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The innards

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

When Jupiter did not apply himself to send eagles or other birds to point to some happily fated man what he had to do, the persons in question had to find other systems to be able to discover their future and understand which was the will of the gods. One of the systems frequently used in the antiquity was the examination of the immolated animals’s innards. This art was believed to have been taught to the men by a mysterious child, Tagetes, who as for enchantment had surfaced from the soil near Tarquinia. With him talked Tarkontes and with what the divine creature told him the “Aruspicines”, the “Akerontians”, and the “Laws of the Etrurian land” books had been written.
Part of the last one, “The Etruscan Discipline”, has been reported in the ancient Latin sources among which the books of Pliny the older and the ones of Seneca who both found their data in the scripts of Aulus Caecina of Volterra. Another good font was also Tarquinius Priscus (I cent B.C.) uthor of the “Ostentaria” in which there was a report of special prodigies and of their interpretations. This work didn’t reach us, but through the “Saturnalia” of Macrobius we can still know some of its part.
The art to consult the future through the innards’s examination was by the Etruscans passed to the Romans and it is in the ancient authors books that we find news of these practices and often their texts tell us incredible facts. The examination was confided to the aruspices and it was advisable that they could be Etruscans. Beside the famous books of the Tagetes child, model of innards existed and on them it was pointed what one had to look and how. One of this is a bronze liver that arrived to us. Over it are marked the division of it in its different parts, and in each of them the name of the god that to this part presided was written.
Obviously not all agreed on the interpretation to give to the various parts of the liver, and as today there are no more aruspices nor victim immolated to the gods, we don’t know the meaning that was given to the modifications of the organs and we can’t say which was a favourable or a unfavourable one. We only know that it was an extremely bad omen to found the “lobus piramidalis” and that from the gall bladder, that was dedicated to Neptunus, the aruspices obtained the previsions for the naval battles. Evidently more bile was found and better was the omen: As a matter of fact the day in which Atium battle was fought and won, Augustus found that the victim had two gall bladder.
Then we learn that not to find the victim’s liver was a very bad omen and it was interpreted as an announcement of death: However nobody asked or tried to know how the victim could have lived without this fundamental organ. Notwithstanding this pressing demand we must signal that in Roman history this fact has been reported no less than three times. It happened when, at Utica, Marius was celebrating the ritual sacrifice; then again it took place the first January of the year in which Caligula was murdered and it was repeated again the year in which Claudius died poisoned by the mushrooms. Good omen was not only to locate the liver but to find back folded its lower membrane as it happened in the sacrifice of Augustus at Spoleto
Beside the liver one part that was examined with all attention was the heart a practice that began, after that Pyrrhus drew back from Italy, when Lucius Postumius Albinus son of Lucius became king of the sacrifices. We have just finished to learn that for three times the sacrifice’s victims didn’ have any liver and if we have been stunned by the fact that they could survive without it, even more we are astonished to learn that an animal could exist without a heart and yet according to Pliny this happened the day in which Ceasar assumed the charge of dictator and purple dressed sat on the golden seat.
Could someone, hoping to scare the great man, have quickly stolen the vital organ just after that the animal had been disemboweled? Not a bad idea.