[586] Cato, De sacrilegio commisso, in Fest. 234. 30. No one could imagine Attus Navius, the swineherd, to have been a patrician, and yet he was the most famous of private augurs; Cic. Div. i. 17. It is significant, too, that the great authority on private auspices, P. Nigidius Figulus, author of Augurium privatum in several books (Gell. vii. 6. 10), was a plebeian.
[587] Livy iv. 2. 5 f.
[588] Livy iv. 6. 1 f.
[589] Livy vi. 41. 5 f.
[590] Cic. Div. ii. 36. 76: “Nos, nisi dum a populo auspicia accepta habemus, quam multum iis utimur?” i. 16. 28.
[591] Rubino, Röm. Verf. 46, n. 2, has pointed out that the phrase auspicia publica occurs only in Livy iv. 2. 5, where he believes it to be used in a special sense. In the time of Cicero no one but an antiquarian ever thought of any other kind of auspices.
[592] Livy x. 8. 9.
[593] The usual view, represented by Mommsen, Röm. Staatsr. i. 89, n. 1, is that the plebeians did not possess this right originally but acquired it later; cf. also Wissowa, in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. ii. 2581; Di Marchi, Cult. priv. di. Rom. i. 233. This hypothesis not only lacks support, but is also vitiated by the fact that at the time of the supposed equalization private auspices must have been declining, as Cicero found them extinct.
The treatment of private auspices here given is supplementary to the study of the social classes made in ch. ii.
[594] Messala, in Gell. xiii. 15. 4; Fest. 157. 21; Rubino, Röm. Verf. 71 ff.; Bouché-Leclerq, in Daremberg et Saglio, Dict. i. 580.