Spurinna and the Ides of March: the omen Caesar ignored

The omen of the Ides of March has become proverbial, but the story behind it is more complex than is often thought. Its protagonist is a haruspex named Spurinna, who in the months before 15 March 44 BC is said to have warned Julius Caesar of mortal danger. The ancient sources tell the episode with some differences, but they agree that Caesar took no notice of the warning.

The victim without a heart

Cicero, who was writing De divinatione in those very months, records an event shortly before the assassination. On the day when Caesar first sat on the golden chair and appeared in purple robes, the ox offered in a sacrifice was found to have no heart. On the following day the liver of the victim lacked the part called the head. Both signs were considered among the gravest in haruspicy.

In the second book Cicero returns to the episode in a critical spirit. He observes that no animal can live without a heart and that, if the organ was not found, it must have been lost in some other way or simply not seen. It is one of the pages in which the author tests the credibility of traditional omens with arguments based on nature.

Come, but not gone

Suetonius, in his Life of Caesar, reports the warning more precisely. During a sacrifice Spurinna is said to have warned Caesar to beware of a danger that would not extend beyond the Ides of March. On the morning of the fifteenth, as he entered the senate house, Caesar mocked him as a false prophet, pointing out that the Ides had arrived without any harm. Spurinna replied that they had come, but had not yet gone.

Plutarch tells of the same exchange without naming the seer, and Valerius Maximus also places the episode among the famous cases of omens. The sources add other signs from those days: the dream of Caesar's wife Calpurnia, a small bird chased by others and torn apart in the curia of Pompey and, according to Cassius Dio, the arms sacred to Mars kept in Caesar's residence, which were said to have resounded during the night.

Who was Spurinna

We know little about Spurinna. The name is Etruscan and appears in inscriptions from Tarquinia, where a family named Spurinna played a leading role. Some scholars have suggested that the haruspex belonged to this aristocratic line, which would fit the tradition that the discipline was guarded by the great Etruscan families. It remains, however, a hypothesis that the sources do not allow us to confirm.

His presence beside Caesar should not surprise us. The dictator was also pontifex maximus and, like other magistrates of the time, made use of haruspices during public sacrifices. The very frequency of these rites makes it plausible that an Etruscan expert gave an unfavourable opinion, even though the exact form of his words was probably embellished in later retellings.

The story of Spurinna has travelled through the centuries. Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar, gives the warning to an unnamed soothsayer, making the phrase about the Ides of March famous. For the historian the episode is above all evidence of the presence of Etruscan haruspices at the very centre of Roman political life in the last years of the Republic.