The Augural Law, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der roemischen Welt II.16.3

Jerzy Linderski's The Augural Law, published in the survey series Aufstieg und Niedergang der roemischen Welt, part II volume 16.3, by Walter de Gruyter in 1986, is widely regarded as the reference treatment of Roman augury as a public constitutional instrument, the formal system by which Roman magistrates sought and interpreted the gods' approval before political and military action. Linderski was a leading specialist in Roman religious and constitutional law, and the piece has been the standard citation on Roman augural procedure for nearly four decades. Its strength is exhaustive engagement with the fragmentary primary evidence, epigraphic and literary, for a system whose original technical manuals do not survive intact. Its limit is that it is necessarily a reconstruction from fragments and later Roman authors' descriptions, so any precise procedural claim carries the same uncertainty as the sources it is built from.