LIVY ENDS THE FIRST FIVE BOOKS OF HIS HISTORY, THE ONES that start with Romulus and Remus, with the near destruction of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BCE and the Roman escape under the leadership of Marcus Camillus, venerated as the second founder of Rome. Livy gives Camillus a fine long speech to say, in which he proudly claims that “Our city was founded with auspices and augury. There is no place in it that is not full of gods and cult.”1
Augury was the science of bird-watching. Birds of the sky were closer to the gods, and the beauty and liberty of their flight reflected the thoughts and intentions of the gods on high themselves. A complex body of lore had built up to help magistrates read the skies, to determine whether a course of action already selected would meet with divine favor. Good signs meant approval, bad ones called for a change of plans. The lore and technique are all but lost to moderns and the process seems merely preposterous. Showing that the gods approved of what the magistrates and generals were doing made everyone—leaders and citizens—feel better about what was going on. With voting irrelevant and with no opinion polls beyond the voice of a mob, a structured, solemn, ceremonial way of seeking and displaying divine favor was a mainstay of leadership.
With time, change. It was hard not to become cynical over time about the workings of this process. So arbitrary and subjective were the criteria of reading the sky that it became commonplace in the late days of the Roman Republic to say and think that anyone could see whatever he wanted, if only he would look. To declare that a magistrate was “watching the sky” was to declare an intention to obstruct another magistrate’s course of action. Time after time in the late Republic, the declaration that one of the authorized magistrates was watching the sky was immediately taken as an effective veto on whatever course of action had been proposed. Surely he would find what he sought. If the distributed rule of magistrates had not ended with the authoritarianism of Augustus, augury would have had to be dispensed with, for it was only an obstacle and was rapidly losing its credibility. It survived as a showpiece ritual from which no one expected to learn anything.
Haruspicy, the reading of guts, was like and unlike reading the sky. Both depended on the idea that divine will manifested itself at a human scale in the diverse appearance and behavior of animals. As with augury, lack of sympathy and our lack of detailed information make the ritual seem fundamentally crazy. Groping around in the inner organs of a slaughtered animal to determine whether there are anomalies or misformations is a laughable way for a grown man to act, much less to think that he finds there a message from the gods. Worse, some of the reported anomalies they found are not merely anomalous but impossible: like the cases where an animal was said to have no heart.
Reading the guts had limited impact in an important way. The practice depended on sacrifice and was mainly interpreted in the context of the ritual. In ordinary cases, a bad reading required that the sacrifice be repeated until the gods showed they were satisfied. Repeated failure would be bad news—but if the setting were ordinary, the result would only be anxiety. When sacrifices were being offered as part of some larger enterprise, like the ritual of new consuls or preparation for a military campaign, the impact of bad readings might be greater. Great enterprises would rarely be derailed this way, but the reassurance normally sought and received this way could be missed and the anxiety of missing it could be real. Gut-reading required a special skill; sky-watching was a task even the powerful could undertake. So sky-watching was corrupted, while the credibility of gut-reading persisted as long as the rituals of sacrifice did.
Both birds and guts went gradually away as markers of the future. The idea of sympathetic magic that underlay both—that is, that divine will and the material realities of the animal kingdom were in deep harmony—faded but did not disappear with time, not out of skepticism or disbelief so much as because competitors with stronger claims prevailed. Oracles and stars are no more likely to tell us true than a cow’s liver, but their use was accepted as a sign of greater cultural sophistication.
That gods would speak through animals was one idea, but that they would speak through human beings was far easier to accept—and easier to manage. In simplest form, this meant going to the divine place to hear an inspired priest or priestess recite words from the god in response to a question. The imperfection of the medium was acknowledged by its form, for the messages usually came veiled in ambiguity and obscurity. We’ll meet a general further on who went off to battle encouraged by oracular guidance, having been told his campaign would lead to the destruction of Rome’s enemy, not expecting that it was he who would die. The message that takes interpretation and gets taken wrong the first time is common in oracle stories. The prophecy is always vindicated, for whatever reassurance that brought, and the human interpreter is always the source of error.
The speaking voice of the god through a human mouth was still a hard thing to find. A small number of places in the world (like Delphi in Greece or Hammon in Egypt—both locations a little out of the way) claimed and won the right to host a godly voice. Demand was much broader, and so we see then practices like those of the Sibylline oracles, the oracle frozen on a page. Books were written, notionally at some site of divine presence, then laid open to interpretation by local priests. The fifteen men in charge of rites at Rome could look at the Sibylline books and make up the answers to their own questions as they went along. As we saw, when the books were destroyed, it turned out they could be very easily replaced. What mattered more than where and how they got to be worthy of belief was that they were books people believed in. Keeping the book secured away in a temple and open only to the priesthood was a way of controlling the divine voice. With a sense of poignancy over time, many observed that the old oracles were fading away and speaking less than they used to, but at the same time, oracles had “gone public.” Oracle texts came into wide circulation, texts the private user could employ to make his own estimate of the future. Those texts were often consciously written to advance specific ideological, political, or religious views, but for the most part that obtrusiveness of a very human voice was opaque to the readers. They wanted to hear the divine voice and could be easily persuaded that they did. Even the Sibyls, it turned out, found new voice in this way!2 The routinization of charisma, as the sociologist rightly says.
The desire to know the future was universal, and so universal means of hinting at it were developed. The stars above are beautiful and impressive. Night after night, they appear to orbit the earth in an entirely predictable fashion. The movement of the great and lesser bears in their dance around the North Pole is imperceptibly different from one lifetime to the next, and so the figures people thought they saw made the sky a landscape of stories and images. A Ptolemaic sky had its oddities, so there were also the wandering stars (planetes is the Greek word for “wanderer”) and sun and moon besides, more cyclically regular in their apparent movements but still, already in ancient times, predictable. Babylonian astronomy already saw a connection between the patterns above and the workings of the material and human worlds.
The campaigns of Alexander the Great in the east brought cultural borrowings on many levels. The city named after him in Egypt, Alexandria, was the first place to see the rise of the astrological horoscope—that is, a text that analyzed in detail and with accuracy the meaning of the position of birth stars for the life of an individual. By Claudius Ptolemy’s time (in the age of Hadrian in the first century), the system of mathematically accurate astronomy as it related to human lives was essentially developed to its fullest extent. What charlatans now promote as astrology would be entirely recognizable to Ptolemy as astronomy.
That argument went roughly this way. We live in a messy, mutable, fragile world, the world of matter, life, and inevitable death. The messiness and vulnerabilities of that world ended, on clear astronomical observation, at the orbit of the moon. John Donne’s “sublunary lovers” are thus lovers in this world of matter below the moon’s orbit, not the ethereal world above. The world of the stars above, by contrast, was perfect, immutable. In this view, widely held among the learned, the spirits of the dead rose up from their bodies and fled beyond the moon to the world of gods and immortality. Astronomy/astrology, undifferentiated at the time, was the science of that world of rationality, a subject to be studied precisely because it led the mind beyond dull earthly matter to the higher realm of order and spirit. The ancient “liberal arts” were laid out in a sequence meant to take the mind from confusion to order in the world of words (grammar, then rhetoric, then logic) and in the world of numbers (arithmetic, geometry, then musical harmony), and then in the order of the stars and spheres. You pursued those arts in order to prepare yourself for contemplation of the divine order of the world.3
Astrology was then not just science—it was the very best and highest science. Within the lifetime of people who attended Augustus’s games of the century, astrology became the fashion among Roman elites. Emperors mistrusted it, not because they thought it was false, but because they worried it was likely true, and therefore a tool that private individuals could use to learn threatening things about the lives and prospects of rulers. The “open-source” data of astronomical handbooks made them more threatening than the classified information in earlier sources like the Sibylline books. The most nervous religious prohibitions of the pre-Christian era were those against practices that could threaten an emperor, such as night sacrifice, magic, and astrology.
All these modes of knowing had their live and vivid critics in antiquity itself. Take Mosollamus, the Jewish soldier under the earliest Ptolemaic kings of Egypt recounted in Josephus’s Against Apion. The Jewish scholar, who witnessed the sack of Jerusalem, is quoting a tale supposedly told by Hecateus three hundred years before him.4 An army on the march comes upon an augur watching a bird sitting in a tree and commanding them therefore to halt. When asked why, he reports that the bird’s movements must determine theirs. As long as the bird stays where it is, they must stay where they are. If it flies on ahead, they are to march ahead; but if it takes off and flies in another direction, even back along their line of march, then that is the direction in which they must go. The generals, as the story goes, are cowed into silent observation and prospective obedience. Mosollamus is impatient, so he takes out his bow, aims, shoots, and kills the bird on the spot. As it falls dead, he turns to his colleagues and says essentially, “If that fool bird was smart enough to know the future, why didn’t he foresee that?”
That’s a great joke, worthy of the Catskills in their glory, and it was told well into the lifetimes of people who had met Jesus. It means less than it appears to, however. I could take it as proof that the smartest of the ancients were not taken in by augury. That Josephus attributes the story—genuinely or not—to an author who lived a generation after Alexander could be taken as evidence that their skepticism had a long history. But belief persisted.
Below, behind, beneath, and around all the other religious practices of the ancient world lay the often hidden domain of magic. No respectable person ever speaks well of magic, though a good many respectable and many less-than-respectable ones practiced it.5 Serious contemporary writers made light of it. Pliny the Elder and Plutarch wrote about the motives of those selling magic curses and cures with disdain and suspicion. Apuleius wrote his novel The Golden Ass about a man who toys with magic, is badly bitten by his curiosity when he turns into a donkey, and then is rescued by the great goddess Isis. At the same time, Apuleius was himself accused of magic for having persuaded a rich elderly widow to marry him—so old at age forty that surely only magic could have won her to this younger man. It was a serious charge, but his surviving Apology manages the defense with wit, mockery, and misdirection. We’re left with the strong suspicion that he’d been up to something. Archaeologists meanwhile find abundant evidence for the everyday use of charms, amulets, curse tablets, and the like, all employed to bend the world to the wishes of the practitioner.6 Nothing in the sequence of events that brought an end to sacrifice, augury, haruspicy, and oracles seems to have disturbed these homely, reassuring, ineffective practices.