[624] Livy vi. 41.
[625] See a good account in the Dict. of Antiquities, vol. i. 252 and 255; and Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "auspicia."
[626] Roman Public Life, p. 162.
[627] Wissowa, R.K. 451, note 2; Marq. 241.
[628] Mommsen, Staatsrecht, i. 86.
[629] Wissowa, R.K. 451, note 7; Plut. Quaest. Rom. 99; Pliny, Ep. 4. 8. Plutarch asks why an augur can never be deprived of his office, and answers that the secrecy of his art made it impossible. Cp. Paulus, 16.
[630] The latest authoritative account of the auspicia is in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v., where the necessary literature and material will be found for a study of an extremely complicated subject.
[631] The technical term was templum minus, in contradistinction to the templum maius, i.e. the space in which he was to look for signs. See Bouché-Leclercq, iv. 197; Fest. 157. The usual place was the arx, where was the auguraculum, on which the magistrate taking the auspices "pitched his tent" (tabernaculum), looking to the east, with the north as his left or lucky side. Von Jhering, op. cit. p. 364, makes some ingenious use of this procedure to support his theory that the origin of such institutions is to be found in the period of migration.
[632] That the division of the templum into regiones was necessary only for the auguria caelestia, and not for the observation of birds, is the conclusion drawn by Wissowa (R.K. 457, note 2) from the words of Cicero (de Legibus, ii. 21) in his ius divinum: "caelique fulgura regionibus ratis temperanto" (i.e. the magistrates).
[633] Cicero expressly says that even old Cato complained of the neglect of the auspicia by the college: de Div. i. 15. 28; above, in sec. 25, he had said the same thing of the augurs of his own day, i.e. including himself. We know of a work on the auspicia by M. Messalla, an augur, from which Gellius, xiii. 15, quotes a lengthy extract (cp. ch. 14). This man was consul in 53 B.C.; Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Lit., ii. 492. Just at the same time Appius Claudius, Cicero's predecessor as governor of Cilicia, wrote libri augurales, to which Cicero more than once alludes in his correspondence with Appius: ad Fam. iii. 9. 3 and 11. 4. It is plain that the old augural lore is now treated only as a curiosity, of which the secrecy need no longer be respected.