The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

divination, but he does have certain theoretical assumptions. For example he writes that
sortition satisfied the religious sentiment and curiosity of the Romans (Bouché-Leclercq
1879: II, 41-42). In other places, though, he seems to think that there was nothing religious
about divination. Concerning the auspices, he writes that Roman divination has moved away
from theology and become formalistic; it has moved from the religious domain to the legal
and has thereby lost its original life (Bouché-Leclercq 1879: IV, 178). He also thought
prodigies, and especially their expiation, served to reduce fear among the population
(Bouché-Leclercq 1879: IV, 80). We can distinguish three key assumptions in his work: that
divination satisfied a religious urge, that divination in its ritual form had lost its religious
character and become formalistic and legalistic, and that prodigies and their expiation served
to reduce fear. These assumptions, as we shall see, surface regularly in the research history of
Roman divination.
The two giants in the research of Roman culture and religion Theodor Mommsen and
Georg Wissowa, whose works are known to be quarries of information and starting points for
almost any investigation, were mainly concerned with describing technicalities. They did,
however, notice that divination was used to obstruct, and thereby manipulate, the political
process (Mommsen 1952: I, 80; Wissowa 1912: I, 540). Mommsen especially shared the
view of Bouché-Leclercq that divination had become mere legal technicalities.
Another central early work on Roman religion was W. Warde-Fowlers The Religious
Experience of the Roman People from 1911. The basic idea of Warde-Fowler was that
Roman religion originally implied some real religious feeling, but this had disappeared in
historical times. This disappearance of religious feeling can be seen in the "over-elaboration"
of the ritual aspect (Warde-Fowler 1971: 292). Thus the focus on the ritual element in
divination was taken to be the result of the decay of true religious feeling. He also had an
interesting theory about the historical development of divination: divination originally arose
out of an agricultural society’s need to predict the weather. Eventually it was adapted to the
needs of the city. This was formalized by the state and ended up being used for private ends,
that is, as manipulation. This is an historical explanation similar to Bouché-Leclercq’s,
Wissowa’s and Mommsen’s.
The early research thus took divination rituals to be a formalistic dilution of true religious
belief. In historical times it had become an empty formalism which was used only for
manipulation. There is a common assumption of decay in Roman religion. Another
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