notare consueverat domi militiaeque terra
marique gesta per singulos dies. Cuius diligentiae
annuos commentarios in octoginta libros veteres
retulerunt, eosque a pontificibus maximis, a quibus
fiebant, annales maximos appellarunt." The explanation
of the name is no doubt wrong; but all the rest of this
passage can be relied on; cp. Cic. _de Orat._ ii. 12.
52; Dion. Hal. i. 73, 74; Gell. ii. 28. 6; Cic. _Legg._
i. 2. 6. For the idea of the almanac, see Cichorius in
Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._, _s.v._ "annales maximi."

[580] _Proponebat tabulam domi_, Cic. _de Orat._ ii. 12.
52. This must refer to the official residence of the
Pont. Max.; see above, p. 271.

[581] These attempted solutions of an insoluble problem
may be found in brief in Schanz, _Gesch. der roem. Lit._
i. 37. Perhaps the boldest is that of Cantorelli, that
the annales were constructed not out of the tabula but
out of the commentarii; but this is in conflict with the
passage in the scholiast on Virgil. To me the difficulty
does not seem overwhelming; events occurring "domi
militiaeque, terra marique," may have filled
considerable space, and yet have been meagre in the eyes
of the rhetoricians of the last century B.C.

[582] Schanz, _op. cit._ p. 35.

[583] The great authority of the Pont. Max. is well
shown in the story of Tremellius the praetor, who in the
middle of the second century B.C. was fined (by a
tribune?) "quod cum M. Aemilio pontifice maximo
iniuriose contenderat, sacrorumque quam magistratuum ius
potentius fuit." Livy, _Epit._ 47.

[584] _De aedibus sacris populi Romani_, p. 10 foll.

[585] Aust, _op. cit._ p. 14 foll. See also _R.F._ p.
340 foll.

[586] For Vacuna, Wissowa, _R.K._ pp. 44 and 128. She
was later, but probably without good reason, identified
with Victoria. The conjecture that she was a hearth
deity rests on the lines of Ovid, _Fasti_, vi. 305,
which I have before referred to in another context:

ante focos olim scamnis considere longis
mos erat et mensae credere adesse deos.
nunc quoque cum fiunt antiquae sacra Vacunae,
ante Vacunales stantque sedentque focos.

[587] Aust, p. 14. For Vertumnus the _locus classicus_
is Propert. v. 2. It is not certain that the connection
with gardens was primitive.

[588] _R.F._ p. 341.

[589] _R.F._ p. 341.

[590] See Axtell, _The Deification of Abstract Ideas in
Roman Literature and Inscriptions_ (Chicago, 1907), p.
59 foll., where the views of Mommsen, Boissier,
Marquardt, and Wissowa are discussed. Axtell's own
conclusion is given on p. 62 foll. In the main it seems
to agree with that hazarded in my _Roman Festivals_, p.
190.

[591] For the evidence as to the contents of the
_commentarii_, which are now generally identified with
the _libri_, see Wissowa, _R.K._ 32 and 441; Schanz,
_op. cit._ i. 32; and the article "Commentarii" in
Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._ As Wissowa remarks (p.
441, note 6), we are greatly in need of a complete
collection of all fragments of these archives.

[592] See above, p. 159 foll. The conviction that these
lists are of comparatively late and priestly origin,
which has long been growing on me, was originally
suggested by the learned article "Indigitamenta" by R.
Peter in Roscher's _Lexicon_, vol. ii. p. 175 foll.

[593] I have here adopted some sentences from my article
in the _Hibbert Journal_ for 1907, p. 854.

LECTURE XIII

THE AUGURS AND THE ART OF DIVINATION

"The one great corruption to which all religion is exposed is its separation from morality. The very strength of the religious motive has a tendency to exclude, or disparage, all other tendencies of the human mind, even the noblest and best. It is against this corruption that the prophetic order from first to last constantly protested.... Mercy and justice, judgment and truth, repentance and goodness--not sacrifice, not fasting, not ablutions,--is the burden of the whole prophetic teaching of the Old Testament."[594]

The over-formalising, or ritualising, of any religion is sure to bring about that result against which the Jewish prophets protested. We saw at the end of the last lecture how the pontifices contributed to such a result. We are now to study the contribution of the other great college, the augurs. For instead of developing, as did the wise man or seer of Israel, into the mouthpiece of God in His demand for the righteousness of man, the Roman diviner merely assisted the pontifex in his work of robbing religion of the idea of righteousness. Divination seems to be a universal instinct of human nature, a perfectly natural instinct, arising out of man's daily needs, hopes, fears; but though it may have had the chance, even at Rome, it never has been able, except among the Jews, to emerge from its cramping chrysalis of magic and become a really valuable stimulant of morality.

By divination I mean the various ways and methods by which, in all stages of his development, man has persuaded himself that what he is going to do or suffer will turn out well or ill for him. It is probably judicious, with Dr. Tylor and with the majority of recent anthropologists, to consider it as belonging to the region of magic;[595] and it is obvious that it affords excellent examples of that inadequacy which characterises magical attempts to overcome the difficulties man meets with in his struggle for existence.[596] It belongs, like other forms of magic, to a stage in which man's idea of his relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe is both rude and rudimentary. But it shares with magic the power or property of surviving, in form at least, through the animistic stage into that of religion, and it is largely practised at the present day even among highly civilised peoples.

But I must observe, before I go on, that divination as an object of anthropological inquiry still stands in need of a thorough scientific examination. At present it seems to puzzle anthropologists;[597] and the reason probably is that the material for studying it inductively has not as yet been collected and sifted. Strange to say, it does not appear in the index to Dr. Westermarck's great work, which I have so often quoted: it is hardly to be found even in the _Golden Bough_: nor can I find a thoroughgoing treatment of it in any other books about the early history of mankind. And any sort of guesswork under these circumstances only increases our difficulties. Some years ago the great German philosophical lawyer, von Jhering, in an interesting work called the _Evolution of the Aryan_, made some most ingenious attempts to explain the origin of Roman divination. He fancied that the practice of examining the entrails of a victim, for example, began in the course of Aryan migration, because when you encamped in a new region you would catch and kill some of the native cattle in order to see whether they were wholesome enough to tempt you to stay.[598] Again, the study of the flight of birds was prompted by the desire to get information about the mountain passes and the course of great rivers; and this study grew into an elaborate art as the leader of the host, the prototype of the Roman augur, gained experience by constant observation from elevated ground.[599] Such a theory as this last might be worth something if it were based upon known facts; as it is, it is only most ingenious guesswork. This great legal writer did not know, as we do now, that divination by both these methods is found all over the world, and cannot be explained by any supposed needs of migrating Aryans.

Whatever be the origin of the several forms of divination, the object of the practice in ancient Italy and Greece is beyond doubt--to find out whether the Power with whom you wish to be in right relation is favourable to certain human operations, or willing to aid in removing certain forms of human suffering. According to our definition, it was a part of religion, whether or no it belonged originally to magic. It was a practical expression of that doubt or anxiety to which I believe the Romans attached the word _religio_. In the agricultural period it must have been specially useful and even inevitable,[600] because the tiller of the soil is always in need of knowledge as to the best times and seasons for his operations, and his out-of-door life gives him constant opportunity of observing natural phenomena, _diosemeia_, signs from heaven, and the utterances and movements of birds and other animals. It is interesting to reflect that these last may often be of real service in foretelling the weather, which is so important to the farmer. As I write this on a December day I recall the fact that I have myself within the last week successfully foretold a spell of cold after observing a great arrival of winter thrushes from the north. This particular branch of augury is, in fact, neither so inadequate nor so absurd as most others. Von Jhering may turn out to be right in his notion that at least some forms of divination have their origin in practical needs and in the skill of uncivilised man in discerning the signs of the weather--a skill which it is well to remember far exceeds that of the house-dweller of modern civilisation. But with the growth of the City-state and the habits of life in a town, these early instincts and methods of the agriculturist came to be caught up into a system of religious practice, adapted to the conditions of civil and political existence; thus they gradually lost their original meaning and such real value as they ever possessed. I have pointed out that the Roman festivals and the ritual of the oldest calendar gradually got out of relation with the agricultural life in which they for the most part originated:[601] so it was with divination, which in the hands of the State authorities became formalised into a set of rules for ascertaining the good-will of the gods, and obtaining their sanction for the operations of the community, which had no scientific basis whatever, no relation to truth and fact. Of all the methods for putting yourself in right relation with the Power, this was the least valuable, and indeed the most harmful; it came in course of time to be a positive obstacle to efficiency and freedom of action, it wasted valuable time, and it often served as the means of promoting private ends to the detriment of the public interest.

Before I go on to consider the development of the highly formalised system of public divination, let me clear the ground by a few remarks about such forms of the practice as were not sanctioned by the State. That these existed throughout Roman history there is no doubt, as they existed in Greece, among the Jews, and elsewhere in the East, alongside of the advanced and organised methods of official and authorised experts.

Our information about private divination is scattered about in Roman literature, and even when brought together there is not a great deal of it. What is prominent both in Roman literature and Roman history is the divination authorised by the State and systematised by its authorities; even in Cicero's treatise _de Divinatione_, though the subject-matter is of a general kind, drawn from Greece as well as Rome, it is, I think, apart from philosophical questions, chiefly the art of augurs and haruspices that interests the writer, who was himself an augur when he wrote it. In Greek literature exactly the opposite is the case; there we hear little of State-authorised divination, and a great deal of wandering soothsayers, soothsaying families, and oracles which (except at Delphi) were not under the direct control of a City-state.[602] The methods of divination are much the same in both peninsulas, and indeed vary little all the world over; the difference lies simply in this,--that at Rome the adoption and systematisation by the State of certain methods, especially those which dealt with birds and lightning, had the effect of discrediting, if not excluding, an immense amount of private practice of this kind. I mean that if the State strongly sanctions some forms of divination, working them by its own officials, it casts a shadow of discredit over the rest. As the _ius divinum_ tended to exclude magic and the barbarous in ritual, so did the _ius augurale_, which was a part of it, exclude the quack in divination. And in this particular department of human delusion the result may be said to have been happy; for though divination belongs to religion as having survived from an earlier stage into a religious one, yet it is the least valuable, the least fruitful, part of it.[603] True, the augural systematisation, as we shall see, had a sinister effect on political progress; but even there the very emptiness and absurdity of the whole business helped to bring contempt on it, and, as Cicero tells us in a well-known passage, even old Cato declared that he could not imagine why a _haruspex_ did not laugh when he met a brother of the craft.[604] In Greece, on the contrary, it might, I believe, be shown that the absence of systematisation by the State only served to prolong the credit and influence of the professional quack.

Greece was at all periods full of these quacks; did the sham prophet exist at Rome in the period we have now under review? Later on the Oriental soothsayer found his way there; of these _Chaldaei_ and _mathematici_ I shall have a word to say in another lecture, and we shall see how the State authorities made occasional attempts to exclude them. Of the _frantic_ type of diviner, the [Greek: entheos], so common in Greece, we hear nothing in the sober Roman annals; the idea of a human being "possessed by a spirit of divination" seems foreign to the Roman character.[605] The only soothsayer, so far as I know, who appears in Roman legend in a private capacity is that Attus Navius who gave Tarquinius Priscus the benefit of his knowledge; and he is represented as a respectable Sabine, and his art as an augural one learnt from the Etruscans.[606] There are, indeed, ancient traces of a prophetic art at Rome, but, as the historian of divination has well observed, they are all connected not with human beings, but with divinities, a fact which explains the Latin word _divinatio_.[607] To take what is perhaps the best example, the ancient deity Carmenta, who had a flamen and a double festival in the month of January, may very probably represent some dim tradition of a _numen_ at whose shrine women might gain some knowledge as to their fortunes in childbirth, just as outside Rome, at Praeneste and Antium, Fortuna seems to have had this gift in historical times.[608] So St. Augustine interpreted Carmenta,[609] probably following Varro; and to Virgil she was the "_vates fatidica_, cecinit quae prima futuros Aeneadas magnos et nobile Pallanteum."

But Carmenta, Picus, Faunus, are dim mythical figures which for us can have no bearing on Roman religious experience; it would be more to the point to ask what was the original meaning and history of the word _vates_, if the question were answerable in the absence of an early Roman literature. All we can say about this is that this word had, as a rule, a certain dignity about it, which enabled it eventually to stand for a poet, and that it rarely has a sinister sense, unless accompanied by some adjective specially used in order to give it.[610] The real word for a quack is _hariolus_, and the fact that it is comparatively rare suggests that the character it expresses was not a common one. It occurs here and there in fragments of old plays, where, unluckily, we cannot be quite sure whether it represents a Greek or a Latin idea. The following lines from the Telamo of Ennius shows us the _hariolus_, as well as the word _vates_ with a discreditable adjective attached:

sed superstitiosi vates impudentesque harioli
aut inertes, aut insani, aut quibus egestas imperat,
qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam,
quibu' divitias pollicentur, ab iis drachmam ipsi petunt.[611]

A more satisfactory bit of evidence as to the existence of the quack in the second century B.C., when Greece and the East were beginning to pour their unauthorised religionists into Italy, is the interesting passage in old Cato's book on agriculture, in which he urges that the bailiff of an estate should not be permitted to consult either a _haruspex_, _augur_, _hariolus_, or _Chaldaeus_.[612] But on the whole, such little evidence as we possess seems to confirm the view I hazarded just now, that the overwhelming prestige of State authority at Rome discouraged and discredited the quack diviner both in public and private life. His work in private life was largely that of fortune-telling, of foretelling the future in one sense or another; and this was exactly what the State authorities never did and never countenanced, at any rate until the stress of the Hannibalic war, and then only in a very limited sense. Their object was a strictly religious one, to get the sanction of the divine members of the community for the undertakings of the human ones. Even the so-called Sibylline oracles, as we saw, were not prophecies; and the augural art never provided an answer to the question, "What is going to happen?" but only to that much more religious one, "Are the deities willing that we should do this or that?"[613]

But before I leave the subject of private divination, I must note that there was a department of it which may be called legitimate, as distinguished from that of the quack. I mean the _auspicia_ of the family religion, and also the comparatively harmless folklore about omens of all sorts and kinds.

Naturally we have little information about legitimate _auspicia_ in the life of the family; but we have seen that the religious instinct of the Roman forbade him to face any important undertaking or crisis without making sure of the sanction of the _numina_ concerned, and among the methods of insurance (if I may use a convenient word) the _auspicia_ must have had a place from the earliest times. No important thing was done, says Cicero in the _de Divinatione_, "nisi auspicato, ne privatim quidem."[614] Valerius Maximus says the same in so many words, and some other evidence has been collected by De Marchi in his work on the private religion of the Romans.[615] But only in the case of marriage do we hear of _auspicia_ in historical times, and even there they seem to have degenerated into a mere form. "Auspices nuptiarum, re omissa, nomen tantum tenent"--so Cicero wrote of his own time;[616] he seems to be thinking of augury by means of birds, for he adds, "nam ut nunc extis sic tunc avibus magnae res impetrari solebant." As we have already seen, the object of the examination of a victim's entrails was simply to ascertain its fitness to be offered; but by Cicero's time the Etruscan art of divination by this method must have penetrated into private life. I think we may conjecture that in the life of the family on the land the _auspicia_, as the word itself implies, were worked chiefly by observation of birds. Nigidius Figulus, the learned mystic of Cicero's time, wrote a book, _de Augurio Privato_, of which one fragment survives which has to do with this kind of divination, and with the distinction between omens from birds seen on the right or left, and from high or low flyers.[617] In the familiar ode of Horace beginning, "Impios parrae recinentis omen,"[618] the _corvus_ and _cornix_ are mentioned besides the _parra_, and in that wholesome old out-of-door life of the farm, as I said just now, there was a certain basis of truth and fact in the observation of such presages. But Horace mentions other animals, wolf, fox, and snake, and some at least of the folklore about omens which is to be found in Pliny's descriptions of animals may help us to appreciate the nature of the old Roman ideas on this subject. The tiller of the land and the shepherd on the uplands used their eyes and ears, not wholly without advantage to themselves; but in the life of the city such observation became gradually formal and meaningless, and degenerated into the superstition reflected in Horace's ode. I must parenthetically confess to a personal feeling of regret that this people, who in their early days had good opportunities, made little or no contribution to the knowledge of animals and their habits.[619] But I must pass on to the more important subject of divination as developed and formalised by the authorities of the State.

In explaining the ritual of the _ius divinum_ I laid stress on the fact that its main object was to maintain the _pax deorum_, the right relation between the divine and human citizens.[620] To make this _pax_ secure, it was necessary that in every public act the good-will of the gods should be ascertained by obtaining favourable auspices--it must be done _auspicato_. To take the first illustration that occurs, Livy describes a dictator about to fight a battle as leaving his camp _auspicato_, after sacrificing to obtain the _pax deorum_.[621] It is for this reason that the _auspicia_ have a leading place in the foundation legends of the city. We are all familiar with the story of the _auspicia_ of Romulus and Remus, which goes back at least as far as Ennius;[622] and we find them also in the foundation of _coloniae_ in historical times.[623] I do not know that I can better express the place which the _auspicia_ occupied in the mind of the Roman than by quoting the words which Livy puts into the mouth of Appius Claudius in 367 B.C., when supposed to be inveighing against the opening of the consulship to plebeians: "Auspiciis hanc urbem conditam esse, auspiciis bello ac pace, domi militiaeque, omnia geri, quis est qui ignoret?" He goes on to argue that these _auspicia_ belong to patricians only, that no plebeian magistrate is created _auspicato_, that the man who wants to allow plebeians to become curule magistrates, _tollit ex civitate auspicia_. "Nunc nos, tanquam iam nihil pace deorum opus sit, omnes caerimonias polluimus."[624] This is, of course, only Livy's rhetoric, but it represents the fundamental Roman idea of the public _auspicia_.

The passage is also useful because it alludes to the fact that the right of taking the _auspicia_ belonged ultimately to the whole patrician body of fully qualified citizens.[625] But so far as we can discern in the dim light of the earliest period, this body entrusted the right and duty to its chief magistrate, the Rex, exactly as it entrusted him with the _imperium_, the supreme power of command in civil matters. Thus the _auspicia_ and the _imperium_ were indissolubly connected; as Dr. Greenidge says,[626] "they are the divine and human side of the same power," and may be found together in a thousand passages in Roman literature and inscriptions. But at the side of the Rex we find, according to tradition, two helpers or advisers called _augures_, the three together perhaps forming a _collegium_.[627] Now there was certainly an important difference between the Rex and the augurs; the latter were aiders and interpreters, but the Rex only was said _habere auspicia_, just as the whole patrician body had this right, though they delegated it to the Rex during his lifetime, and on his death received it again. The man who "habet auspicia" has the right of _spectio_, _i.e._ of taking the auspices in a particular case,[628] of watching the sky or the conduct of the sacred fowls in eating; this right the augurs never had. Their power was limited to guidance and interpretation. This follows necessarily from the fundamental principle that the _auspicia_ and the _imperium_ were indissolubly connected; for the augur, of course, never possessed the _imperium_ by virtue of his office. It is true that of the augur in the regal period we know almost nothing; his art, as we shall see directly, was kept strictly secret, and he was bound by oath not to reveal it.[629] But we may safely argue back in general terms from the relation of magistrate and augur under the later Republic to the relation of augur and Rex, from whom descended the magistrate's _imperium_. The one essential thing to remember is that _it was in all periods the magistrate who was responsible_, under the sanction and advice of his assistants the pontifices and augurs, for the maintenance of the _pax deorum_. The lay element in the actual working of the constitution never lost this prerogative. Rome was never hierarchically governed.

It would be going beyond the scope of these lectures if I were to plunge at this point into the thorny question of the exact relation between magistrate and augur in respect of details. Nor do I propose to go into the minutiae of augural lore, which are not instructive, like those of sacrifice, for our survey of Roman religious experience. It will be sufficient to state in outline what I believe to be necessary for our purpose.[630] The person who had the _auspicia_, _i.e._ originally the Rex, like the later magistrate, had to watch for signs from heaven; in order to do so he marked out a _templum_, a rectangular space, by noting certain objects, trees or what not, beyond which, whether he looked at earth or sky, he need take no notice of what he saw. The spot where he took up his position for this purpose was itself a rectangular space,[631] marked out on a similar principle; in each case the space was _liberatus effatus_, _i.e._ freed from previous associations by a form of words, and ready, if need were (as in the case of _loca sacra_) to be further handed over to the deities as their property; this consecration, however, did not, of course, follow in the ordinary procedure of the _auspicia_. In the _urbana auspicia_ all _loca effata_ must be within the sacred boundary of the _pomoerium_. Within this the magistrate watched in silence at the dead of night for such signs as he especially asked for (_auspicia impetrativa_); those which offered themselves without such specification (_oblativa_) he was not bound to take cognisance of unless some one claimed his attention for them. The signs were originally in the regal period, if we may guess from the word _auspicium_, only such as birds supplied, and the space in which they were watched for was not complicated by the divisions of the later augural art.[632] The business of the augur was, we may suppose, to see that the details were carried out correctly, and to interpret the signs; but those signs were not sent to _him_, for he was not the actual representative of the State in this ritual.

If the constitutional position and duty of the augurs have now been made sufficiently clear, I may go on to explain briefly, as in the case of the pontifices, how the office became gradually secularised, and the duty formalised, so that if there ever had been anything of a really religious character in this art, any genuine belief in the manifestation by the Power of his will in matters of State life, such character, such belief, had become by the second century B.C. entirely paralysed and destroyed. But the history of the augurate is much more difficult to follow than that of the pontificate. The work of the pontifices touched the life of every day, public and private, at many points, with the result that their secrets ceased to be secrets by the end of the fourth century B.C. The work of the augurs was occasional, and more technical than that of the other college; it can hardly be said to have affected the religion of family life, nor did it continually bear upon public life, as did the pontifical knowledge of the _ius divinum_ and the calendar. Hence the augural lore was never published, under pressure of public opinion, and neither ancient nor modern scholars have had to waste their time in investigating it. Books were indeed written about it in later times by one or two curious students, but in the time of Cicero, who was himself an augur, the neglect of it was general, even by members of the college.[633]

This mysterious augural lore was preserved in books, like that of the pontifices; and in all probability these books were put together in the same period as the latter, viz., the two centuries immediately following the abolition of the kingship.[634] I think there is a strong probability that the augurate emerged from the age of Etruscan rule which marks the latter part of the kingly period, with increased importance and fresh activity, the result of immediate contact with Etruscan methods of divination.[635] It is likely that they began in this way to cultivate the art of divination by lightning, which was peculiarly Etruscan, and to divide their _templum_ into _regiones_, which, as I said just now, were not apparently needed for the observation of omens from birds. How far they carried this art we cannot tell, owing to the loss of their books and the commentaries upon them; but about the Etruscan discipline we do know something. Those who wish to have a glimpse of it may consult the first chapter of the fourth volume of Bouche-Leclercq's _History of Divination_, as a more intelligible account than any known to me.[636] But all I need to insist on now is the likelihood that the augurs began the Republican period with a power of interpretation which was the more important because the art was changed; it is now the depository not only of the old bird lore, but of the new lightning lore. And as this last became the peculiar characteristic of the art of public divination, and as the augurs were, like the pontifices, a close self-electing corporation until 104 B.C. and a close self-electing _patrician_ body until the lex Ogulnia of 300 B.C., holding secret meetings every month on the _arx_,[637] and recording their lore in books which were never made public, they might well have grown into a powerful hierarchy, _if they had only been possessed of the right of spectio_. What saved Rome from this fate was simply the fact that the college was a body of interpreters only, or, in other words, the principle that the _auspicia_ belonged exclusively to the magistrate. The _auspicia_ were in fact a matter of public law, not of religion, properly speaking; the idea on which they were based, that the sanction of the deities was needed for every public action, very early lost its true significance, and the process of taking them became a mere form, the religious character of which was almost entirely forgotten. They ceased to be matter of religion just as the amulet or any other form of preventive magic fails to be reckoned as within the sphere of religion; the feeling was there that they must be attended to (though even that feeling lost its strength in course of time), but only as a matter of custom, not because the Power was really believed to sanction an act in this way.

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_.[638] 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.[639] 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."[640] 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,[641] 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.[642] 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.