- chapter 26: Haruspicy and augury –
Figure 26.5 Clay model of a sheep’s liver from Mesopotamia, eighteenth century bce. Inv. BM Bu
89–4–26, 238. London, British Museum.Then there are numerous references to books with particular categories of information.
Vegoia (=Etruscan Vecuvia or Lasa Vecuvia) was said to have written about lightning,
and thus the books referred to as fulgurales...libri and Etrusci libri de fulguratura may
have been contained in the libri Vegoici.^28 Tages, the wizened child who emerged from
a ploughed furrow at Tarquinii and revealed the basic tenets of divination to the city
founder, Tarchon, is especially associated with haruspication; he is said to have fi rst
demonstrated extispicium, the examination of exta (i.e. entrails).^29 Thus aruspicinae libri or
simply haruspicini may refer to a part of the libri Tagetici.^30 Tages is also said to have treated
sacra Acheruntia, rites that have to do with fate and the Afterlife, and rituals related to
founding cities and delimiting boundaries.^31 The former may have been contained in the
libri fatales; the latter were certainly in the libri rituales.^32 Libri exercituales may have been
for the use of haruspices in the army.^33 Etruscan books on auspicious birds were so detailed
that there were even illustrations to identify each bird that was being observed.^34
Cicero relates that at Rome prodigies were to be delegated to Etruscan haruspices,^35
thereby indicating that haruspicina actually embraced a good bit more than the reading of
entrails. In fact there are several passages in Cicero’s De divinatione (2. 42; 49–50) in which the
word haruspicina seems to apply to divination in general and thus to be loosely equivalent to
the Etrusca disciplina. Cicero’s well-known text of 56 bce on the response of the haruspices
(De haruspicum responsis) notes that the haruspices are charged with interpreting a strepitus
cum fremitu (“a clamor, with roaring”) in the ager Latiniensis. Other prodigies referred to
the haruspices by the Romans are numerous and remarkable: lightning, monstrous births,
androgynies, a rain of stones, a rain of blood, talking cows, oxen climbing stairs, a statue
that is blown over, a statue weeping, fl ames from the earth, a trumpet blast from the sky, a
speaking infant, a rain of iron, bees on the Capitol.^36 All of these belong to the period of the
Republic, and stand a reasonable chance of indicating matters of concern to the Etruscans
themselves within their own political bodies and society.
The names of various Roman antiquarians and scholars are associated with the study
and preservation of Etruscan books and teachings, falling roughly into two time periods
- the Late Republic/Early Empire and Late Antiquity. From the earlier period,^37 the