Lituus of Romulus
The lituus of Romulus was the curved augur's staff with which, in Roman tradition, Rome's founder marked out the regions of the sky when he took the auspices that sanctioned the building of the city. The relic was kept among the sacred gear of the Salian priests in the Curia Saliorum on the Palatine, and Cicero, Plutarch, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus record how it was found unharmed after the building burned, a survival read as a portent that the augural science, and with it Rome's favour with the gods, would endure. The lituus, a crook-like staff, was the professional badge of the augur, us