f human nature, though
a perverse one; if left to itself it will apparently pass into the
region of harmless folklore, where it does not seriously interfere with
human progress, either secular or religious; but where, as at Rome, it
is taken up into the ritual of a religious system, and is further
allowed to express itself mechanically in the region of public law, it
exhausts itself rapidly, loses all its original significance, and
becomes a clog on human progress.

In ancient Italy this instinct for divination was nowhere so strongly
and so perversely developed into a mechanical system as in Etruria, and
it is highly probable that this development contributed largely to the
rapid political and moral decay of the Etruscan people. The narrow
aristocratic constitution of the Etruscan cities, worked by a kind of
priestly nobility, seems to have afforded great opportunities for the
cultivation of the perverse art which (as we are now beginning to
recognise) this people had brought with them from the East.[643] I have
already suggested that an Etruscan dominion at Rome had very probably
unfortunate results in developing and formalising the art of the augurs.
But the age of the Tarquinii was not the only one in which the sinister
influence of this strange people was brought to bear on Roman religious
institutions; and before I close this lecture I must say a very few
words about a second invasion of Etruscan perversity, which began some
two centuries and a half later. This was the result of that renewed
_religio_, that feeling of anxiety and sometimes of despair
characteristic of the last half of the third century B.C., the perilous
era of the Punic wars, with which I shall deal more particularly in the
next lecture. The state religion could not soothe it; neither pontifices
nor augurs had any sufficient native remedy for it, and as the ritual of
worship was reinforced from Greece and the East, so the ritual of
divination was reinforced from Etruria.

The Etruscans seem to have educated their diviners with care and system.
We do not know the details of such education, but it seems likely that
there were schools of these prophets, by means of which the art was
handed down and developed.[644] The word for the person thus trained was
_haruspex_ in its Italian form as known to us, though it had an Etruscan
original.[645] The art acquired was of three kinds--the interpretation
of lightning; the explanation and interpretation of t