The Romans openly acknowledged that they had received an important part of their religious science from another people. To interpret the most complex divine signs they turned to the Etruscan haruspices, heirs to a tradition they called the Etrusca disciplina. It combined reading the entrails of sacrificed animals, interpreting lightning and a vast body of ritual rules.
Tages, the child from the earth
The Etruscans told that their discipline had been revealed by a prodigious being, Tages. Cicero, in On Divination, reports the legend: in the territory of Tarquinia, while a man was ploughing a field, a boy suddenly rose from a furrow deeper than the others, with the look of a child but the wisdom of an old man. When the Etruscan leaders gathered, Tages dictated to them the principles of the art of divination, which were then written down.
Tradition also remembered a female figure, the nymph Vegoia, connected with the rules on field boundaries and the sacredness of limits.
The books of the discipline
Latin sources divide Etruscan knowledge into three great groups of texts:
| Group | Content |
|---|---|
| Libri haruspicini | Reading the entrails, above all the liver |
| Libri fulgurales | Interpreting lightning |
| Libri rituales | Rules for founding cities, consecrating places, organising civil and military life |
These books have not survived. We know them through quotations and summaries by Latin authors, who often translated or commented on them.
The liver as a map of the sky
In Etruscan tradition the liver of the sacrificed animal, usually a sheep, was regarded as a microcosm: a small-scale reproduction of the celestial order. The haruspex examined it carefully, observing its shape, colour and anomalies, and linked each part to a deity.
In the same way, the sky was divided into sixteen regions, each inhabited by different gods. The eastern part was considered favourable, the western unfavourable. The liver reproduced this division, so that a sign in a certain area of the organ pointed to a precise sector of the cosmos and to whoever ruled it.
The Piacenza Liver
The material proof of this system is one of the most extraordinary objects in Italian archaeology. In 1877, in the countryside near Piacenza, a farmer found a bronze model of a sheep's liver, little more than a hand's length, now kept in the civic museums of Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza. It is generally dated between the second and the first century BC.
Its main features are:
- the upper surface is divided into compartments, each inscribed in Etruscan with the names of deities;
- the outer rim is divided into sixteen sectors, corresponding to the sixteen regions of the sky;
- it shows raised features reproducing the anatomical parts of the organ, such as the gall bladder and the lobes;
- on the underside the liver is divided into two halves bearing the names of the Sun and the Moon.
Among the legible names are deities such as Tin, the Etruscan equivalent of Jupiter, Uni and other figures of the Etruscan pantheon. The object probably served as a teaching tool or as a reference model for the haruspex.
Lightning
Equally important was the science of lightning. The Etruscans distinguished lightning bolts according to the region of the sky they came from, the deity who hurled them and the effect they produced. According to Latin sources, Tin could cast three kinds of bolt: one of warning, which he decided alone; a graver one, for which he had to consult other gods; and a third, destructive, for which the consent of higher, hidden deities was needed.
A place struck by lightning became sacred: it was purified and often fenced off, and the remains of the lightning were ritually "buried".
Haruspices in Rome
In Rome the haruspices were not a Roman priestly college in the strict sense, but experts called in by the senate to interpret prodigies and sacrifices. The emperor Claudius, a great scholar of Etruscan language and history, took care to give stability to an order of haruspices, so that this ancient science would not be lost.
The most famous episode concerns Julius Caesar. The haruspex Spurinna, during a sacrifice, warned him of a grave danger that would not pass beyond the Ides of March. On the day itself, according to the story, Caesar joked with him that the Ides had come, and Spurinna replied that they had come, but had not yet gone.
The Etruscan discipline survived for a long time: as late as the early fifth century, during Alaric's siege of Rome, some haruspices offered to protect the city with their rites.
In short
- The Etrusca disciplina combined reading entrails, interpreting lightning and ritual rules.
- Tradition attributed it to the revelation of Tages, who rose from a furrow near Tarquinia.
- The liver was considered a microcosm, mirroring the sixteen regions of the sky.
- The bronze liver of Piacenza, found in 1877, bears the names of deities in its compartments.
- Rome consulted haruspices for centuries, as Spurinna's warning to Caesar shows.
