nded to exclude magic and the barbarous in ritual, so did the _ius
augurale_, which was a part of it, exclude the quack in divination. And
in this particular department of human delusion the result may be said
to have been happy; for though divination belongs to religion as having
survived from an earlier stage into a religious one, yet it is the least
valuable, the least fruitful, part of it.[603] True, the augural
systematisation, as we shall see, had a sinister effect on political
progress; but even there the very emptiness and absurdity of the whole
business helped to bring contempt on it, and, as Cicero tells us in a
well-known passage, even old Cato declared that he could not imagine why
a _haruspex_ did not laugh when he met a brother of the craft.[604] In
Greece, on the contrary, it might, I believe, be shown that the absence
of systematisation by the State only served to prolong the credit and
influence of the professional quack.

Greece was at all periods full of these quacks; did the sham prophet
exist at Rome in the period we have now under review? Later on the
Oriental soothsayer found his way there; of these _Chaldaei_ and
_mathematici_ I shall have a word to say in another lecture, and we
shall see how the State authorities made occasional attempts to exclude
them. Of the _frantic_ type of diviner, the [Greek: entheos], so common
in Greece, we hear nothing in the sober Roman annals; the idea of a
human being "possessed by a spirit of divination" seems foreign to the
Roman character.[605] The only soothsayer, so far as I know, who appears
in Roman legend in a private capacity is that Attus Navius who gave
Tarquinius Priscus the benefit of his knowledge; and he is represented
as a respectable Sabine, and his art as an augural one learnt from the
Etruscans.[606] There are, indeed, ancient traces of a prophetic art at
Rome, but, as the historian of divination has well observed, they are
all connected not with human beings, but with divinities, a fact which
explains the Latin word _divinatio_.[607] To take what is perhaps the
best example, the ancient deity Carmenta, who had a flamen and a double
festival in the month of January, may very probably represent some dim
tradition of a _numen_ at whose shrine women might gain some knowledge
as to their fortunes in childbirth, just as outside Rome, at Praeneste
and Antium, Fortuna seems to have had this gift in historical
times.[608] So St. Augustine interpreted Carm