he entrails of
victims, and especially of the liver; and, thirdly, the explanation and
expiation of portents and prodigia.[646] All three departments seem to
have been carried to an extreme degree of perverse development. To give
an idea of it I need but refer to recent discussions of the relation
between the divisions marked on a bronze model of a victim's liver
(found in 1877 at Piacenza), in which are written the Etruscan names of
a great number of deities, and the somewhat similar divisions of the
templum of the heavens as given by Martianus Capella in explanation of
the celestial dwellings of the Italian deities. A study of this
unprofitable subject, of which the only interest lies in the
illustration it offers of the prostitution of human ingenuity, will be
found in a little work by Carl Thulin, published in the series called
_Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten_.[647]

Just as the Roman authorities had recourse from time to time to the
Sibylline books, so also they occasionally, though not apparently before
the Punic wars, sought the help of the trained Etruscan diviners. We
shall come across instances of this in the next two lectures, and I need
not specify them now. They seem to have used their art in all its
departments; and in the most degraded of these, the examination of
entrails, it was found so convenient to have their services in a
campaign that in course of time one at least seems to have accompanied
every Roman army.[648] The complicated art of augury might in fact be
dispensed with if you had a _haruspex_ ready and willing at a moment's
notice to give you a good report of the victim's liver. To keep up the
supply of experts, the senate, probably in the second century B.C.,
determined to select and train ten boys of noble family in each Etruscan
city. This was the last service that the degenerate Etruscan people
rendered to its conquerors, and a more degrading one it is impossible to
imagine. These foreign diviners were never admitted to the dignity of a
_collegium_;[649] they rather played the part of the domestic chaplain
kept to say grace before meat. For a moment they attract our attention
in connection with the persecution of Cicero by his political enemies,
and the _consecratio_ after his exile of the site of his house on the
Palatine hill.[650] For a moment again we meet with them in the reign of
Claudius, who was interested in the Etruscans and wrote a work about
them, and once rai