e peculiar
characteristic of the art of public divination, and as the augurs were,
like the pontifices, a close self-electing corporation until 104 B.C.
and a close self-electing _patrician_ body until the lex Ogulnia of 300
B.C., holding secret meetings every month on the _arx_,[637] and
recording their lore in books which were never made public, they might
well have grown into a powerful hierarchy, _if they had only been
possessed of the right of spectio_. What saved Rome from this fate was
simply the fact that the college was a body of interpreters only, or, in
other words, the principle that the _auspicia_ belonged exclusively to
the magistrate. The _auspicia_ were in fact a matter of public law, not
of religion, properly speaking; the idea on which they were based, that
the sanction of the deities was needed for every public action, very
early lost its true significance, and the process of taking them became
a mere form, the religious character of which was almost entirely
forgotten. They ceased to be matter of religion just as the amulet or
any other form of preventive magic fails to be reckoned as within the
sphere of religion; the feeling was there that they must be attended to
(though even that feeling lost its strength in course of time), but only
as a matter of custom, not because the Power was really believed to
sanction an act in this way.

Thus it seems that the importance of the augurs belongs to Roman public
law, and not to the history of Roman religious experience. It will be
found fully explained, in that connection, in Mommsen's _Staatsrecht_,
or in Dr. Greenidge's volume on _Roman Public Life_.[638] All we have to
note here is the complete secularisation of what was once really a part
of the Roman religion; the augurs themselves were public men and could
hold magistracies, and their art of interpretation came to be used for
secular and political purposes only. They could declare a magistrate
_vitio creatus_, whether they had been present at the taking of the
auspices or not; they could also on appeal stop the proceedings at a
public assembly, whether for election or legislation; it may be said of
them that in one way or another they had a veto on every public
transaction.[639] As Cicero expresses it in his _ius divinum_, in the
second book of his work on the constitution: "Quae augur iniusta nefasta
vitiosa dira defixerit inrita infectaque sunto, quique non paruerit,
capital esto."[640] But in spite