I'm going to share some of my recent writings for the next volume of Secret History here, in advance, because some of you may be interested in digging deeper into these topics. What I'll post below will not have the footnotes because I'm just copy/pasting from a Word doc. I will try to format it so the quotes will be enclosed.
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The Ancient Religion and the Ancient City
In 1864, a brilliant French historian named Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, published a remarkable work entitled “The Ancient City”. Wikipedia tells us:
I just love pointing out what an authoritarian tool Wikipedia is when there is something the PTB want to hide. In this case, the last sentence is entirely untrue. I can hear you asking “why would they want to suppress The Ancient City?” There are a number of reasons among which is the fact that he denied that there had ever been a “conquest of Gaul” by the Germans. He’s right, there wasn’t. He opened a huge gap in the standard historical explanations that he was unfortunately, unable to bridge due to the fact that he spent almost the rest of his life defending himself from relentless attacks from the authoritarian follower academics.
There are a whole lot of theories about history. For example, Jared Diamond (geography and physiology) wrote “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” in 1997 to present his ideas that differences in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. Then, there is the earlier Annales school founded by French historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929 which rejects an emphasis on politics and war as being the prime movers of history. Instead, geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, are the important matters. There is Marxism which postulates that economics is the key to history. A subset of Marxism is Functionalism vs. Intentionalism which deals mainly with the history of Nazi Germany. The Great Man theory (I like to call it the “Big Chief Theory”) proposes that history can be explained by the impact of influential or charismatic individuals. The opposite to that is the claim that great men are the products of their societies. One of the nuttier ones is American exceptionalism. This proposes that the United States is "qualitatively different" from other nations. For the authoritarian follower believers in this one, the United States is the biblical shining "City upon a Hill", and exempt from historical forces that have affected other countries. They miss the point that Rome was the original “city on a hill” and this “theory” is exactly what the Romans thought about themselves. So much for being exempt from historical forces.
I think you get the idea. There’s a lot more. According to most of these theories, particularly Marxist and similar ideas, religion, morals, and culture, are created and used to justify the distribution of economic power.
Fustel de Coulanges came along and declared that religious beliefs were the fundamental reality in ancient Greece and Rome, and he pretty well demonstrated that all the other aspects of the Graeco-Roman civilization followed from its religion. Using the information conveyed by the ancient writers about rituals, customs, folk beliefs, ancient laws and language, Fustel de Coulanges was able to infer the most likely ancient beliefs of the Romans (and Greeks). Despite the highly speculative nature of his results, he apparently captured many of the essentials about early Greek and Roman beliefs as recent archaeology has demonstrated.
According to Fustel, the belief on which Hellenistic civilization was originally built was a cult of the dead which was based on a fear of the dead: what they could and would do to the living if they were not kept happy under the earth. It was absolutely essential for a family to provide worship and material sustenance for its ancestors to keep them in their graves (or to gain their help, if needed). The spirits of the dead fathers are associated with their bodies which are buried on the family’s property, and this gave rise to the concept of private property. Each family was an exclusive cult of its ancestors, who often were associated with gods and heroes, and had its own specific rituals, and its own high priest, the father - paterfamilias. To participate in the worship of an ancestor-god was a privilege allowed only to family members which strengthened the idea of private property and boundaries, because if a person were to trespass on the place where someone else’s ancestors were buried, dire things might happen.
Fire was very important to the religion as well. The fire itself was divine and was a benevolent being that maintained their life and health as opposed to needing to be kept quiet under the ground like the ancestors. They made offerings to the fire of whatever they thought the god might like: flowers, fruits, incense, wine and, of course victims. One of the Orphic hymns is a prayer to the fire:
This fire in the home represented the eternal life of the family (not the individual) and the rule was that there should always be a few live coals on the hearth. Preparing of meals with the holy fire was a religious act. The god lived in the fire; the god cooked the bread, the meat, warmed the home. Before the family ate, they gave a portion of their meal to the fire. Before drinking, they poured out a bit of wine for the fire. Every meal was sacred communion with the fire, the god. This fire, as a tutelary god, was pure and it was forbidden to throw anything unclean into it or to commit any unacceptable act in its presence. In the worship of all other gods, the first and last invocation was always addressed to the fire.
Obviously, the fire that warmed the home and cooked the food was something more than a material phenomenon. The evidence for this was the fact that the fire may only be ignited with the aid of certain rituals and using certain implements and must be fed with certain kinds of wood. The fire is a moral being, chaste and shining; it thinks, has a conscience, knows mens hearts and duties, has sentiments and affections, it enjoys what is good and beautiful, and nourishes the soul of man.
In Rome, the embodiment of the fire was Vesta, the symbol of moral order. Ovid says of her that she occupied the first place in the religious practices of men. As Fustel pointed out, we read the same thing in the Rg Veda:
The ancients so closely associated the fire worship with the worship of the ancestors, that they were actually one religion. The fire was linked to the ancestral spirits, the lares and Penates (household gods) and it seems that these were something like the souls of the dead to whom the Romans attributed a supernatural power. In a passage in the Aeneid, Hector tells Iowans that he is going to entrust to him the Trojan Penates, and it is the hearth-fire that he commits to his care. Aeneas, speaking of the sacred fire he transports across the waters, designates it by the name of the Lar of Assaracus, or the soul of his ancestor.
It seems that, in the most ancient of times, the dead were buried under the floor of the house. Putting grandpa under the hearth may have been seen as a way to keep him close and involved with the family. After a time, the dead were buried in tombs or cremated and their ashes put in tombs, so without going too much further into detail, let’s just leave it at the fact that the dead and fire were rooted so deeply in the minds of these people that even great myths and fantastical stories of gods and heroes could not replace the dedication of the Romans to their fire and ancestors.
The role of family high priest was passed from father to eldest son along with ownership of the property and its tombs. It could be said that the eldest son was given, at birth, to the ancestors, to maintain the worship and pass it on for the safety of the entire family. Extended families, members of which shared a worship of the same ancestors, could become very large and powerful. This was called a “gens”. If a family died out in the male line, there was no more high priest to conduct the worship of the ancestors and they might get loose and wreck havoc on society, so it was enforced and reinforced, between families with these beliefs, that this was very, very important and everything else only supported the appeasing of the dead and associated gods and heroes. It was understood that no external power had the right to regulate or change a family’s private cult. There was no other priest but the father and there was no hierarchy. The Pontifex might ascertain if a father was performing his religious duties, but had no right to modify them in any way.
From groups of such families that acknowledged one another as holding these basic beliefs, and with whom intermarriage was approved, cities were formed. The city was a union of families, not of individuals. The city itself was a religious body – there was no other form of organization – with agreed-upon gods, an agreed-upon cult exclusive to citizens who could only be members of the accepted families, and its own high priest (the king).
The second half of The Ancient City describes how, as time passed, the customs that had emerged from the ancient religion became harder to justify. This was mainly due to the fact that the oligarchy of the city of Rome and the institutions they had created, excluded a large segment of the population. These were the plebs, the people without recognized ancestral gods who did not belong to families participating in the civic cult. Fustel doesn’t really explain why it should be that some families had gods as ancestors, and some did not. It would seem that anybody who knew who his father or grandfather was and was capable of making a fire, could have his own ancestors and religion. But that wasn’t the case and one suspects some manipulation there; but we’ll come to that. First, I want to discuss the fact that there is actually more to this Roman religion business than Fustel de Coulanges imagined according to Suzanne Rasmussen. She writes in “Public Portents in Republican Rome”:
It’s very useful to find that someone else has been searching through the sources for the same types of events that I have been assembling for years now though Rasmussen’s book is a sociological study and not an inquiry into what might have been going on in the planetary and cosmic environment. As Rasmussen notes (as I did some time ago as well) with my extensive tabular arrangement of the data (she uses tables too), the ancient sources for portents and prodigies exhibit a striking agreement in respect of such things and these reports do not appear to be embellished in any way. Further, there is agreement among the sources as to the firmly established procedures for responding to the intruding events. Rasmussen details the sources, discusses who relied on whom, and the usual chain of evidence type analyses. She notes:
In essence, what seems to be the case is that, in addition to keeping the fire happy and preventing the dead from coming back to haunt them, the Romans were very, very concerned with a whole host of things that they considered to be direct messages from the gods or things that would terribly offend the gods and cause one of those unpleasant “direct messages.” So, to protect themselves, it seems that they created the Holy City of Rome as a place where the accepted families could gather to appease mainly the gods of the sky. Their dedication to doing this, their concern that nothing that anybody did should offend the gods, came to be the ruling dynamic in the life of the city-state in all respects in its earliest period.
The history of early Rome is covered in the next main volume of the Secret History series, so I’m not going to go into it here. For the moment, what is important is to know that there was an ancient system of guiding the Romans in their activities via augurs, haruspices, and portents. Very early, there was an agreement between some Latins and the Etruscans and many elements of Etruscan practices became “Roman” so it is difficult to distinguish sometimes which was which. In general, however, extispicy – reading the entrails of sacrificed victims – was an Etruscan science performed by their haruspices. According to Cicero, the Romans adopted this method because it was handy for getting omens for individual activities.
In volume one of his De divination, Cicero discusses how the signs in the entrails can possibly occur. He presents two theories: either the selection of the sacrificial animal is subject to an omnipresent force, or changes take place in the entrails before the sacrifice is carried out. However, in his second book of De divination, Cicero declares against such possibilities in strong terms – calling it absurd - as well as arguing against the idea that some divine force pervades the whole world, the perspective promoted by Stoic philosophers. I don’t think that either of these arguments can prove that Cicero chose one way or the other as his personal belief; we know that such personalities can hold different beliefs in different compartments of their minds and depending on the circumstances, unpack one or the other. Cicero appears to have been such a person as we will see. At the same time, he consciously prided himself on being able to argue any point of view effectively and to pull the wool over the eyes of his listeners and to leave them believing what he wanted them to believe.
In any event, his final argument for extispicy, Cicero reached the conclusion that the art of divination actually does exist and the main difficulty is clarifying the underlying principles and causes. He notes that certain signs do precede certain events and can be empirically observed. Thus, in his view, one didn’t have to understand or explain the thing, one should simply make use of them “since all of Etruria could hardly be mistaken about the interpretation of extispicy, lightning, and other portents.” What is of particular interest to us here is the amount of time that Cicero devoted to discussing such matters and how often portents were brought up in his orations.
According to Cicero, extispicy depended on a variety of interpretative methods and the lack of consensus was the problem. During the late Republican times, Roman society had been dramatically altered as a result of wars and bringing back slaves of all kinds including Carthaginian, Greek, Chaldean and Egyptian specialists in divination.
Auspices, on the other hand, was linked to Jupiter and Cicero refers to it as a Roman form of divination as opposed to Etruscan extispicy. Roman public augury recognized only a limited range of bird omens in contrast to non-Roman augury which utilized any species. The system of interpretation was apparently well-established. Apparently, no public actions were taken without first taking the auspices. A little more insight into Cicero’s head can be located in his De republica where he describes the augural discipline as the cornerstone not only of the founding of Rome, but of the ideal Roman constitution. Cicero says that Romulus established augury and the senate, dividing the people into tribes, and then founding the augural college with one elected augur from each tribe.
All the ancient literature about Rome confirms how crucial their augural science was to all political activity. Public actions such as passing laws and conducting assemblies, elections, Senate meetings, etc, could only take place after auspices had been taken. It was a traditional part of the religio-political process. Thunder and lightning and bird omens revealed the approval or disapproval of the gods and without the approval of the gods, nothing could be undertaken. Cicero’s De legibus also makes evident that the objective of public augury – as a traditional institution – was to determine if the gods were favorable to state business and public ceremonies including the inauguration of places, people and things. A decision of the senate could not be legally valid without the blessing of the augurs and it had to be done in the correct location as designated by the augur as well.
The pomerium was Rome’s sacred augural boundary within which auspices on behalf of the city could be taken. Certain political assemblies could only take place within the pomerium, and others – including all military events – had to be kept outside the pomerium.
One of the curious things about Roman religion was its almost total lack of mythological material from either the early Latins or Etruscans. The closest thing they have to such religious underpinnings are the stories of their early kings. They were not concerned with any stories of individual deities and the surviving material leaves a puzzle as to what were the actual motivations and explanations of why they did what they did and believed they had to do what they had to do. Because, in the end, the portents were all about methodological diligence in following the prescribed procedures for getting the information “from the gods”, so to say, and then, taking religious actions as advised by the authorized experts so as to perform the correct ritual to expiate the fault.
A number of ancient writers some of whose other works have survived, were augurs and wrote works on augury including Lucius Julius Caesar, Appius Claudius Pulcher and Cicero himself.
Unfortunately, most histories of Rome or academic discussions about same, completely exclude this aspect of the Roman state. Their narrow-minded exclusion is based on thinking that the reports of prodigies were some sort of collective hysteria and that portents were solely a means of political manipulation. They sometimes interpret portents and prodigies as possibly even literary embellishment by later writers who were adding flavor to their accounts. However, one may notice that Livy includes these records into his work in a stiff and formulaic style which contrasts with his usual elegant prose, thus suggesting that the events must be copied directly from the Annales Maximi, published in the 120s BC by P. Mucius Scaevola, who compiled his list from the tabulae pontificum, the annual records of the pontifex maximus of Rome.
In any event, most – if not all – historians discard these important elements of early Roman history as irrelevant to the religious and political institutions of Rome. But the facts seem to be quite the opposite: they were a significant element in the perception and construction of reality of the Roman people. Portents and prodigies played a far more important role in terms of history and politics, religion and sociology, than is acknowledged by the gentlemen historians, and a careful study reveals that they were not the by-product of mass hysteria or aberrant psychological conditions of a few crazies nor were they the product of the superstitious Roman mind ignorant of natural laws.
Georges Dumezil seeks to explain prodigies as mass psychosis around the time of the Second Punic War:
Indeed, Livy notes connections between times of war and the increased reporting of prodigies but if one reviews the annual reporting of portents throughout the history of the Republic, one discovers that the “psychosis” from which Rome was suffering lasted over 800 years down to the end of the reign of Domitian. What such scholars miss entirely is the fact that the entire Roman governing system was set up as the social and religio-political means of maintaining equilibrium between Rome and the gods who were, obviously, upset rather often. Further, there are numerous “heavenly prodigies” that are not linked to martial activity and wars that are not linked to prodigies.
Those historians who think that the extraordinary phenomena reported by the Romans were just a means of political mass manipulation also miss the point. Overall, it seems that it wasn’t just the masses who believed – the magistrates and senate were as preoccupied with the indications of wrath as everyone else. Portents weren’t used to control the masses although, in the later Republic it is obvious that they were used for political purposes in the conflicts within the ruling aristocracy itself. This process was described by Toynbee:
Toynbee was influenced by the Greek Polybius’s view that the purpose of Roman religion was to control the passions and violent anger of the masses. His idea was naturally conditioned by his own culture; to Polybius, the linking of res publica to public divination was preposterous. Nevertheless, it is true that there was a growing Hellenization in Rome and thus, there appears to be some validity in this idea at least toward the end of the republic and among a few of its politicians, though not all by a long shot!
Cicero tells us that the idea of interpreting and then performing rituals to expiate prodigies and portents came from the Etruscans. A public prodigy or portent was one that was reported to the senate and approved by that body as a prodigium publicum, a portent relevant to the society as a whole and which would require the entire society to contribute to the ritual expiation. Whatever it was, it was an indicator that the pax deorum had been disturbed.
There was a distinction between private and public prodigies though private prodigies that occurred in respect of public individuals could be adjudged as public portents. But the procedure that had to be followed for the declaration to be made and the expiation performed, demonstrates that it was solely the purview of the senate to approve the prodigy as public. Further, it seems clear that what was or was not determined to be a public prodigy does not indicate any sort of religious development on the part of the Romans. They were singularly rigid and conservative right up to the end of the republic at which point, Cicero, in a desperate bid to “save the republic”, fought viciously against those who would set aside the strict powers of the senate to declare prodigies and expiations.
In respect of Cicero and his war against change, a particular type of prodigy comes to the fore as significant: incestum of the Vestal Virgins; that is, breaking of the vows of chastity by any of the virgins put in charge of tending the sacred fire of the temple of Vesta. Such a “prodigy” consists in a violation of sacred law by human beings: incorrect behavior that could anger the gods towards the entire populace. This would constitute a tangible violation threatening the welfare of Roman society and the security of the state militarily and politically.
As will be discussed further on, there were a number of such episodes of incestum on the part of the Vestal virgins, though not so many as might be expected over the very long life of the institution. However, one of the earlier events was in 216 BC when the Vestal Virgins Opimia and Florionia were accused. Livy then notes that a very un-Roman expiation was undertaken, to wit, a Gallic man and woman, and a Greek man and woman, were buried alive at the Forum Boarium . Then, one of the virgins involved committed suicide and the other was buried alive while at least one of the men involved, a scriba pontificius named L. Cantilius, was flogged to death – a very usual Roman procedure. We can also note that 216 BC was the year in which Hannibal defeated Roman forces at the Battle of Cannae. In numbers of Romans killed, this was the second greatest defeat of Rome, after the Battle of Arausio.
In short, in addition to celestial phenomena, meteorological phenomena, the birth of deformed infants, talking cows, rains of blood and milk, fertile mules, incorrect human behavior could be adjudged as prodigies by the senate, and therefore requiring public expiation. At the same time, some prodigies could be interpreted as favorable.
Rasmussen describes the fixed procedure for determining prodigies based on the sources. Anyone could report an observation of an unusual event to the senate. The consuls would normally present the reports along with eyewitnesses who corroborated the event. Some reports were submitted in writing. The senate then had to decide if the event was a prodigium publicum. There were three options available to them at this point:
1) Refusal to approve the event as a prodigy. This could be justified on the grounds that there were too few witnesses or the witnesses were of dubious reliability.
2) Approve the event as a prodigy, but not relevant to the public welfare. It would be declared to be a “private portent.”
3) Approve the event as important to the public welfare and then undertake to find out from specialists what form the expiation must take.
For the latter part of the process, there were three different groups of experts: the decemviri sacris faciundis, the pontifices, and the haruspices. The determination of the priests were given in the form of responsa and decreta which the senate could then choose to comply with or not. They could also decide whether or not to report the prodigy and responses to the public. At that point, the senate could authorize the recommended actions which was the formal responsibility of the consuls who frequently were the ones required to perform the expiatory sacrifices themselves. This will be important further on, so keep it in mind. For the moment, I'll just note that Livy reports several cases where prodigies were reported and had to be expiated after new consuls had been elected and before the old consuls had left to take up governorships in their assigned provinces as was the general order of things. The timing and swiftness could ensure a good beginning for the next year. The delays imposed on consuls due to prodigies reveals quite clearly that the manner of dealing with public portents certainly exerted a powerful influence on the political establishment itself, and was not necessarily a tool for mass manipulation. Apparently, prodigies could be collected up and expiated all at once, but some of them were so serious that expiation was required as quickly as possible. The sources are very clear on the fact that prodigies were high priority items on the senatorial agenda. Issues relating to the gods were always dealt with before matters relating to human affairs. Rasmussen writes:
It seems that, in the year 193 BC, according to Livy, the Senate made a decision to stop accepting prodigy reports because they were too numerous. Rasmussen speculates that this was not so much evidence of political manipulation but that the high incidence of earthquakes and other prodigies of the time obstructed political life entirely. The prodigies prevented the departure of the consuls, prevented the convening of the senate, the transaction of any public business, etc. The Sibylline Books were consulted and the necessary rituals performed, after which the senate said “that’s enough.” The fact that the senate had to take this extreme measure is evidence of the essential role of prodigies in the political life of Rome. Once a prodigy had been reported, the senate was obliged to deal with it according to traditional, fixed, procedure. If, as some scholars would like to think, portents held no real significance at the political level, the senate could easily have chosen to ignore or reject them. Instead, in the above case, they pursued the policy of a singular expiation as advised by the priests and the Sibylline books, and were assured thereby that they could stop accepting further reports and being required thereby to deal with them.
On another occasion that Livy reports, a violent wind knocked over a pillar and statue in front of the temple of Jupiter in 152 BC. The haruspices interpreted the prodigy to mean death among the magistrates and priests upon which announcement, every single one of them resigned! That's not the behavior of non-believers!
The point of this brief survey is that environmental factors, human behaviors, and unusual phenomena had decisive, even controlling, influences on social, political, and military affairs in the Roman Republic right down to the time of, and including the actions of, Cicero, as I will show further on. Indeed, we will see that political manipulation of this tradition took place, but the tradition, the system, had to exist first – and in a significant way – for such manipulation to be implemented – as it was by Cicero.
According to the tradition, auspicia were originally a patrician prerogative whereas plebeian magistrates, assemblies, and plebiscite were usually appointed or approved without any prior taking of auspices. The traditional patrician monopoly on auspices raises a number of questions, especially about how plebeians accessing patrician offices were handled with respect to the patrician auspices. The sources indicate considerable social, political, and religious changes in the relationship between patricians and plebeians from around 500 BC until the passing of the Licini-Sextic laws in 367 BC granting plebeians access to the consulate, and the lex Ogulnia in 300 BC which gave them access to the college of augurs and the college of pontifices.
The right to take auspicia was transferred through the election of magistrates and, according to Varro, the patrician auspices could be divided into two categories: auspicia maxima and auspicia minora. Auspicia maxima related to consuls, praetors, and censors, whereas asupicia minora related to the other types of magistrates. In other words, there were various auspices depending on magisterial rank and the right to take auspices was relinquished at the end of one’s magisterial term. If the succession of consuls was interrupted, the auspices reverted to the senate until new consuls were elected. In war, the right of auspicy was transferred to the commander by means of lex curiata.
The four priesthoods relating to official Roman divination were:
1) The Roman Xviri sacris faciundis (originally IIviri; from 367 BC Xviri, and from Sulla onwards SVviri, who interpreted prodigia
2) The Roman pontifices, who interpreted prodigia
3) The Roman augures, who interpreted auspice
4) The Etruscan haruspices, who interpreted exta and prodigia
The sources reveal that the senate often directed the Xviri to consult the libri Sibyllini in order to determine the appropriate expiation rituals. This priesthood originally consisted of only two members (IIviri) and sources credit Tarquinius Superbus with acquiring the Sibylline Books and establishing this priesthood. In 367, the number of priests was increased to ten (Xviri). It was also decided at that time that plebeians could achieve membership: five patricians and five plebeians (Livy 6.42.2) The number was then increased again to 15 (XVviri) from 51 BC onwards.
The primary task of this college was to guard and consult the Sibylline Books. According to tradition, this collection of Greek oracular pronouncements was only consulted to clarify prodigies that proved difficult to interpret or were particularly terrifying as mentioned in Livy 22.9.8. The directions from the Sibylline Books were often concerned with introducing Greek cults and other foreign cults and rites and human sacrifices.
The pontifices' duties and privileges included listing reports of prodigies and consulting the libri pontificii. These books included annual chronicles, lists of magistrates, wars, important events, rituals performed and results, commentary on all of these things, and responses and decreta on religious matters. The original number of pontifices was three but this was increased to six, nine, fifteen, and finally sixteen by Julius Caesar (who was pontifex maximus). The college was opened to plebeians in 300 BC. Cicero’s speech De domo sua reveals the decisive role the pontifices played in treating prodigies. The expertise of this priesthood was crucial to the Senate’s decision in the religious dispute over Cicero’s house which had been razed during his exile and consecrated to the gods. Cicero wanted the land back.
The augural college was parallel to the pontifices in number and expansion of those members. There were originally three members – one for each tribe – and then six, then opened to plebeians and expanded to nine and then increased by Sulla to 15 and Caesar adding a 16th.
In the beginning, the priests were selected, then the Lex Domitia de sacerdotiis in 104 BC abolished this co-optive election and replaced it with elections in 17 tribes chosen by lot. This law was repealed by Sulla in 81 BC, but restored in 63 BC through the Lex Labiena. This was important to the election of Julius Caesar as Pontifex Maximus. Members of the colleges of pontifices and Xviri were elected for life. However, they could forfeit their offices if sentenced in court, though augurs appear to have been immune to this.
It is fairly clear that these offices were held by men from the most wealthy and powerful families meaning noble patrician families and ennobled and wealthy plebeian families: the political elite of Rome. The same group of people combined the roles of handling religious affairs as well as making political decisions in the interests of the state. As we can see from Cicero’s writings, he saw absolutely nothing wrong with this and from his perspective, an ideal social and religio-political establishment featuring the same people was not only acceptable, but highly desirable. This, of course, leads to the consideration that the formal distinction between priesthoods and magistracies was only a technical detail that meant nothing in practice. Not all priests were magistrates, nor all magistrates priests, to be sure; Cicero did not become an augur until ten years after his consulship. Further, the pontifex maximus could order a person who was simultaneously serving as priest and magistrate to pay a fine for putting his magisterial duties above his religious duties. This highlights the fact that, at some point in time, it must have been seen as needful to put measures in place to ensure that politics yielded to religion because the latter was seen as the preeminent concern of the political state. Nevertheless, it is clear that certain individuals did hold multiple offices and would have discussed religio-political affairs among themselves.
The haruspices were recruited from aristocratic Etruscan families and were a very prestigious group. Etruscan principes early intermarried with Patrician families and the Etruscan institution was internalized in these noble families and passed down father to son. Cicero mentions a senate decree stating that sons from the most prominent families were to study haruspicy to prevent the discipline from dying out. Their principal duty was to “read the entrails” of the victims. Another haruspex group appears to have been linked to the sacrifices performed by the magistrates. They often went along on military campaigns as well. There were also, it seems, wandering “street-corner” haruspices specializing in private “readings” whom Cicero, Cato and others considered to be charlatans. The haruspices do not seem to have been members of an actual Roman priesthood nor did they have a collegium, but they were highly respected as experts nevertheless as the sources show that the Roman authorities systematically made use of these Etruscan priests in the interpretation of public prodigies. In recounting Postumius’ speech on the Bacchanalia affair in 186 BC, Livy places the haruspical responsa on a par with pontifical responsa.
Apparently, the different priesthoods had different specialties that were complementary and they appear to have worked together without competition. The sources emphasize interpretations and calculations on the part of haruspices, so different criteria must have determined who was called in. Cicero points out several instances in which the haruspices and Xviri gave identical responses.
In Rome, the struggle for political power was not in any way a fight to “control the gods” because in Rome, augury and auspicia was not at all about “gaining control over the gods or forces of life”. On the contrary, in the Roman view of things, human beings were subject to the will of the gods and the religio-political desire was, above all, to be in harmony with the gods while one’s opponents could be accused of being in disharmony. To the Roman mind, the wish to exercise control over the gods would, itself, constitute a violation of the pax deorum. Neglecting the auspices could be fatal, as the ancient sources exampled time and time again.
In short, the function of auspices and augury was to examine and confirm that Roman society was in good relationship to the gods in respect of planned political, religious and military undertakings, offices, and individuals. If such confirmation was not forthcoming, the reason or error had to be determined using the augural science and expiation undertaken which could reestablish the balance.
Despite the senate’s status as the ultimate decision-making authority in public portent matters, there is no doubt that the official augurs did wield considerable power being the only religious specialists authorized to advise on the interpretation of auspices relevant to the welfare of the Roman state. According to the rules of the ideal state, Cicero tells us in De legibus, that those leading negotiations must observe the auspices and obey the public augur. Furthermore, in the event of a conflict between the magistrates and the official priesthoods’ observations and expertise in matters of public portents, the regard for religio is always identified with the regard for the welfare of the res publica. This places the response from the official priesthoods over and above the individual magistrate’s actions, opinions and schemes.
Now, even though Cicero was a superficial, self-contradictory, hypocritical manipulator and pinning down his own religious attitude is iffy at best, he is still one of the most important sources on divination and public portents. His often polemical approach to the topic while, at the same time, saying that it was the only way to do things, can certainly be confusing. When it is useful for something he wants, like the approval of the optimates or getting his house back, he’s all for it. But when he wants to impress his philosophical friends, he’s full of criticism. However, I think his ambiguous position actually acts in our favor: we may get a relatively undistorted view of things because, as Goar wrote:
Obviously, Cicero was never sincere about anything except getting what he wanted and being approved by the “in crowd” that had been inculcated into him as the ONLY group worth belonging to since his youth. For Cicero, Greek theory is one thing, Roman practices are another. This is evident from the considerable social and religious prestige Cicero associates with the office of augur, which he was proud to attain in 53 BC. To Cicero, philosophy was a diversion while Roman religion was a historical, social, and political necessity for preserving the res publica.
Obviously, when considering all this Roman business of killing critters and splattering blood everywhere every time they turned around, along with all the other apparently silly rituals, one begins to think that these people were simply nuts. You ask yourself: how could anybody believe that nonsense?! And when you consider that our own civilization is considered to be modeled on that one, that great thinkers of the Renaissance attributed to such as Cicero enormous powers of intellect and rationality, how the heck do we deal with the fact that these people – including Cicero – were regularly peering at the guts of freshly dead animals in order to decide whether or not they should take a trip, make a speech, pass a law, make war, or execute prisoners?
Obviously, we cannot judge them by the standards of our own time. Perhaps they would be more justifiably appalled at our nebulous astralized belief systems that don’t seem to have anything at all to do with reality. Obviously, rationality is a culture-bound and context-related concept. As Rasmussen says:
Obviously, something happened during the formation of the Roman state, and throughout its existence, that made what they were doing entirely rational. My suggestions are, of course, described in some detail in my previous book, “Comet and the Horns of Moses” so I won’t go into it in any detail here except to say that the cosmic threats to humanity must have been clearly understood by the early Romans and some fairly frightening and traumatic activity continued off and on for several hundred years.
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Next, I'll try to get some of the portents listed. I think it is important to realize that all the truly weird stuff happening nowadays has happened many times before. It also helps to know what might "happen next."
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The Ancient Religion and the Ancient City
In 1864, a brilliant French historian named Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, published a remarkable work entitled “The Ancient City”. Wikipedia tells us:
I just love pointing out what an authoritarian tool Wikipedia is when there is something the PTB want to hide. In this case, the last sentence is entirely untrue. I can hear you asking “why would they want to suppress The Ancient City?” There are a number of reasons among which is the fact that he denied that there had ever been a “conquest of Gaul” by the Germans. He’s right, there wasn’t. He opened a huge gap in the standard historical explanations that he was unfortunately, unable to bridge due to the fact that he spent almost the rest of his life defending himself from relentless attacks from the authoritarian follower academics.
There are a whole lot of theories about history. For example, Jared Diamond (geography and physiology) wrote “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” in 1997 to present his ideas that differences in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. Then, there is the earlier Annales school founded by French historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929 which rejects an emphasis on politics and war as being the prime movers of history. Instead, geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, are the important matters. There is Marxism which postulates that economics is the key to history. A subset of Marxism is Functionalism vs. Intentionalism which deals mainly with the history of Nazi Germany. The Great Man theory (I like to call it the “Big Chief Theory”) proposes that history can be explained by the impact of influential or charismatic individuals. The opposite to that is the claim that great men are the products of their societies. One of the nuttier ones is American exceptionalism. This proposes that the United States is "qualitatively different" from other nations. For the authoritarian follower believers in this one, the United States is the biblical shining "City upon a Hill", and exempt from historical forces that have affected other countries. They miss the point that Rome was the original “city on a hill” and this “theory” is exactly what the Romans thought about themselves. So much for being exempt from historical forces.
I think you get the idea. There’s a lot more. According to most of these theories, particularly Marxist and similar ideas, religion, morals, and culture, are created and used to justify the distribution of economic power.
Fustel de Coulanges came along and declared that religious beliefs were the fundamental reality in ancient Greece and Rome, and he pretty well demonstrated that all the other aspects of the Graeco-Roman civilization followed from its religion. Using the information conveyed by the ancient writers about rituals, customs, folk beliefs, ancient laws and language, Fustel de Coulanges was able to infer the most likely ancient beliefs of the Romans (and Greeks). Despite the highly speculative nature of his results, he apparently captured many of the essentials about early Greek and Roman beliefs as recent archaeology has demonstrated.
According to Fustel, the belief on which Hellenistic civilization was originally built was a cult of the dead which was based on a fear of the dead: what they could and would do to the living if they were not kept happy under the earth. It was absolutely essential for a family to provide worship and material sustenance for its ancestors to keep them in their graves (or to gain their help, if needed). The spirits of the dead fathers are associated with their bodies which are buried on the family’s property, and this gave rise to the concept of private property. Each family was an exclusive cult of its ancestors, who often were associated with gods and heroes, and had its own specific rituals, and its own high priest, the father - paterfamilias. To participate in the worship of an ancestor-god was a privilege allowed only to family members which strengthened the idea of private property and boundaries, because if a person were to trespass on the place where someone else’s ancestors were buried, dire things might happen.
Fire was very important to the religion as well. The fire itself was divine and was a benevolent being that maintained their life and health as opposed to needing to be kept quiet under the ground like the ancestors. They made offerings to the fire of whatever they thought the god might like: flowers, fruits, incense, wine and, of course victims. One of the Orphic hymns is a prayer to the fire:
This fire in the home represented the eternal life of the family (not the individual) and the rule was that there should always be a few live coals on the hearth. Preparing of meals with the holy fire was a religious act. The god lived in the fire; the god cooked the bread, the meat, warmed the home. Before the family ate, they gave a portion of their meal to the fire. Before drinking, they poured out a bit of wine for the fire. Every meal was sacred communion with the fire, the god. This fire, as a tutelary god, was pure and it was forbidden to throw anything unclean into it or to commit any unacceptable act in its presence. In the worship of all other gods, the first and last invocation was always addressed to the fire.
Obviously, the fire that warmed the home and cooked the food was something more than a material phenomenon. The evidence for this was the fact that the fire may only be ignited with the aid of certain rituals and using certain implements and must be fed with certain kinds of wood. The fire is a moral being, chaste and shining; it thinks, has a conscience, knows mens hearts and duties, has sentiments and affections, it enjoys what is good and beautiful, and nourishes the soul of man.
In Rome, the embodiment of the fire was Vesta, the symbol of moral order. Ovid says of her that she occupied the first place in the religious practices of men. As Fustel pointed out, we read the same thing in the Rg Veda:
The ancients so closely associated the fire worship with the worship of the ancestors, that they were actually one religion. The fire was linked to the ancestral spirits, the lares and Penates (household gods) and it seems that these were something like the souls of the dead to whom the Romans attributed a supernatural power. In a passage in the Aeneid, Hector tells Iowans that he is going to entrust to him the Trojan Penates, and it is the hearth-fire that he commits to his care. Aeneas, speaking of the sacred fire he transports across the waters, designates it by the name of the Lar of Assaracus, or the soul of his ancestor.
It seems that, in the most ancient of times, the dead were buried under the floor of the house. Putting grandpa under the hearth may have been seen as a way to keep him close and involved with the family. After a time, the dead were buried in tombs or cremated and their ashes put in tombs, so without going too much further into detail, let’s just leave it at the fact that the dead and fire were rooted so deeply in the minds of these people that even great myths and fantastical stories of gods and heroes could not replace the dedication of the Romans to their fire and ancestors.
The role of family high priest was passed from father to eldest son along with ownership of the property and its tombs. It could be said that the eldest son was given, at birth, to the ancestors, to maintain the worship and pass it on for the safety of the entire family. Extended families, members of which shared a worship of the same ancestors, could become very large and powerful. This was called a “gens”. If a family died out in the male line, there was no more high priest to conduct the worship of the ancestors and they might get loose and wreck havoc on society, so it was enforced and reinforced, between families with these beliefs, that this was very, very important and everything else only supported the appeasing of the dead and associated gods and heroes. It was understood that no external power had the right to regulate or change a family’s private cult. There was no other priest but the father and there was no hierarchy. The Pontifex might ascertain if a father was performing his religious duties, but had no right to modify them in any way.
From groups of such families that acknowledged one another as holding these basic beliefs, and with whom intermarriage was approved, cities were formed. The city was a union of families, not of individuals. The city itself was a religious body – there was no other form of organization – with agreed-upon gods, an agreed-upon cult exclusive to citizens who could only be members of the accepted families, and its own high priest (the king).
The second half of The Ancient City describes how, as time passed, the customs that had emerged from the ancient religion became harder to justify. This was mainly due to the fact that the oligarchy of the city of Rome and the institutions they had created, excluded a large segment of the population. These were the plebs, the people without recognized ancestral gods who did not belong to families participating in the civic cult. Fustel doesn’t really explain why it should be that some families had gods as ancestors, and some did not. It would seem that anybody who knew who his father or grandfather was and was capable of making a fire, could have his own ancestors and religion. But that wasn’t the case and one suspects some manipulation there; but we’ll come to that. First, I want to discuss the fact that there is actually more to this Roman religion business than Fustel de Coulanges imagined according to Suzanne Rasmussen. She writes in “Public Portents in Republican Rome”:
It’s very useful to find that someone else has been searching through the sources for the same types of events that I have been assembling for years now though Rasmussen’s book is a sociological study and not an inquiry into what might have been going on in the planetary and cosmic environment. As Rasmussen notes (as I did some time ago as well) with my extensive tabular arrangement of the data (she uses tables too), the ancient sources for portents and prodigies exhibit a striking agreement in respect of such things and these reports do not appear to be embellished in any way. Further, there is agreement among the sources as to the firmly established procedures for responding to the intruding events. Rasmussen details the sources, discusses who relied on whom, and the usual chain of evidence type analyses. She notes:
In essence, what seems to be the case is that, in addition to keeping the fire happy and preventing the dead from coming back to haunt them, the Romans were very, very concerned with a whole host of things that they considered to be direct messages from the gods or things that would terribly offend the gods and cause one of those unpleasant “direct messages.” So, to protect themselves, it seems that they created the Holy City of Rome as a place where the accepted families could gather to appease mainly the gods of the sky. Their dedication to doing this, their concern that nothing that anybody did should offend the gods, came to be the ruling dynamic in the life of the city-state in all respects in its earliest period.
The history of early Rome is covered in the next main volume of the Secret History series, so I’m not going to go into it here. For the moment, what is important is to know that there was an ancient system of guiding the Romans in their activities via augurs, haruspices, and portents. Very early, there was an agreement between some Latins and the Etruscans and many elements of Etruscan practices became “Roman” so it is difficult to distinguish sometimes which was which. In general, however, extispicy – reading the entrails of sacrificed victims – was an Etruscan science performed by their haruspices. According to Cicero, the Romans adopted this method because it was handy for getting omens for individual activities.
In volume one of his De divination, Cicero discusses how the signs in the entrails can possibly occur. He presents two theories: either the selection of the sacrificial animal is subject to an omnipresent force, or changes take place in the entrails before the sacrifice is carried out. However, in his second book of De divination, Cicero declares against such possibilities in strong terms – calling it absurd - as well as arguing against the idea that some divine force pervades the whole world, the perspective promoted by Stoic philosophers. I don’t think that either of these arguments can prove that Cicero chose one way or the other as his personal belief; we know that such personalities can hold different beliefs in different compartments of their minds and depending on the circumstances, unpack one or the other. Cicero appears to have been such a person as we will see. At the same time, he consciously prided himself on being able to argue any point of view effectively and to pull the wool over the eyes of his listeners and to leave them believing what he wanted them to believe.
In any event, his final argument for extispicy, Cicero reached the conclusion that the art of divination actually does exist and the main difficulty is clarifying the underlying principles and causes. He notes that certain signs do precede certain events and can be empirically observed. Thus, in his view, one didn’t have to understand or explain the thing, one should simply make use of them “since all of Etruria could hardly be mistaken about the interpretation of extispicy, lightning, and other portents.” What is of particular interest to us here is the amount of time that Cicero devoted to discussing such matters and how often portents were brought up in his orations.
According to Cicero, extispicy depended on a variety of interpretative methods and the lack of consensus was the problem. During the late Republican times, Roman society had been dramatically altered as a result of wars and bringing back slaves of all kinds including Carthaginian, Greek, Chaldean and Egyptian specialists in divination.
Auspices, on the other hand, was linked to Jupiter and Cicero refers to it as a Roman form of divination as opposed to Etruscan extispicy. Roman public augury recognized only a limited range of bird omens in contrast to non-Roman augury which utilized any species. The system of interpretation was apparently well-established. Apparently, no public actions were taken without first taking the auspices. A little more insight into Cicero’s head can be located in his De republica where he describes the augural discipline as the cornerstone not only of the founding of Rome, but of the ideal Roman constitution. Cicero says that Romulus established augury and the senate, dividing the people into tribes, and then founding the augural college with one elected augur from each tribe.
All the ancient literature about Rome confirms how crucial their augural science was to all political activity. Public actions such as passing laws and conducting assemblies, elections, Senate meetings, etc, could only take place after auspices had been taken. It was a traditional part of the religio-political process. Thunder and lightning and bird omens revealed the approval or disapproval of the gods and without the approval of the gods, nothing could be undertaken. Cicero’s De legibus also makes evident that the objective of public augury – as a traditional institution – was to determine if the gods were favorable to state business and public ceremonies including the inauguration of places, people and things. A decision of the senate could not be legally valid without the blessing of the augurs and it had to be done in the correct location as designated by the augur as well.
The pomerium was Rome’s sacred augural boundary within which auspices on behalf of the city could be taken. Certain political assemblies could only take place within the pomerium, and others – including all military events – had to be kept outside the pomerium.
One of the curious things about Roman religion was its almost total lack of mythological material from either the early Latins or Etruscans. The closest thing they have to such religious underpinnings are the stories of their early kings. They were not concerned with any stories of individual deities and the surviving material leaves a puzzle as to what were the actual motivations and explanations of why they did what they did and believed they had to do what they had to do. Because, in the end, the portents were all about methodological diligence in following the prescribed procedures for getting the information “from the gods”, so to say, and then, taking religious actions as advised by the authorized experts so as to perform the correct ritual to expiate the fault.
A number of ancient writers some of whose other works have survived, were augurs and wrote works on augury including Lucius Julius Caesar, Appius Claudius Pulcher and Cicero himself.
Unfortunately, most histories of Rome or academic discussions about same, completely exclude this aspect of the Roman state. Their narrow-minded exclusion is based on thinking that the reports of prodigies were some sort of collective hysteria and that portents were solely a means of political manipulation. They sometimes interpret portents and prodigies as possibly even literary embellishment by later writers who were adding flavor to their accounts. However, one may notice that Livy includes these records into his work in a stiff and formulaic style which contrasts with his usual elegant prose, thus suggesting that the events must be copied directly from the Annales Maximi, published in the 120s BC by P. Mucius Scaevola, who compiled his list from the tabulae pontificum, the annual records of the pontifex maximus of Rome.
In any event, most – if not all – historians discard these important elements of early Roman history as irrelevant to the religious and political institutions of Rome. But the facts seem to be quite the opposite: they were a significant element in the perception and construction of reality of the Roman people. Portents and prodigies played a far more important role in terms of history and politics, religion and sociology, than is acknowledged by the gentlemen historians, and a careful study reveals that they were not the by-product of mass hysteria or aberrant psychological conditions of a few crazies nor were they the product of the superstitious Roman mind ignorant of natural laws.
Georges Dumezil seeks to explain prodigies as mass psychosis around the time of the Second Punic War:
Indeed, Livy notes connections between times of war and the increased reporting of prodigies but if one reviews the annual reporting of portents throughout the history of the Republic, one discovers that the “psychosis” from which Rome was suffering lasted over 800 years down to the end of the reign of Domitian. What such scholars miss entirely is the fact that the entire Roman governing system was set up as the social and religio-political means of maintaining equilibrium between Rome and the gods who were, obviously, upset rather often. Further, there are numerous “heavenly prodigies” that are not linked to martial activity and wars that are not linked to prodigies.
Those historians who think that the extraordinary phenomena reported by the Romans were just a means of political mass manipulation also miss the point. Overall, it seems that it wasn’t just the masses who believed – the magistrates and senate were as preoccupied with the indications of wrath as everyone else. Portents weren’t used to control the masses although, in the later Republic it is obvious that they were used for political purposes in the conflicts within the ruling aristocracy itself. This process was described by Toynbee:
Toynbee was influenced by the Greek Polybius’s view that the purpose of Roman religion was to control the passions and violent anger of the masses. His idea was naturally conditioned by his own culture; to Polybius, the linking of res publica to public divination was preposterous. Nevertheless, it is true that there was a growing Hellenization in Rome and thus, there appears to be some validity in this idea at least toward the end of the republic and among a few of its politicians, though not all by a long shot!
Cicero tells us that the idea of interpreting and then performing rituals to expiate prodigies and portents came from the Etruscans. A public prodigy or portent was one that was reported to the senate and approved by that body as a prodigium publicum, a portent relevant to the society as a whole and which would require the entire society to contribute to the ritual expiation. Whatever it was, it was an indicator that the pax deorum had been disturbed.
There was a distinction between private and public prodigies though private prodigies that occurred in respect of public individuals could be adjudged as public portents. But the procedure that had to be followed for the declaration to be made and the expiation performed, demonstrates that it was solely the purview of the senate to approve the prodigy as public. Further, it seems clear that what was or was not determined to be a public prodigy does not indicate any sort of religious development on the part of the Romans. They were singularly rigid and conservative right up to the end of the republic at which point, Cicero, in a desperate bid to “save the republic”, fought viciously against those who would set aside the strict powers of the senate to declare prodigies and expiations.
In respect of Cicero and his war against change, a particular type of prodigy comes to the fore as significant: incestum of the Vestal Virgins; that is, breaking of the vows of chastity by any of the virgins put in charge of tending the sacred fire of the temple of Vesta. Such a “prodigy” consists in a violation of sacred law by human beings: incorrect behavior that could anger the gods towards the entire populace. This would constitute a tangible violation threatening the welfare of Roman society and the security of the state militarily and politically.
As will be discussed further on, there were a number of such episodes of incestum on the part of the Vestal virgins, though not so many as might be expected over the very long life of the institution. However, one of the earlier events was in 216 BC when the Vestal Virgins Opimia and Florionia were accused. Livy then notes that a very un-Roman expiation was undertaken, to wit, a Gallic man and woman, and a Greek man and woman, were buried alive at the Forum Boarium . Then, one of the virgins involved committed suicide and the other was buried alive while at least one of the men involved, a scriba pontificius named L. Cantilius, was flogged to death – a very usual Roman procedure. We can also note that 216 BC was the year in which Hannibal defeated Roman forces at the Battle of Cannae. In numbers of Romans killed, this was the second greatest defeat of Rome, after the Battle of Arausio.
In short, in addition to celestial phenomena, meteorological phenomena, the birth of deformed infants, talking cows, rains of blood and milk, fertile mules, incorrect human behavior could be adjudged as prodigies by the senate, and therefore requiring public expiation. At the same time, some prodigies could be interpreted as favorable.
Rasmussen describes the fixed procedure for determining prodigies based on the sources. Anyone could report an observation of an unusual event to the senate. The consuls would normally present the reports along with eyewitnesses who corroborated the event. Some reports were submitted in writing. The senate then had to decide if the event was a prodigium publicum. There were three options available to them at this point:
1) Refusal to approve the event as a prodigy. This could be justified on the grounds that there were too few witnesses or the witnesses were of dubious reliability.
2) Approve the event as a prodigy, but not relevant to the public welfare. It would be declared to be a “private portent.”
3) Approve the event as important to the public welfare and then undertake to find out from specialists what form the expiation must take.
For the latter part of the process, there were three different groups of experts: the decemviri sacris faciundis, the pontifices, and the haruspices. The determination of the priests were given in the form of responsa and decreta which the senate could then choose to comply with or not. They could also decide whether or not to report the prodigy and responses to the public. At that point, the senate could authorize the recommended actions which was the formal responsibility of the consuls who frequently were the ones required to perform the expiatory sacrifices themselves. This will be important further on, so keep it in mind. For the moment, I'll just note that Livy reports several cases where prodigies were reported and had to be expiated after new consuls had been elected and before the old consuls had left to take up governorships in their assigned provinces as was the general order of things. The timing and swiftness could ensure a good beginning for the next year. The delays imposed on consuls due to prodigies reveals quite clearly that the manner of dealing with public portents certainly exerted a powerful influence on the political establishment itself, and was not necessarily a tool for mass manipulation. Apparently, prodigies could be collected up and expiated all at once, but some of them were so serious that expiation was required as quickly as possible. The sources are very clear on the fact that prodigies were high priority items on the senatorial agenda. Issues relating to the gods were always dealt with before matters relating to human affairs. Rasmussen writes:
It seems that, in the year 193 BC, according to Livy, the Senate made a decision to stop accepting prodigy reports because they were too numerous. Rasmussen speculates that this was not so much evidence of political manipulation but that the high incidence of earthquakes and other prodigies of the time obstructed political life entirely. The prodigies prevented the departure of the consuls, prevented the convening of the senate, the transaction of any public business, etc. The Sibylline Books were consulted and the necessary rituals performed, after which the senate said “that’s enough.” The fact that the senate had to take this extreme measure is evidence of the essential role of prodigies in the political life of Rome. Once a prodigy had been reported, the senate was obliged to deal with it according to traditional, fixed, procedure. If, as some scholars would like to think, portents held no real significance at the political level, the senate could easily have chosen to ignore or reject them. Instead, in the above case, they pursued the policy of a singular expiation as advised by the priests and the Sibylline books, and were assured thereby that they could stop accepting further reports and being required thereby to deal with them.
On another occasion that Livy reports, a violent wind knocked over a pillar and statue in front of the temple of Jupiter in 152 BC. The haruspices interpreted the prodigy to mean death among the magistrates and priests upon which announcement, every single one of them resigned! That's not the behavior of non-believers!
The point of this brief survey is that environmental factors, human behaviors, and unusual phenomena had decisive, even controlling, influences on social, political, and military affairs in the Roman Republic right down to the time of, and including the actions of, Cicero, as I will show further on. Indeed, we will see that political manipulation of this tradition took place, but the tradition, the system, had to exist first – and in a significant way – for such manipulation to be implemented – as it was by Cicero.
According to the tradition, auspicia were originally a patrician prerogative whereas plebeian magistrates, assemblies, and plebiscite were usually appointed or approved without any prior taking of auspices. The traditional patrician monopoly on auspices raises a number of questions, especially about how plebeians accessing patrician offices were handled with respect to the patrician auspices. The sources indicate considerable social, political, and religious changes in the relationship between patricians and plebeians from around 500 BC until the passing of the Licini-Sextic laws in 367 BC granting plebeians access to the consulate, and the lex Ogulnia in 300 BC which gave them access to the college of augurs and the college of pontifices.
The right to take auspicia was transferred through the election of magistrates and, according to Varro, the patrician auspices could be divided into two categories: auspicia maxima and auspicia minora. Auspicia maxima related to consuls, praetors, and censors, whereas asupicia minora related to the other types of magistrates. In other words, there were various auspices depending on magisterial rank and the right to take auspices was relinquished at the end of one’s magisterial term. If the succession of consuls was interrupted, the auspices reverted to the senate until new consuls were elected. In war, the right of auspicy was transferred to the commander by means of lex curiata.
The four priesthoods relating to official Roman divination were:
1) The Roman Xviri sacris faciundis (originally IIviri; from 367 BC Xviri, and from Sulla onwards SVviri, who interpreted prodigia
2) The Roman pontifices, who interpreted prodigia
3) The Roman augures, who interpreted auspice
4) The Etruscan haruspices, who interpreted exta and prodigia
The sources reveal that the senate often directed the Xviri to consult the libri Sibyllini in order to determine the appropriate expiation rituals. This priesthood originally consisted of only two members (IIviri) and sources credit Tarquinius Superbus with acquiring the Sibylline Books and establishing this priesthood. In 367, the number of priests was increased to ten (Xviri). It was also decided at that time that plebeians could achieve membership: five patricians and five plebeians (Livy 6.42.2) The number was then increased again to 15 (XVviri) from 51 BC onwards.
The primary task of this college was to guard and consult the Sibylline Books. According to tradition, this collection of Greek oracular pronouncements was only consulted to clarify prodigies that proved difficult to interpret or were particularly terrifying as mentioned in Livy 22.9.8. The directions from the Sibylline Books were often concerned with introducing Greek cults and other foreign cults and rites and human sacrifices.
The pontifices' duties and privileges included listing reports of prodigies and consulting the libri pontificii. These books included annual chronicles, lists of magistrates, wars, important events, rituals performed and results, commentary on all of these things, and responses and decreta on religious matters. The original number of pontifices was three but this was increased to six, nine, fifteen, and finally sixteen by Julius Caesar (who was pontifex maximus). The college was opened to plebeians in 300 BC. Cicero’s speech De domo sua reveals the decisive role the pontifices played in treating prodigies. The expertise of this priesthood was crucial to the Senate’s decision in the religious dispute over Cicero’s house which had been razed during his exile and consecrated to the gods. Cicero wanted the land back.
The augural college was parallel to the pontifices in number and expansion of those members. There were originally three members – one for each tribe – and then six, then opened to plebeians and expanded to nine and then increased by Sulla to 15 and Caesar adding a 16th.
In the beginning, the priests were selected, then the Lex Domitia de sacerdotiis in 104 BC abolished this co-optive election and replaced it with elections in 17 tribes chosen by lot. This law was repealed by Sulla in 81 BC, but restored in 63 BC through the Lex Labiena. This was important to the election of Julius Caesar as Pontifex Maximus. Members of the colleges of pontifices and Xviri were elected for life. However, they could forfeit their offices if sentenced in court, though augurs appear to have been immune to this.
It is fairly clear that these offices were held by men from the most wealthy and powerful families meaning noble patrician families and ennobled and wealthy plebeian families: the political elite of Rome. The same group of people combined the roles of handling religious affairs as well as making political decisions in the interests of the state. As we can see from Cicero’s writings, he saw absolutely nothing wrong with this and from his perspective, an ideal social and religio-political establishment featuring the same people was not only acceptable, but highly desirable. This, of course, leads to the consideration that the formal distinction between priesthoods and magistracies was only a technical detail that meant nothing in practice. Not all priests were magistrates, nor all magistrates priests, to be sure; Cicero did not become an augur until ten years after his consulship. Further, the pontifex maximus could order a person who was simultaneously serving as priest and magistrate to pay a fine for putting his magisterial duties above his religious duties. This highlights the fact that, at some point in time, it must have been seen as needful to put measures in place to ensure that politics yielded to religion because the latter was seen as the preeminent concern of the political state. Nevertheless, it is clear that certain individuals did hold multiple offices and would have discussed religio-political affairs among themselves.
The haruspices were recruited from aristocratic Etruscan families and were a very prestigious group. Etruscan principes early intermarried with Patrician families and the Etruscan institution was internalized in these noble families and passed down father to son. Cicero mentions a senate decree stating that sons from the most prominent families were to study haruspicy to prevent the discipline from dying out. Their principal duty was to “read the entrails” of the victims. Another haruspex group appears to have been linked to the sacrifices performed by the magistrates. They often went along on military campaigns as well. There were also, it seems, wandering “street-corner” haruspices specializing in private “readings” whom Cicero, Cato and others considered to be charlatans. The haruspices do not seem to have been members of an actual Roman priesthood nor did they have a collegium, but they were highly respected as experts nevertheless as the sources show that the Roman authorities systematically made use of these Etruscan priests in the interpretation of public prodigies. In recounting Postumius’ speech on the Bacchanalia affair in 186 BC, Livy places the haruspical responsa on a par with pontifical responsa.
Apparently, the different priesthoods had different specialties that were complementary and they appear to have worked together without competition. The sources emphasize interpretations and calculations on the part of haruspices, so different criteria must have determined who was called in. Cicero points out several instances in which the haruspices and Xviri gave identical responses.
In Rome, the struggle for political power was not in any way a fight to “control the gods” because in Rome, augury and auspicia was not at all about “gaining control over the gods or forces of life”. On the contrary, in the Roman view of things, human beings were subject to the will of the gods and the religio-political desire was, above all, to be in harmony with the gods while one’s opponents could be accused of being in disharmony. To the Roman mind, the wish to exercise control over the gods would, itself, constitute a violation of the pax deorum. Neglecting the auspices could be fatal, as the ancient sources exampled time and time again.
In short, the function of auspices and augury was to examine and confirm that Roman society was in good relationship to the gods in respect of planned political, religious and military undertakings, offices, and individuals. If such confirmation was not forthcoming, the reason or error had to be determined using the augural science and expiation undertaken which could reestablish the balance.
Despite the senate’s status as the ultimate decision-making authority in public portent matters, there is no doubt that the official augurs did wield considerable power being the only religious specialists authorized to advise on the interpretation of auspices relevant to the welfare of the Roman state. According to the rules of the ideal state, Cicero tells us in De legibus, that those leading negotiations must observe the auspices and obey the public augur. Furthermore, in the event of a conflict between the magistrates and the official priesthoods’ observations and expertise in matters of public portents, the regard for religio is always identified with the regard for the welfare of the res publica. This places the response from the official priesthoods over and above the individual magistrate’s actions, opinions and schemes.
Now, even though Cicero was a superficial, self-contradictory, hypocritical manipulator and pinning down his own religious attitude is iffy at best, he is still one of the most important sources on divination and public portents. His often polemical approach to the topic while, at the same time, saying that it was the only way to do things, can certainly be confusing. When it is useful for something he wants, like the approval of the optimates or getting his house back, he’s all for it. But when he wants to impress his philosophical friends, he’s full of criticism. However, I think his ambiguous position actually acts in our favor: we may get a relatively undistorted view of things because, as Goar wrote:
Obviously, Cicero was never sincere about anything except getting what he wanted and being approved by the “in crowd” that had been inculcated into him as the ONLY group worth belonging to since his youth. For Cicero, Greek theory is one thing, Roman practices are another. This is evident from the considerable social and religious prestige Cicero associates with the office of augur, which he was proud to attain in 53 BC. To Cicero, philosophy was a diversion while Roman religion was a historical, social, and political necessity for preserving the res publica.
Obviously, when considering all this Roman business of killing critters and splattering blood everywhere every time they turned around, along with all the other apparently silly rituals, one begins to think that these people were simply nuts. You ask yourself: how could anybody believe that nonsense?! And when you consider that our own civilization is considered to be modeled on that one, that great thinkers of the Renaissance attributed to such as Cicero enormous powers of intellect and rationality, how the heck do we deal with the fact that these people – including Cicero – were regularly peering at the guts of freshly dead animals in order to decide whether or not they should take a trip, make a speech, pass a law, make war, or execute prisoners?
Obviously, we cannot judge them by the standards of our own time. Perhaps they would be more justifiably appalled at our nebulous astralized belief systems that don’t seem to have anything at all to do with reality. Obviously, rationality is a culture-bound and context-related concept. As Rasmussen says:
Obviously, something happened during the formation of the Roman state, and throughout its existence, that made what they were doing entirely rational. My suggestions are, of course, described in some detail in my previous book, “Comet and the Horns of Moses” so I won’t go into it in any detail here except to say that the cosmic threats to humanity must have been clearly understood by the early Romans and some fairly frightening and traumatic activity continued off and on for several hundred years.
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Next, I'll try to get some of the portents listed. I think it is important to realize that all the truly weird stuff happening nowadays has happened many times before. It also helps to know what might "happen next."
