This report item is a reading of an observed sign in the Roman and Etruscan augural manner, which watched birds, weather and chance events and cared a great deal about the direction the observer faced. An account of what was seen is read against those recorded conventions.

History

Roman augury, reading the will of the gods from the flight and calls of birds, weather signs and other chance events, was a formal state institution, staffed by a dedicated college of augurs, and taking augural readings was a legal precondition for major public acts, elections, the convening of assemblies, and the beginning of military campaigns among them. It is extensively documented in Roman sources, including Cicero's own treatise De Divinatione, written in 44 BCE, notably a skeptical philosophical examination of divination's claims written by a man who had himself held the office of augur, an early and unusually direct instance of a practitioner questioning his own institution's premises in writing.

Roman augury drew heavily on the earlier Etruscan disciplina etrusca, a broader body of divinatory learning the Romans held the Etruscans to have originated and mastered. A specific and well documented structural feature of the Roman method is the augur's own orientation, which direction he faced while observing a sign: the augur divided the visible sky into regions relative to that fixed facing, and a sign's favorable or unfavorable reading depended in part on which region of the sky it appeared in relative to the observer's own chosen direction.

How A Reading Is Constructed

An account of what was seen, a bird's flight or call, a weather event, a chance occurrence, and the direction the observer faced while watching it, is read against the recorded Roman and Etruscan augural conventions, naming whether the sign and its position relative to the observer's facing direction would traditionally have been read as favorable or unfavorable.