THE IMPORTANCE OF THE AUGURS IN ROME

The writer Livy, at the moment of introducing the second king of Rome Numa Pompilius in I. 18, describes the ceremony of appointment of Numa as new king after the ritual performed by an augur. The augurs were important in ancient Rome because they were an inheritance from the Etruscan civilization and had the role of interpreting the will of gods by studying the flight of birds. An episode in which the Romans used birdwatching to derive good or bad omens was when Romulus and Remus observed the flight of the vultures from the Palatine and from the Aventine.As it happened with the Pontifical college, at the beginning of the republican age the patricians held the office fo themselves only; by 300 BC the office of augur was open top the plebeians too. Augurs are often represented in the Etruscan tombs and in some Roman reliefs with their typical curved staff called lituus. With the lituus they used to delimit the area in which a temple could be built but also they could see if the omen was good or not. Taking auspices and asking the gods about good or bad signs was part of the broader idea of the Pax deorum, in which the ancient community asked the favors of the Gods for its daily activity, from sailing to trade in a foreign land to the choice of the right moment to begin a war.And again Livy describes the role of a famous augur who lived under Tarquinius Priscus: when Tarquinius wanted to increase the number of the equestrian centuries, Navius opposed him declaring that the king should have not taken this decision, because the omens were not propitious. As Tarquinius did not believe in Navius divination powers, he asked the augur, as a proof of his powers, to cut a stone with a razor. Navius did cut the stone with the razors and after this event the power of this priesthood dramatically raised in Rome.