THE PROPHECIES OF VEGOIA
The great encyclopedist Varro (On the Latin Language 5.143) referred to the Etruscan origin of rites of boundaries and city foundations. The myth of Vegoia’s prophecy is known only from a Latin text archived by the surveyors’ guild, although finds of Etruscan boundary inscriptions attest circumstantially its significance (Corpus Agrimensorum [anon.
Treatise on Land Surveying] 1.350-51; Heurgon 1959; Harris 1971: 31-40; Pfiffig 1975: 160-61; Turcan 1976; Valvo 1988; Schultz 2006: 222-3). After a cosmological opening (“Know that the sea was separated from the sky”) and credit for the apportionment of land to Jupiter, the prophet states that the greed of men will lead them to transgress their boundaries, during the eighth saeculum (one of a series of cycles, approximately the length of a long human life or a hundred years, predicted for human history). It goes on to list the punishments for any who move boundary markers, whether masters or their slaves: death, diseases, storms, destruction of crops, and civil unrest. It ends “be not false or double-tongued. Keep this teaching in your heart” (see de Grummond 2006b: 191-2 for full text.)The image of the nymph Vecu has been identified (on hand-mirrors and a gold ring of ca. 300 BCE) as a winged female labelled lasa vecuvi[a] or lasa vecu, associated with Tinia, Menrva and thunderbolts (de Grummond 2000; 2002; 2006a: 30-33). Texts of her prophecies to “Arruns Veltymnus” were ultimately deposited by Augustus with the Sibylline Books in the crypts of the temple of Apollo Palatinus, at a time when their doctrine of divinely ordained land boundaries was highly topical for the Roman state.