LITERARY SOURCES
The earliest preserved references come from late Republican Latin writers who were able to draw upon a large body of Etruscan religious texts, supplemented with treatises by learned men, for instance the first-century scholar Aulus Caecina (Seneca Quaestiones Naturales [Natural Questions] 2.39.1; Turfa 2006a: 79).
The effigy of Laris Pulenas of Tarquinia on his sarcophagus holds a scroll stating that he ancn zikh netsrac acasce, “wrote this book of haruspicy” (ca. 250- 200 BCE; Bonfante & Bonfante 2002: 149-50). Varro, Cicero, Livy and Pliny the Elder all record anecdotes of divination, prophecy, civic ceremony or expiation, while the poets, particularly Ovid and Propertius, drew on Etruscan myth and the festival calendar.Both Cicero and Seneca waxed critical when commenting on Etruscan religion. From Seneca (Natural Questions 2.32.2, written after 12 CE) comes a Roman perception of the alien character of Etruscan belief:
This is the difference between us and the Etruscans, with whom resides the utmost learning for interpreting lightning: we believe that lightning is caused by clouds colliding, whereas they believe that clouds collide in order to create lightning. Since they attribute everything to the divine, they are led to believe not that events have a meaning because they have happened, but that they happen in order to express a meaning.
Some of the earliest references to the initiator of formal Etruscan religion, the prophet Tages, are preserved by Cicero (On Divination 2.30.50-51) but with negative connotations: at Div. 2.38.80, the supernatural hero is a “ploughed-up boy” (exaratum puerurri) and the founder of Tarquinia a “yokel” (bubulcus, Turfa 2006a: 77-80). Cicero’s most scathing scepticism (On Divination 2.24.51) reiterates Cato’s famous comment, quod non rideret haruspex haruspicem cum vidisset: he asks, how could one priest, when he sees another, not burst out laughing at the shared scam which is all there really is to public divination?
Haruspicy, divination by examining the excised entrails of sacrificed victims, was always associated with etruscan priesthoods, and continued to the end of the Roman Empire. Haruspices also interpreted lightning omens and prodigies such as unnatural births.
Their highly distinctive costume with a fringed cloak pinned with an archaic fibula and a tall pointed hat, adopted as the apex or galerus hat of some Roman cults (Pfiffig 1975: 115-27; Roncalli 1981; Torelli 2000b: 278-80, 285-6; Turfa 2006d), was seen in Rome, where in the second century BCE the Collegium LX Haruspicum (College of 60 Haruspices) was established (Pfiffig 1975: 45-7, 381; Haack 2006). Cicero’s De haruspicum responsis (On the Responses of the Haruspices, 56 BCE) was occasioned by the public unrest caused by ominous apparitions in central Italy and their interpretation by officially appointed Etruscan haruspices. Their statements are formalized and stilted, bearing some similarity to other “Etruscan” documents such as the Prophecy of Vegoia and Brontoscopic Calendar, below, for example, NE DETERIORIBUSREPULSISQUE HONOS AUGEATUR (“let not honour be increased for the baser and the rejected”, On the Responses of the Haruspices 25.56). Etruscan practitioners in the first century probably attracted respect and suspicion in equal measure.
Late Antique and Byzantine authors have preserved passages from earlier texts now lost. Most important are the treatises of Johannes Lydus (490-560 CE), a civil servant in Justinian’s Constantinople. Texts from several cultures are embedded in De ostentis (On Omens'), including the Diarium tonitruale or Brontoscopic Calendar, for the interpretation of thunder, supposedly transmitted from the prophet Tages himself (below). In his poem Philologia (The Wedding of Philology and Mercury), Martianus Capella (fifth c. CE) apparently recast an Etruscan description of gods - mostly unfamiliar and few illustrated in Etruscan art - who controlled the sixteen sectors of the universe. Their relationships in the heavens have been used to identify the cells/gods inscribed on the Piacenza liver (Capdeville 1996; de Grummond 2006c: 44-51).