Augury

Article summary

, the curved wand often used as a symbol of augury on Roman coins Augury was the Roman religious practice of observing the behavior of birds to receive omens. When the individual, known as the augur, read these signs, it was referred to as "taking the auspices". "Auspex” (plural, “auspices”) ( ) means "one who divines by looking at birds". Depending upon the birds, the auspices from the gods could be favorable or unfavorable (auspicious or inauspicious). Sometimes politically motivated augurs would fabricate unfavorable auspices in order to delay certain state functions, such as elections. Pliny the Elder attributes the invention of auspicy to Tiresias the seer of Thebes. Over the development of the Roman empire, the definition of augury broadened to include other forms of divination. Haruspicy—the examination of animal entrails—was learned from the Etruscans. The Etruscan practice of observing thunder and lightning was also adapted. In Cicero's time, the augurs had mostly switched from using the flight of birds to haruspicy for public divination. This type of omen reading was already a millennium old in the time of Classical Greece: in the fourteenth-century BCE diplomatic correspondence preserved in Egypt called the Amarna correspondence, the practice was familiar to the king of Alasia in Cyprus who needed an "eagle diviner" to be sent from Egypt.…

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