The Seer and the City

Religion, Politics, and Colonial Ideology in Ancient Greece

Margaret Foster

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780520295001
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520967915
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in archaic and classical colonial discourse. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse privileged the city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, at the expense of the independent seer. Investigating a  sequence of literary texts, Foster explores the tactics the Greeks devised both to leverage and suppress the extraordinary cultural capital of seers. The first cultural history of the seer, The Seer and the City illuminates the contests between religious and political powers in archaic and classical Greece.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Conventions and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Beyond Entrails and Omens: Herodotus's Teisamenos and the Talismanic Seer at War
• 2. Sailing to Sicily: Theoklymenos and Odysseus in the Odyssey
• 3. Suppressing the Seer in Colonial Discourse: Delphic Consultations and the Seer in the City
• 4. The Disappearance of Melampous in Bacchylides' Ode 11
• 5. Hagesias as Sunoikistēr: Mantic Authority and Colonial Ideology in Pindar's Olympian 6
• 6. Amphiaraos, Alkmaion, and Delphi's Oracular Monopoly
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index Locorum