of the god should regularly consult such men of skill, and listen to their advice; and thence arose the corporations or colleges of men specially skilled in religious lore, a thoroughly national Italian institution, which had a far more important influence on political development than the individual priests or priesthoods. These colleges have been often, but erroneously, confounded with the priesthoods. The priesthoods were charged with the worship of a specific divinity; the skilled colleges, on the other hand, were charged with the preservation of traditional rules regarding those more general religious observances, the proper fulfilment of which implied a certain amount of information, and rendered it necessary for the state in its own interest to provide for the faithful transmission of that information. These close corporations, supplying their own vacancies, of course from the ranks of the burgesses, became in this way the depositaries of skilled arts and sciences. Under the Roman constitution and that of the Latin communities in general there were originally but two such colleges, that of the augurs and that of the pontifices.[1] The augurs. The six augurs were skilled in interpreting the language of the gods from the flight of birds, an art which was prosecuted with great earnestness and reduced to a quasi-scientific system. The pontifices. The five "bridge-builders" (pontifices) derived their name from their function, as sacred as it was politically important, of conducting the building and demolition of the bridge over the Tiber. They
- ↑ The clearest evidence of this is the fact, that in the communities organized on the Latin scheme augurs and pontifices occur everywhere (e. g. Cic. de lege agr. ii. 35, 96, and numerous inscriptions), but the other colleges do not. The former, therefore, stand on the same footing with the constitution of ten curies and the Flamines, Salii, and Luperci, as very ancient heirlooms of the Latin stock; whereas the Duoviri, the Fetiales, and other colleges, like the thirty curies and the Servian tribes and centuries, originated in, remained therefore confined to, Rome. Only in the case of the second college, the pontifices, the influence of Rome probably led to the introduction of that name into the general Latin scheme instead of some earlier, perhaps more variable name; or (a hypothesis which philologically has much in its favour) pons originally signified not "bridge" but "way" generally, and pontifex therefore meant "constructor of ways."
The statements regarding the original number, of the augurs in particular, vary. The view that it was necessary for the number to be an odd one is refuted by Cic. de lege agr. ii. 35, 96; and Livy (x. 6) does not say so, but only states that the number of Roman augurs had to be divisible by three, and must therefore have had an odd number as its basis. According to Livy (l. c.) the number was six down to the Ogulnian law, and the same is virtually affirmed by Cicero (de Rep. ii. 9, 14) when he represents Romulus as instituting four, and Numa two, augurial stalls.
