The haruspices in Rome, from the republican Senate to Claudius's reform

Rome always had an ambivalent relationship with the haruspices. They were foreigners, they came from Etruria and they practised an art different from the Latin augural tradition. Yet in times of crisis the Senate turned precisely to them to interpret the most disturbing prodigies. Over the centuries these experts passed from being occasional consultants to forming an organised body in the service of the state.

An aristocratic training

Cicero, in De divinatione, mentions a decree of the Senate providing that some young men from the most distinguished families should be entrusted to the peoples of Etruria to learn the discipline there. The passage has reached us in a corrupt form and the number of youths is uncertain; Valerius Maximus reports a similar notice. The aim was clear: to prevent such important knowledge, through the poverty of those who practised it, from being reduced to a trade for hire.

Alongside high-ranking haruspices there were in fact private diviners who offered their services for money. Latin authors often speak of them with contempt. Cato the Elder, in his treatise on agriculture, recommends that the farm manager should not consult haruspices, augurs, soothsayers or Chaldean astrologers: advice that reveals how widespread these figures were, even in the countryside.

The response of 56 BC

A well-documented episode dates from 56 BC. In the territory near Rome a mysterious noise had been heard, accompanied by a din like that of weapons. The Senate consulted the haruspices, who identified several religious offences, including the profanation of sacred places. The tribune Publius Clodius used the response against Cicero, claiming that his house on the Palatine, rebuilt after his exile, stood on consecrated ground.

Cicero replied with a speech, De haruspicum responso, in which he interpreted the response in the opposite sense, attributing to Clodius himself the offences denounced by the gods. The speech is valuable because it shows how the opinions of the haruspices entered directly into political conflict, and how each side tried to turn them to its own advantage with the tools of eloquence.

The reform of Claudius

In the imperial age the prestige of the discipline seemed to be declining. Tacitus relates that in AD 47 the emperor Claudius, a great enthusiast for Etruscan antiquities and author of a history of the Etruscans in twenty books, written in Greek and now lost, proposed to the Senate that action be taken so that the oldest discipline of Italy should not die out through neglect. The Senate instructed the pontiffs to determine what in haruspicy should be preserved and strengthened.

Inscriptions of the imperial period mention an order of sixty haruspices, the ordo haruspicum LX, whose members came largely from Etruscan families. The bond with the land of origin remained strong: the discipline continued to be regarded as a heritage of Etruria even when the Etruscan language was no longer spoken. Alongside the public haruspices there were others who served in the retinue of emperors and governors.

The history of the haruspices in Rome is that of a foreign knowledge that became an institution. The Romans feared and respected it at the same time, and entrusted it with the questions their own religion could not answer. It was precisely this public role that ensured the Etruscan discipline survived for many centuries after the end of independent Etruria.