In Rome no important public decision was taken without first asking the consent of the gods. Before an assembly, a battle or the installation of a magistrate, someone had to take the auspices. The word itself explains it: auspicium comes from avis, "bird", and specere, "to observe". Watching birds was, for the Romans, the oldest and most authoritative way to learn the will of Jupiter.
The college of augurs
The experts in this art were the augurs, members of one of the great priestly colleges of the state. Their task was not to predict the future in a general sense, but to establish whether a planned action was approved or not by the gods. The difference matters: the augur did not say what would happen; he said whether one could proceed.
Being an augur was a great honour, reserved for leading figures. Cicero held this office and wrote the dialogue On Divination, in which he discusses the value of divination with great clarity, also reporting the quip attributed to Cato that he wondered how a haruspex could keep from laughing when he met another.
The lituus and the templum
The augur's instrument was the lituus, a staff curved at the end and free of knots, with which the lines of a ritual space were traced in the sky. This bounded space was called a templum: before it meant a sacred building, the word in fact designated a portion of sky or ground ritually defined, within which signs had meaning.
Livy, describing the inauguration of King Numa, sets out the scene: the augur, his head veiled, sits on a stone facing a set direction, takes the lituus in his right hand, divides the space into regions, asks Jupiter to show clear signs within those boundaries, and waits.
Left and right
For the Roman augur, signs coming from the left were generally favourable, the opposite of the Greek tradition, where the propitious side was the right. The most common explanation is linked to orientation: the Greek and the Roman observer faced in different directions, and the eastern part of the sky, associated with light, ended up on opposite sides.
The signs
Augural lore distinguished several types of signs. A traditional list includes:
- signs from the sky, such as lightning and thunder;
- birds, observed for their flight or their song;
- the behaviour of the sacred chickens;
- the movements of four-footed animals crossing the observed space;
- ominous signs, extraordinary and unexpected events.
Among birds, some counted for their flight, such as the eagle and the vulture, others for their call, such as the raven, the crow and the owl.
Requested signs and offered signs
There were two modes. In impetrative auspices the magistrate explicitly asked for a sign and waited for it to appear. In oblative auspices, by contrast, the sign appeared spontaneously, without being requested, and could interrupt an action already under way.
This second possibility also had political uses: a magistrate could announce that he was watching the sky and thus block an assembly, since no vote could take place while signs were awaited.
The sacred chickens
On military campaigns it was not always possible to watch the sky at leisure. The sacred chickens were then used, kept by an attendant called the pullarius. Food was offered to them: if they ate greedily, letting pieces fall from their beaks, the sign was favourable; if they refused to eat, the omen was negative.
| Behaviour of the chickens | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Eat greedily, food falls from the beak | Fully favourable sign |
| Eat normally | Neutral or favourable |
| Refuse food or run away | Unfavourable sign |
Two famous episodes
The first stands at the very origin of Rome. According to the tradition recorded by Livy, Romulus and Remus relied on the auspices to decide who should give the city its name. Remus, on the Aventine, was the first to see six vultures; Romulus, on the Palatine, saw twelve shortly afterwards. The dispute over who had won, the first or the more numerous, led to the quarrel between the brothers.
The second is a warning. During the First Punic War, in 249 BC, the consul Publius Claudius Pulcher, before the naval battle of Drepana, was told that the sacred chickens would not eat. Irritated, he had them thrown into the sea, saying that if they would not eat, they could drink. The Roman fleet suffered a heavy defeat, and the episode was remembered for centuries as an example of impiety punished.
In short
- Auspicium means observing birds: it was the Roman way of asking Jupiter's consent.
- Augurs did not predict the future but determined whether an action was approved by the gods.
- With the lituus the augur traced the templum, the space within which signs had meaning.
- Signs included lightning, the flight and call of birds, sacred chickens and four-footed animals.
- The auspices of Romulus and Remus and the case of Claudius Pulcher are the most famous episodes of the tradition.
