w, were not prophecies;
and the augural art never provided an answer to the question, "What is
going to happen?" but only to that much more religious one, "Are the
deities willing that we should do this or that?"[613]

But before I leave the subject of private divination, I must note that
there was a department of it which may be called legitimate, as
distinguished from that of the quack. I mean the _auspicia_ of the
family religion, and also the comparatively harmless folklore about
omens of all sorts and kinds.

Naturally we have little information about legitimate _auspicia_ in the
life of the family; but we have seen that the religious instinct of the
Roman forbade him to face any important undertaking or crisis without
making sure of the sanction of the _numina_ concerned, and among the
methods of insurance (if I may use a convenient word) the _auspicia_
must have had a place from the earliest times. No important thing was
done, says Cicero in the _de Divinatione_, "nisi auspicato, ne privatim
quidem."[614] Valerius Maximus says the same in so many words, and some
other evidence has been collected by De Marchi in his work on the
private religion of the Romans.[615] But only in the case of marriage do
we hear of _auspicia_ in historical times, and even there they seem to
have degenerated into a mere form. "Auspices nuptiarum, re omissa, nomen
tantum tenent"--so Cicero wrote of his own time;[616] he seems to be
thinking of augury by means of birds, for he adds, "nam ut nunc extis
sic tunc avibus magnae res impetrari solebant." As we have already seen,
the object of the examination of a victim's entrails was simply to
ascertain its fitness to be offered; but by Cicero's time the Etruscan
art of divination by this method must have penetrated into private life.
I think we may conjecture that in the life of the family on the land the
_auspicia_, as the word itself implies, were worked chiefly by
observation of birds. Nigidius Figulus, the learned mystic of Cicero's
time, wrote a book, _de Augurio Privato_, of which one fragment survives
which has to do with this kind of divination, and with the distinction
between omens from birds seen on the right or left, and from high or low
flyers.[617] In the familiar ode of Horace beginning, "Impios parrae
recinentis omen,"[618] the _corvus_ and _cornix_ are mentioned besides
the _parra_, and in that wholesome old out-of-door life of the farm, as
I said just now, there was a certa