if you have ever wondered why modern states insist on separating religion from government, one of the answers lies in rome, in one of the most ingenious and brazen mechanisms of political manipulation antiquity ever devised. there, the will of the gods became a weapon to thwart the will of the people.
picture the scene, a regular one in the rome of the 5th century bce. the leaders of the plebs have at last marshalled the votes to push through a law that favours them; the patrician senate is reeling and the vote looks unstoppable. and then, at the decisive moment, a magistrate or a patrician priest raises his eyes to the sky, observes the flight of a bird or the flash of lightning and declares that the gods do not approve of the assembly. by law, the vote is annulled on the spot. no argument, no sword: a bird has been enough to halt the people.
it was no simple blind faith: it was parliamentary obstruction camouflaged as devotion.
this art was called augury, and it rested on a sincere and deep-rooted belief. the romans were convinced that the gods communicated their assent or their refusal through signs in the natural world — the flight of birds, the lightning bolt, the way the sacred chickens fed. no important public act — an election, an assembly, a campaign — was to be undertaken without first taking the auspices. the trap did not lie in the faith: it lay in who administered it. the college of augurs, the official experts charged with reading and interpreting those signs, was in this period made up, exclusively, of patrician aristocrats.
that monopoly turned religion into a key to politics. whoever controls the reading of the signs controls, in practice, the calendar of power. the most effective tool was the obnuntiatio: the formal announcement of an unfavourable omen, which obliged the suspension of an already convened assembly (the device was formally regulated only in the late republic, but the principle of magistrate auspicium, the right to take the auspices, was already at work in this century). it was above all the prerogative of the supreme magistrates — consuls, praetors, dictators. but the augural college, exclusively patrician, fixed the doctrine on how the signs were to be read: the aristocracy thus controlled both the interpretation and, through sympathetic magistrates, its political use. it was enough to declare at the right moment that the heavens were against you for the machinery of the state to grind to a halt. and, conveniently, the gods always seemed to object precisely when the plebs was about to win a concession. divinity was invoked with astonishing political aim.
modern historiography rightly sees this not so much as naive superstition as an instrument of power. the right to take the auspices and to veto on religious grounds was one of the great reserves of the aristocracy for blocking popular reforms without opposing them outright: they did not say “we do not want”, they said “the gods do not want”. it was the perfect obstruction, shielded by collective piety and almost impossible to refute, because to dispute the verdict of an augur bordered on sacrilege.
a chronological qualification is in order. the patrician exclusivity of the augurship was real during the first centuries of the republic, which is the stage of this entry; but it was not eternal. with time, plebeian pressure would put an end to this redoubt too: a law of the late 4th century at last opened the great priestly colleges, the augural one included, to plebeians, partly disarming the monopoly. the battle for the gods was thus one further front of the long war for political equality.
augury left a deep imprint: the idea that power needs a sanction higher than a mere majority, and the risk that such sanction may be manipulated, runs through political history far beyond rome. indeed, the lesson the west finally drew — to separate the altar from the government so that no one can veto a law in the name of the gods — is, in the negative, a child of experiences like this. yet not even the most sophisticated divine bureaucracy could handle everything. the day an enemy army cornered the roman legions and the very survival of the city was at stake, no omen was of any help: the state had to reach for its absolute safety valve and hand all the power, for six months, to a single man.
