The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

that issued from it (Pease 1963: 475). We know that the consul Marcellus abandoned this
form in 222 BCE (Cic.Div.2.77). It may, contrary to the view of Mommsen (Mommsen 1952:
I, 87, n.6), have been oblative (sic. Pease 1963: 475).
Iuges auspicium
Iuges auspicium was when yoked cattle defecated (Fest.92 L). It might have been used in a
more wide sense as signs from yoked cattle and had consequences for the magistrates seeing
it. 139 It was, however, an oblative sign (Valeton 1890: 208).
Sortition
Sortition is strangely not a very well researched form of divination in Roman history. 140
Sortition was used both privately and in public for a wide range of different purposes. Few of
the other divination practices have so many different applications. In the following I will
divide sortition into public sortition, private sortition and sortition oracles.
Public sortition
Whereas the auspices were used to decide whether or not one alternative should be carried
out, sortition was used in cases where more than one alternative existed. In sortition inscribed
lots were employed. The outcome was determined by the draw of an operator. The senate
annually determined the duties to be carried out by the elected officials. These were allocated
after the election by allotment among the elected officials (Stewart 1998: 23). Unfortunately
sortition is not something the Romans cared to describe very thoroughly. What we can know
about it has to be pieced together from a variety of sources.
139 As can be gathered from a medieval scholion (Cf. Pease 1963: 477)
140 It is curiously left out of Susanne William Rasmussen’s Public Portents in Republican Rome (Rasmussen
2003), which presumes to be an exhaustive study of all public Roman divination. It is not either mentioned in
the article on divination in the recent multivolume work on ancient religion, Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum
Antiquorum (Rüpke & Belayche 2005). One could get the impression that the scholarly community did not
consider sortition a form of divination. It does not seem that the ancient Romans shared that impression. We
have for example evidence that the Roman augural college investigated a vitium (ritual fault) in sortition (Liv.
41.18.10), augural vocabulary is consistently used about sortition (Stewart 1998: 38-41) and Festus writes that
sortition is the response of the gods (Fest. 380, L).
160