This artwork, depicting ancient Roman practitioners of divination, was originally created by Jean-Léon Gérôme (c. 1824-1904) and reproduced as a print by Goupil & Cie (19th century). Specifically, the artwork purports to depict a brotherhood of diviners known as the augures or augurs, who practiced augury. Dating back to Rome’s earliest history, augury is a type of divination associated with interpreting divine favor or displeasure from the patterns of birds, but augures were also known to consult other types of omens during their surveying of supernatural signs. These diviners were part of a college of augures, eventually numbering sixteen members by the time of Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE), and their addition to the college was a lifetime appointment. In Rome, the augures became an advisory body that instructed the Roman Senate and magistrates on matters of omens and rituals. Most interestingly, the augures had the power to suspend public business in Rome at times when the auspices were not ideal.
In the artwork, the two augures can be seen laughing, and this detail harkens back to a curious reputation in ancient Rome that developed around this particular group of diviners. By the final centuries of the Roman Republic, the masses in Rome began to hold the opinion that the augures too often abused their powers to pause public business, and it was insinuated that the pauses were used for irreligious and self-interested reasons. Critics of the group suspected that public business was being shut down at times when the pause benefited an augur. This poor reputation was so bad that it became a stereotype and fodder for jokes. Many ancient Romans imagined that the augures, themselves, grinned and laughed at their own unseriousness and their religious gamesmanship whenever they congregated or met in chance encounters. On this reputation, the Roman statesman, Cicero (106-43 BCE), wrote, “It seems remarkable that one augur can look another in the eye without grinning” (The Nature of the Gods, 1.71), and Cicero also attributed the same notion to Cato the Elder (c. 234-149 BCE), writing, “But indeed, that was quite a clever remark which Cato made many years ago: ‘I wonder,’ said he, ‘that a soothsayer doesn’t laugh when he sees another soothsayer’” (On Divination, 2.51). It is this imagery of the augures grinning and laughing amongst themselves that is re-created in the artwork of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Goupil & Cie printmakers.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Sources:
- Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, translated by P. G. Walsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 1998, 2008.
- The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion, edited by Simon Price and Emily Kearns. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
- https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0043%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D51
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/augur
- https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/104DS5#full-artwork-details
