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The Roman augur Attus Navius was famous for having prevented king Tarquinius the Elder from changing the tarditional organization of Roman cavalry with its three centuries. Other texts tell us how, as a child, he reinvented the art of observing birds as practiced by augurs. He was also connected with the alleged translation of the fig-tree under which the founder of Rome, Romulus, was suckled by the she-wolf. These three stories can be related together, as forming parts of a career conceived along the lines of old Indo-European trifunctional ideology, after which Attus Navius’ mysterious vanishing can be understood as a kind of heroization.

 

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