Prophets and Profits

Ancient Divination and Its Reception

Richard Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351970358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume examines the ways in which divination, often through oracular utterances and other mechanisms, linked mortals with the gods, and places the practice within the ancient sociopolitical and religious environment. Whether humans sought knowledge by applying to an oracle through which the god was believed to speak or used soothsayers who interpreted specific signs such as the flight of birds, there was a fundamental desire to know the will of the gods. In many cases, pragmatic concerns – personal, economic or political – can be deduced from the context of the application.

Divination and communication with the gods in a post-pagan world has also produced fascinating receptions. The presentation of these processes in monotheistic societies such as early Christian Late Antiquity (where the practice continued through the use of curse tablets) or medieval Europe, and beyond, where the role of religion had changed radically, provides a particular challenge and this topic has been little discussed by scholars. This volume aims to rectify this desideratum by providing the opportunity to address questions related to the reception of Greco-Roman divination, oracles and prophecy, in all media, including literature and film.

Several contributions in this volume originated in the 2015 Classics Colloquium held at the University of South Africa and the volume has been augmented with additional contributions.

1Introduction

Daniel Ogden

Let us begin, as all accounts of ancient divination should, with the bromide that the activity was not wholly given over to the prediction or navigation of the future.¹ It sought the revelation of hidden information, but this information could equally well relate to the past or the present, or indeed to eternity, in the case of eschatological enquiry. There are of course many other ways to categorize divination. One may, for example, distinguish between procured or ‘impetrative’ methods (such as a purposeful visit to an oracular shrine, or a hieroscopic investigation) and spontaneous or ‘oblative’ methods (such as encounters with unsought dreams or with omens based in nature, as in the case of prodigy births). Or one may distinguish between inductive divination and inspired divination. In inductive divination, one reads signs which the gods have sown, as it were, into the fabric of the universe (in prodigies, in the livers of victims, in bird flights, in the drawing of lots, etc.); in inspired divination, a human soul comes into direct contact with the divine (through a dream, for example, or through more violent forms of possession, as in the case of the Pythia).²

Admittedly, however, future-related divination was and remains the most eye-catching variety, so let us make some observations about it. First, even when divination was sought in relation to the future, queries were seldom framed in terms of a crude demand to know events or outcomes; more typically, one might ask which among alternative courses of action might be more pleasing to the gods, or to which of the gods one might sacrifice for better fortune.³ Secondly, for obvious reasons, divination was a poor and inefficient tool for making sense of the future. But two pleas could be entered in mitigation. On the one hand, it could certainly be a useful tool for managing anxiety: at least one might think that one had done one’s best to discover the will of the gods and to act in accordance with it, and that in itself might be thought an approach deserving of divine mercy. On the other hand, future-divination was a very powerful tool indeed for making sense of the past and for structuring it. It is evident that in many cases a great event, anticipated or otherwise, was a catalyst for the retrospective collection of future-related omens and prophecies, for the reinterpretation and perhaps also the outright confection of the latter (though I suspect that this happened less often that modern sceptics might suppose).⁴ The work of the chrēsmologoi, the ‘oracle collectors’, keepers of pre-existing oracular pronouncements, was doubtless focused precisely upon this activity.⁵ Pertinent here is Thucydides’ well-known report of the old oracle suddenly recalled (its origin obscure) by the Athenians when they were stricken by plague during the Peloponnesian War, which read, according to an interpretation then favoured, ‘A Dorian war will come, and a pestilence together with it’.⁶ Pertinent too is Herodotus’ tale of Sparta’s rediscovery of the bones of Orestes: as he tells it, Lichas discovered the bones first, and only then did he work out, intellectually, the relationship between the words of the Delphic oracle supposedly guiding the Spartans to the spot and the circumstances of his actual discovery.⁷ The enhancement of a given event with retrospectively found omens and prophecies not only conferred significance and grandeur upon it, it also supported the integration of the event into a satisfactory or even a compelling narrative, and above all a memorable one (we have only to think of Herodotus’ marvellous story (7.141) of the Delphic prophecy of the ‘wooden walls’). And, indeed, the promulgation of such narratives legitimated and validated the processes of future-related divination and prophecy more generally.⁸ We ourselves, of course, are the ultimate beneficiaries of these engagingly woven narratives. Indeed, their engaging nature is doubtless the principal reason why ancient divination remains a topic of fascination for us today.

Lucid abstracts are provided with some of the chapters that follow, so the brief treatments here aspire, for the most part, to offer modest additional perspectives upon the chapters’ contentions or upon the material handled in them.

Evans (Chapter 2) focuses on Didyma (Branchidae), Miletus’ external oracle. Apollo’s major oracles in Asia Minor, those at Clarus and Didyma, together with the one subsequently founded for him at Daphne near Antioch by Seleucus I (this last, seemingly, in part at least, on the model of Didyma), all seem to have relied upon a sacred spring for their prophetic force, albeit in different ways.⁹ In history, what is not there, or not said, can often be more telling than what is, and the skill of the historian lies in spotting instructive silences in our sources. And so it is that Evans fashions a suggestive argumentum e silentio about the role of Didyma in the great Ionian Revolt, which was led by the oracle’s own Miletus. One should indeed expect the Didyma shrine to have pronounced a favourable oracle in support of its patron city’s revolt (or at least an oracle which initially seemed to be such), either before or during, and one should equally expect Herodotus to have reported such an oracle, given that he provides such a detailed account of the revolt (his narrative of it spans almost the entirety of his fifth book, albeit with many a digression), given that he is such a great devotee of oracles, and in particular given that he was very much alive to the usefulness of oracles in structuring and shaping historical narratives. Evans’ solution is that the rebel city of Miletus was at loggerheads with its own oracle, a conservative institution and firmly pro-Persian. This antagonism may well be visible in Hecataeus’ advice that Aristagoras should plunder the shrine to fund the revolt.¹⁰ Understandably, the wealthy shrines of the Greek world ever preferred order to chaos, and therefore tended to be supportive of the status quo or the great power of the day. Evans’ case may be supported by a fragment of the Hellenistic paroemographer Demon, according to which the oracle discouraged the Carians from making common cause with the Milesians against the Persians during the revolt.¹¹ We may introduce a further consideration here too. It could be that the role one might typically have expected an oracular message to play in initiating a chain of events in an expansive Herodotean narrative is in this case taken rather by the message of support and advice which the revolt’s leader Aristagoras is sent from the Persian court by his father-in-law Histiaeus (Hdt. 5.35–6). It is noteworthy that the message is conveyed to Aristagoras by means of a tattoo, which in other contexts can serve as a medium for oracles: we think in particular of the oracles tattooed onto the skins of Anthes and Epimenides.¹²

Dufault (Chapter 3) leaves prophets behind, but remains with issues of profit. He mounts a challenging argument to the effect that there was no significant specialization or professionalization in the writing of curse tablets before the second century AD. Rather, up until this point, users of such tablets were responsible for writing their own. Such a claim, entailing as it does that all users were at least basically literate, has significant implications for their class profile, and suggests that the use of curse tablets was a relatively elite activity.¹³ Dufault further conjectures that the development of specialization in the writing of the tablets, when it came, was a product of or concomitant with the extraordinary developments in the complexity of the tablets’ textual content (in line with the curse recipes and curse texts of the Greek Magical Papyri).

Dufault’s hypothesis may draw support from the seeming origin point of the curse tablets. The earliest ones discovered derive from the milieu of the law courts – those of Selinus, c. 500 BC.¹⁴ It may at first seem curious that these seemingly visceral artefacts should have originated in such a rarefied and almost intellectual environment. But (relatively advanced) literacy is surely key here: c. 500 BC, the curse tablet represented a new verbal-literary variation upon the wordless voodoo dolls that had long been established in Greek culture. And so it did after all make sense that it should have made its debut in the Greek world’s most intensely literate environment, that of the speechifying rhetoricians. Here, then, we had a series of individuals making physical curses for themselves, but now in the idiom with which they themselves were most familiar, that of the written word. And let us not forget here the intriguing prospect (a fair chance) that a distinctive group of legal curse tablets and voodoo dolls from the Athenian Ceramicus (c. 400 BC), the ‘Mnesimachus doll’ and its associated finds, incorporate an autograph text of the great orator Lysias!¹⁵

Faraone’s influential hypothesis that binding curses tended to be produced in agonistic contexts retains some merit, as does the corollary that they were often made between social equals (for all that the curser might be keen to pull ahead of his rival in one respect or other), with all its implications for the identification of the social class of the curse-maker. But this corollary can be taken too far: when shopkeepers or brothel-keepers are identified as the victims of curses, those curses need not have been formulated by directly rival shopkeepers or brothel-keepers.¹⁶ The anthropologically widespread notion of the ‘limited good’ may be at play: the notion that there is a limited store of good luck out there means that the success of a neighbour comes to be seen as an obstacle to one’s own success: ‘So long as he has it, I can’t have it’.¹⁷ And some curse tablets clearly did cross class boundaries in quite emphatic ways, such as the curses made in the first century AD by a ‘wicked’ public slave against the great and good senators of the town of Tuder (the modern Todi in Perugia), the details of which outrage are preserved for us by an inscription (the senators’ names were ‘attached to tombs’).¹⁸

A striking implication that emerges from Dufault’s study is its incidental exposure of a lack of agricultural or rural content in the earlier tablets. One gets the impression that they were essentially products of an urban environment. This perhaps makes sense if one is indeed to conclude that their use was directly determined by literacy, for this was likely to have been concentrated in cities. However, our evidence may be obscured to some extent here by the practicalities of arc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Was Didyma (Branchidae) a false oracle?
• 3 Who wrote Greek curse tablets?
• 4 A story of blood, guts and guesswork: synthetic reasoning in classical Greek divination
• 5 Value-added divination at Dodona
• 6 Divination and profit in the Roman world
• 7 Profiting from prophecy: Q. Marcius Rex and the construction of the Aqua Marcia
• 8 Valerius Maximus and the language of stars
• 9 ‘Arrows fletched from our own wings’: discovering a ‘Delphi of the mind’ in the writings of the Early Church Fathers
• 10 Egyptian necromancy in Heliodorus Aethiopica (6.12–15) and the Witch of Endor narrative (1 Sam 28)
• 11 Sosipatra: prophetess, philosopher and theurgist: reflections on divination and epistemology in late antiquity
• 12 One oracle too many? Corippus (and Procopius) on female prophecy in North African divination and profit in the Roman world
• 13 Deconstructing divination: superstition, anticlericalism and Cicero’s De Divinatione in Enlightenment England, c. 1700–1730
• 14 Prophecy and Paul Kruger: Robert Grendon’s appropriation of Graeco-Roman prophets and prophetic devices in his South African epic, Paul Kruger’s Dream
• 15 Cassandra prophesies back: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Firebrand
• Bibliography
• Index