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A seat at the augural board was regarded as a tribute to his merit rather than his birth; and indeed the Roman aristocrats, who dispensed such favours, were too clever to be the slaves of a name, when political manipulation was in question and talent might be diverted to the true cause. His marriage was a more important determinant in his career.
Cicero for instance, although in prose one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency, revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution and the augural discipline; "patriotism requires," we find him saying, "that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation of Sophocles than the original."
Of augural lore we have indeed enough and to spare. We know that the decumanus and the cardo, the two main lines of the Roman land-survey and probably also the two main streets of the Roman town-plan, were laid out under definite augural and semi-religious provision. We should expect to find more.
The 'insulae', whatever their shape square or oblong are fairly uniform throughout. The two main streets appear to follow some method of orientation connected with augural science.
The more openly the religion of the land was declared a political institution, the more decidedly the political parties regarded the field of the state-church as an arena for attack and defence; which was especially, in a daily-increasing measure, the case with augural science and with the elections to the priestly colleges.
The practical side of the Roman priesthood was the priestly cuisine; the augural and pontifical banquets were as it were the official gala-days in the life of a Roman epicure, and several of them formed epochs in the history of gastronomy: the banquet on the accession of the augur Quintus Hortensius for instance brought roast peacocks into vogue.
These writers, or at least the most ancient of them, Cato and Pictor, founded their investigations on such, records as treaties, public documents e.g. the annals, censors' and pontiffs' commentaries, augural books, books relating to civil procedure kept by the pontiffs, &c.; laws, lists of magistrates, Libri Lintei kept in the temple of Juno Moneta; all under the reservation noticed before, that the majority perished in the Gallic conflagration.
Their doctrine as to the gods and the state soon exhibited a singular family resemblance to the actual institutions of those who gave them bread; instead of illustrating the cosmopolitan state of the philosopher, they made their meditations turn on the wise arrangement of the Roman magistracies; and while the more refined Stoics such as Panaetius had left the question of divine revelation by wonders and signs open as a thing conceivable but uncertain, and had decidedly rejected astrology, his immediate successors contended for that doctrine of revelation or, in other words, for the Roman augural discipline as rigidly and firmly as for any other maxim of the school, and made extremely unphilosophical concessions even to astrology.
So the besom of revolution swept doubtless at times very roughly through the cobwebs of the augural bird-lore; nevertheless the rotten machine creaking at every joint survived the earthquake which swallowed up the republic itself, and preserved its insipidity and its arrogance without diminution for transference to the new monarchy.
As the day dawned, there was no banner hoisted on the Janiculum, although its turrets might be seen bristling with the short massive javelins of the legions, and gleaming with the tawny light that flashed from their brazen casques and corslets. There was no augural tent pitched on the hills without the city walls, wherefrom to take the auspices.
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