I preferred to present here the bases of the divination and his relationship with the Roman religion and mentality. In Rome, the divination is omnipresent. Undoubtedly bequeathed by the Etruscans, it covers at the same time the public domain and the private field.

I. “Private” soothsayers and public soothsayers

In the private field exite greatest freedom: itinerant soothsayers, prophets, magicians, haruspices, augurs, etc. For the public affairs exist three types of soothsayers:

- Augurs

According to Ancients themselves, the term of “augur” comes from avis gerere (“to observe the birds”). The College of the omens deciphers signa impetrativa, i.e. celestial signs requested from the gods by the men with a given aim, like a military campaign or the construction of a temple. the word “inauguration” was born from this significance.

- Quindecemviri sacris faciundis

This college of fifteen members - two before Sylla - proceeds, at the request of the Senate, the consultation of the Sybillins Books and deciphers signa oblativa, i.e. the signs which occur spontaneously, without human request (prodigia). The college must then indicate the rites necessary to the re-establishment of the pax deorum.

- Haruspices

The term of haruspicex comes from haru spicere, “to examine the entrails”. The haruspicex examines the internal bodies of the sacrificial victims, proceeding to extispicium to know if the gods accept the victim which is offered to them (litatio). If the bodies present anomalies, it is that the gods reject it, and it is then advisable to offer other victims (instauratio) to them.

II. Significance of the divination

The divination in Rome does not have a prophetic goal, at least with the usual signification of the word. Thus, the twelve centuries duration promised to Rome by the twelve vultures seen by Romulus, recalled by Sidoine Apollinaire in a famous poem, and realized with a margin of thirty years, does not deliver the key of its future but the registered voter simply within the framework of the duration promised to the cities and the nations, according to an Etruscan habit. The Etruscans, for their part, judged theirs to have to last ten centuries.

The divination is not the means of predicting the future, but that to decipher the organization of the universe, and to make sure that the human company is not in contradiction with it.

In Rome, the construction of a bridge is thus, like says Roger Caillois (“Cases d'un échiquier”), “a subterfuge sacrilege which, by itself, compromises the order of the world and which could only bring a terrible punishment to its author, its family, the nation, (...) [which], by its essence, infriges to a secret and inextricable system(...)”.

Indeed, the Roman religious thought is coherent, and rests on a philosophical design of the universe. The divination then makes it possible to the men to contribute to restore the disturbed order of the world.

(To be continued)

Lucius Rutilius Minervalis