Divination and Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Crystal Addey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032041728
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315449463
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Addressing the close connections between ancient divination and knowledge, this volume offers an interlinked and detailed set of case studies which examine the epistemic value and significance of divination in ancient Greek and Roman cultures.

Focusing on diverse types of divination, including oracles, astrology, and the reading of omens and signs in the entrails of sacrificial animals, chance utterances and other earthly and celestial phenomena, this volume reveals that divination was conceived of as a significant path to the attainment of insight and understanding by the ancient Greeks and Romans. It also explores the connections between divination and other branches of knowledge in Greco-Roman antiquity, such as medicine and ethnographic discourse. Drawing on anthropological studies of contemporary divination and exploring a wide range of ancient philosophical, historical, technical and literary evidence, chapters focus on the interconnections and close relationship between divine and human modes of knowledge, in relation to nuanced and subtle formulations of the blending of divine, cosmic and human agency; philosophical approaches towards and uses of divination (particularly within Platonism), including links between divination and time, ethics, and cosmology; and the relationship between divination and cultural discourses focusing on gender. The volume aims to catalyse new questions and approaches relating to these under-investigated areas of ancient Greek and Roman life. which have significant implications for the ways in which we understand and assess ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of epistemic value and variant ways of knowing, ancient philosophy and intellectual culture, lived, daily experience in the ancient world, and religious and ritual traditions.

Divination and Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity will be of particular relevance to researchers and students in classics, ancient history, ancient philosophy, religious studies and anthropology who are working on divination, lived religion and intellectual culture, but will also appeal to general readers who are interested in the widespread practice and significance of divination in the ancient world.

1 The enigmatic divine voice and the problem of human misinterpretation

Julia Kindt

Introduction

The ancient Greeks knew of a number of ways in which humans sought to communicate with the divine through the medium of language, including prayers, hymns, curses and oracles. All of these strategies have in common that they imagine the gods and goddesses as entities that could be addressed for certain purposes and that, potentially at least, took an interest in human affairs. Because this kind of communication addressed the supernatural, it differed from other kinds, including communication about the gods rather than with them.

On the spectrum of ways in which the Greeks sought to converse with the divine, oracles stand out.¹ They allowed humans to address the gods about an array of problems. Moreover, in contrast to other forms of religious communication they also promised an instant, verbal response from divinity, even if this response frequently seemed to have posed more questions than it really answered (see below).

A large number of institutions provided religious communication through oracles. Among them, the oracle of Apollo at Delphi was the most authoritative (see Figure 1.1). Its prophecies were considered to be more truthful than, for example, the predictions and omens provided by itinerant seers (Flower 2008).

Figure 1.1 Temple of Apollo, Delphi. 2-369-731. Artist: Samuel Magal.

Source: Courtesy of Samuel Magal/Sites & Photos/Heritage Images.

This chapter enquires into the kind of religious communication the Greeks associated with Delphi (see Figure 1.2). It explores the principles and practices of oracular divination as represented in Greek thought and literature and investigates the way classical scholarship has looked at this evidence. A particular focus will be on the significance of the famous “enigmatic language” of the oracle – the hallmark of Delphi and other oracular institutions as represented in Greek thought and literature.

Figure 1.2 This red-figure bell krater depicts the Pythia at Delphi, with the tripod, and Orestes kneeling as suppliant beside the omphalos with Apollo and Athena intervening on his behalf. Attributed to Python. 360–320 BCE, Paestum.

Source: 1917, 1210.1, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Testing the oracle

A mischievous man (anēr kakopragmōn) once decided that he would prove the Delphic oracle wrong (Aesop 55 Halm). Holding a sparrow hidden underneath his cloak, he approached the oracle asking whether what he held was dead or alive. He planned either to kill the bird or let it live, depending on the oracle’s response. The god, however, saw through the cloak, and replied: “You there, hang on, do whatever you want: it is entirely up to you whether you show me something living or dead!”² (“ἀλλ’, ὦ οὗτος, πέπαυσο. ἐν σοὶ γάρ ἐστι τοῦτο, ὃ ἔχεις, ἢ νεκρὸν εἶναι ἢ ἔμψυχον.”). Aesop, who included this story amongst his fables, concluded with the moralising observation that the god was obviously not to be trifled with.

This story plays on several aspects central to oracular divination. Most notably, it nicely captures the air of suspicion and fraud that ever so subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) attached itself to the oracular business. Except, of course, that in this case the ambiguity inheres not in the oracular response at all but rather in the man himself and his intent to prove the oracle wrong. In fact, Aesop’s fable upends the normal dynamics of oracle consultations because here the consultant seeks to mislead the god, not the other way around.³ The ambiguity typically associated with oracular responses – often so frustrating for those seeking to benefit from the god’s superior knowledge – is turned against the oracle itself, but with only limited success. The oracle rather elegantly deconstructs the ambiguities presented to it by naming the two possible outcomes.

Compare this incident to a similar one in which a certain Daphidas asks the Delphic oracle whether he would find his horse (Suda ∆99). To outsmart the oracle, our man invokes an adunaton (an impossibility): as he did not even own a horse he obviously could not retrieve one and either a positive or a negative response would prove the oracle wrong. In contrast to Aesop’s fable, however, the oracle does not immediately unmask the fraud but seemingly falls into the trap, by matching the impossible question with an equally impossible prediction: that he would soon find the horse. Valerius Maximus, who tells the same story, adds that the oracle also stated that he would fall from it and die.⁴

Later, Daphidas learns that what appeared to be the wrong answer has a second, alternative meaning, which he had not considered and which confirms the oracle’s authority and truthfulness and brings about – literally – his downfall. King Attalus of Pergamum seized him and had him thrown down a cliff. Just moments before his death, Daphidas learns that the rock was called hippos – “horse” – from which he concluded (rightly, it seems) that the oracle did not lie (Suda ∆99).

What are we supposed to take from these obviously moralizing stories about the nature of oracular divination? And what if anything can we learn from them about the meaning and significance of enigmatic oracular communication? To be sure, we could take them as evidence for an ancient tendency to challenge the perception of the enigmatic voice as genuinely inspired and divine. After all, both characters are initially unconvinced that oracular ambiguities are anything more than prophetic fiction making.

In semiotic terms, both tests deny the existence of a fixed referent for the oracular sign. What is at stake is the idea that the enigmatic divine voice circumscribes a particular future, a particular reality. In both instances, the possibility is raised that oracular ambiguity does not reveal a hidden truth, divine authority, and an otherworldly system of knowledge but rather represents a much more worldly instance of “deliberate ambiguity” employed to cover all possible outcomes of a given course of events. By challenging the oracle with a question that not only has no right answer (as in the second example) or the answer to which changes depending on a given course of events (as in the first), oracle-testing seeks to invalidate the very modes of meaning upon which oracular ambiguity rests.

But this testing is only half the story. In both instances the oracle ultimately reaffirms its role as the speaker of true prophecies and revelatory ambiguities. The enigmatic voice reflects a form of divine knowledge that exceeds human knowledge – that sees through all human clothes and is able to foretell human fate.

Oracular communication, it follows, is authoritative communication, is enigmatic communication: to try to beat oracles on their home turf (as by tricking them with obscure or ambiguous requests) is as futile as it is dangerous. At the very least, these two incidents suggest that if we want to benefit from the superior knowledge of the gods, we had better take oracular ambiguity seriously. We shall return to this point later in this chapter.

Ambiguities and authorities

It remains to be said that – perhaps unsurprisingly – classical scholarship has inherited the suspicious attitude towards oracular ambiguity. Like the mischievous man and Daphidas, scholars have frequently put oracular ambiguity to the test, in order to show that the Delphic Oracle employed ambiguity deliberately in order to generate responses that cover every possible outcome of a given course of events.

Take, for example, the scholarly discussion of a prediction allegedly given to the Spartans in about 550 BCE. The Spartans consulted the Pythia about conquering Arcadia and received the following response:

Arcady? Great is the thing you ask. I will not grant it.

In Arcady are many men, acorn-eaters,

And they will keep you out. Yet, for I am not grudging,

I will give you Tegea to dance in with stamping feet

And her fair plain to measure out with the line.⁵

In their 1956 study of the Delphic oracle, Herbert Parke and Donald Wormell present this prophecy as a prime example of “deliberate ambiguity.” They argue that,

this oracle … is evidently authentic and was delivered under approximately the circumstance which Herodotus records… . Happily for the Pythia, her metaphorical language could lend itself to other interpretations, and when the current opinion was that the gods expressed their meaning darkly, a devious construction could plausibly be put on the prophecy after the event.

(1956, I: 94)

In short, by choosing to employ ambiguity, the oracle preserved its standing as a speaker of true prophecies, no matter how events turned out.

For long, the question of the meaning of oracular ambiguity was invariably tangled up with the question of authenticity. In order to write a history out of oracular responses and the circumstances surrounding them, classical scholars sought to distinguish genuine and authentic responses (that were really spoken at Delphi) from inauthentic ones and to identify the background of possible forgeries. Who invented a particular oracular response and for what reason were the principal questions asked about oracles. The ambiguous language of the oracle employing metaphors, homonyms and obscurities – what throughout this contribution (and following Manetti) I summarily refer to as the “enigmatic mode” – indicate that a given response was not historical.⁶ The extraordinary tales of enigmatic prediction, interpretation and misinterpretation, and the subsequent spectacular fulfillment of prophecy, were frequently exposed as mere forgeries, brought into circulation after the event. The existence of “deliberate ambiguity,” however, is easily disproved by pointing out that in most cases the circumstances according to which most of the famously ambiguous predictions are fulfilled are far too specific to be deliberately taken into account at the moment of their alleged delivery (see below for examples).⁷

Joseph Fontenrose criticised the arbitrary and subjective nature of such assessments, and sought to put the discussion of prophecies on firmer grounds. In his now classic stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: divination and knowledge in ancient Greek and Roman cultures
• 1 The enigmatic divine voice and the problem of human misinterpretation
• 2 Torch-bearing Plato: why reason without the divine is not philosophy after all
• 3 “Work with the god”: military divination and rational battle-planning in Xenophon
• 4 Divination and decumbiture: Katarchic astrology and Greek medicine
• 5 Divination and the kairos in ancient Greek philosophy and culture
• 6 The Pythia as matter: Plutarch’s scientific account of divination
• 7 Divination and female sexuality: the transformation of the Greek Pythia by the Church Fathers
• 8 “Ethnic” divination in Roman imperial literature
• 9 Apuleius on divination: Platonic daimonology and child-divination
• 10 Astral symbolism in theurgic rites
• Index