The right of taking auspices was neither a priestly nor even a magisterial function, but was possessed by every Patrician. But the man in a private capacity could exercise it only in his private concerns; the auspices destined to guide public action are vested in the person of the patrician magistrate. Hence the distinction between auspicia publica and privata. There was a time when no important act of business or domestic life was undertaken without an appeal for divine guidance.[1] Marriage especially demanded the taking of the auspices; and even when the custom of such private divination had become wholly discarded, a survival of the custom is found in the presence of auspices, friends of the bridegroom who superintend the due performance of the rites.[2] The confarreatio was older than the traditional institution of the augural college, and it is not probable that official intervention was brought to bear on marriage, still less on such concerns as were more strictly private. Hence it is difficult to see how the Plebeians could have been prevented from taking the auspicia privata, although their use of them was probably scoffed at by their patrician rulers. On the one hand, we find that the incapacity of the Plebeians to share in the auspices was one of the arguments used against the permission of conubium between the orders;[3] on the other, that the auspex continues to be an integral part of a ceremony which was founded on plebeian marriage law.
It was different with the auspices taken on behalf of the state (auspicia publica). It is the Patricians alone who have these auspices, and only a magistrate belonging to the order can exercise the right of looking for them (spectio).[4] This remains not only a purely magisterial, but a purely patrician privilege,
- ↑ Cic. de Div. i. 16, 28 "Nihil fere quondam majoris rei, nisi auspicato, ne privatim quidem, gerebatur: quod etiam nunc nuptiarum auspices declarant, qui, re omissa, nomen tantum tenent." In i. 17, 31 we have the story of Attus Navius taking auspices by aves in a private matter. Cf. Liv. vi. 41.
- ↑ Cic. de Div. i. 16, 28 (see last note); Suet. Claud. 26; Tac. Ann. xi. 27.
- ↑ Liv. iv. 2 "Quas quantasque res C. Canuleium adgressum? Conluvionem gentium, perturbationem auspiciorum publicorum privatorumque adferre." Yet this passage has only an indirect reference to the matrimonial auspicia. The argument is that intermarriage would cause the pure Patriciate to disappear, and with it the general right of taking auspicia impetrativa.
- ↑ Cic. de Div. ii. 36, 76 "a populo auspicia accepta habemus." The relation of auspicia habere to the spectio is that the former denotes the abstract right of questioning the gods, the latter its exercise in a particular case (Momms. Staatsr. i. 89 n. 3). The specification by the magistrate of the signs which he wished to see was known as legum dictio (Serv. ad Aen. iii. 89; cf. p. 43 n. 2).
