Prodigies and procuratio: how Rome answered the signs of divine anger
Showers of stones, talking oxen, sweating statues: how the Roman Senate received prodigies, who interpreted them and which rites were used to expiate them.
In republican Rome certain extraordinary events were not regarded as mere curiosities but as prodigies: signs indicating a rupture in the pax deorum, the good understanding between the city and its gods. A lightning strike on a temple, a shower of stones, the birth of a deformed animal or a statue that seemed to sweat had to be reported to the authorities and dealt with according to precise procedures.
The report to the Senate
Prodigies were announced to the Senate, which decided whether to accept them as phenomena of public concern. Not all were recognised: an event that occurred on private land, for example, could be excluded. Once accepted, the prodigy was entrusted to experts. The pontiffs indicated the traditional rites, the priests in charge of the Sibylline Books consulted those texts, and in the most obscure cases haruspices were summoned from Etruria.
Livy carefully records, year by year, the lists of prodigies reported to the Senate. A collection of these episodes, the Liber prodigiorum of Julius Obsequens, has come down to us in part and covers the period from 190 to 12 BC. The lists show a great variety of phenomena: talking oxen, swarms of bees, springs that seemed to flow with blood, lightning in a clear sky, animals born with unusual shapes.
Expiation
The response to a prodigy was called procuratio. It might consist of sacrifices, days of public prayer called supplicationes, or banquets offered to images of the gods, the lectisternia. Livy relates that as early as the reign of King Tullus Hostilius, after a shower of stones on the Alban Mount, a nine-day ceremony was instituted, the novendiale sacrum, which was repeated whenever the phenomenon recurred.
In cases considered most serious the procuratio could be dramatic. In 207 BC, during the war against Hannibal, a child of uncertain sex was born at Frusino. The haruspices summoned from Etruria ruled that it had to be removed from Roman territory: it was shut in a chest and thrown into the sea. The pontiffs also ordered twenty-seven maidens to go through the city singing a hymn composed by the poet Livius Andronicus.
A religion of the community
The system of prodigies reveals a particular conception of the relationship with the divine. The signs did not concern the fate of individuals but the community as a whole. They were especially frequent in times of crisis, such as the Hannibalic war, when tension made people more alert to every anomaly. Their expiation also had a civic function: it reassured the people and strengthened the cohesion of the city around its rites.
The recourse to Etruscan haruspices in particular shows that Rome did not hesitate to draw on foreign expertise when its own tradition was not enough. The pontiffs guarded the Roman rites, the Sibylline Books offered answers of Greek origin, and the haruspices brought the wisdom of Etruria. The city thus combined different religious systems in a single public procedure.
Livy already noted that in his day prodigies were reported less often, and he attributed this neglect to the same indifference that led many to believe that the gods no longer announced anything. Without believing every story, the historian refused to remove them from his work: they were part of Rome's memory and of the way in which its ancestors had made sense of events.