01] so it was with
divination, which in the hands of the State authorities became
formalised into a set of rules for ascertaining the good-will of the
gods, and obtaining their sanction for the operations of the community,
which had no scientific basis whatever, no relation to truth and fact.
Of all the methods for putting yourself in right relation with the
Power, this was the least valuable, and indeed the most harmful; it came
in course of time to be a positive obstacle to efficiency and freedom of
action, it wasted valuable time, and it often served as the means of
promoting private ends to the detriment of the public interest.

Before I go on to consider the development of the highly formalised
system of public divination, let me clear the ground by a few remarks
about such forms of the practice as were not sanctioned by the State.
That these existed throughout Roman history there is no doubt, as they
existed in Greece, among the Jews, and elsewhere in the East, alongside
of the advanced and organised methods of official and authorised
experts.

Our information about private divination is scattered about in Roman
literature, and even when brought together there is not a great deal of
it. What is prominent both in Roman literature and Roman history is the
divination authorised by the State and systematised by its authorities;
even in Cicero's treatise _de Divinatione_, though the subject-matter is
of a general kind, drawn from Greece as well as Rome, it is, I think,
apart from philosophical questions, chiefly the art of augurs and
haruspices that interests the writer, who was himself an augur when he
wrote it. In Greek literature exactly the opposite is the case; there we
hear little of State-authorised divination, and a great deal of
wandering soothsayers, soothsaying families, and oracles which (except
at Delphi) were not under the direct control of a City-state.[602] The
methods of divination are much the same in both peninsulas, and indeed
vary little all the world over; the difference lies simply in
this,--that at Rome the adoption and systematisation by the State of
certain methods, especially those which dealt with birds and lightning,
had the effect of discrediting, if not excluding, an immense amount of
private practice of this kind. I mean that if the State strongly
sanctions some forms of divination, working them by its own officials,
it casts a shadow of discredit over the rest. As the _ius divinum_
te