ORACLES AND GREEK MENTALITIES: THE MANTIC CONFIRMATION OF MANTIC REVELATIONS
Pierre Bonnechere
The average Greek had a sense of divine intervention in human affairs.1 Day-to-day worries were one thing; faced with anything else, he soon found himself lost in a forest of symbols, whose meaning he had to decode if he were to hope to act rationally. A sign is ambiguous by defini- tion, however, and always hazardous to interpret; his best strategy would be to follow the greatest concentration of symbols and potentially telling mantic clues. And if ever these signs did not accumulate naturally, there were always means of soliciting them. Hence the universal preference for composite mantic enquiries: among the Azanda in s Sudan, each oracle obtained ‘by poison’ demanded a counter-test to be credible.2 The Hittites, likewise, could verify ominous dreams with such deductive orac- ular procedures as ornithomancy and hepatoscopy.3 For the Greek world, the example of Croesus would immediately spring to mind. Wishing to invade Persia, he sought the sanction of the gods, and to test the reliability of each one, he sent to the Greek oracles as many envoys, all charged with asking the same question, at the same
1 This article is part of a vast research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose ultimate goal is to replace A. Bouché- Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’Antiquité, vols. (Paris: Leroux, –). I am delighted to participate in the medley offered to Jan Bremmer, a scholar whom I have long admired and now count among my friends. I would like to thank my graduate student Christopher Lougheed for his translation. 2 E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azanda (abridged edition; Oxford: Clarendon, ), –. The practice was to administer a dose of poison to a chicken, ordering the poison either to kill or to spare the animal: ‘if so and so has committed X, o poison, kill (or spare) the chicken’. The reverse would serve as a counter-test: ‘if so and so has really committed X, o poison, spare (or kill) the chicken’. 3 See A. Mouton, Rêves Hittites. Contribution à une histoire et une anthropologie du rêve en Anatolie ancienne (Leiden: Brill, ). A good example is no. .–, esp. – : ‘si la déesse (a voulu signifier telle chose), d’abord que les chairs soient favorables, mais qu’ensuite elles soient défavorables. D’abord les chairs ont montré (telle et telle chose): c’est favorable. Ensuite, les chairs [ont eu leur] intérieur saisi: c’est défavorable’. Counter-test with ornithomancy: Mouton, Rêves Hittites, no. . pierre bonnechere time: ‘what is Croesus doing at this exact moment?’ Only the oracle of Apollo guessed that Croesus was stirring a pot in which he was cooking a mixture of lamb and turtle meat.4 Croesus’ story is now considered an isolated example of hybris, but it has left an impression of trickery that has coloured perceptions of Greek oracles to the present day. The expedition of Agesipolis in bce provides a perfect example.
Agesipolis and the Sacred Truce of the Argives
In this year, Sparta mounted an expedition against the Argives, who declared a sacred truce—unjustified by the calendar itself—to celebrate the major Dorian festival of the Carneia. The truce prevented any military action until King Agesipolis secured a favourable oracle from Olympia, where Zeus ‘assured him that there was no impiety in ignoring a truce illegitimately declared’. Immediately afterwards, he left for Delphi and inquired of Apollo ‘if he shared the opinion of his father on the truce’ (ε$ κκε ν\ω δκ η περ τ ν σπνδ ν κα!περ τ\ πατρ ). The god ‘gave the same answer, and in no uncertain terms’.Modern commentators highlight the sophistry, as they see it, of the king’s manoeuvre: Apollo was bound by filial piety to confirm the oracle of his father. In other words, the king cynically exploited an inherent flaw in the polytheist oracular system for his own political ends. This reading is a veritable case study in the dangers of hasty analysis, as we will see.5 Before we discuss Greek practices as to multiple oracles, there are certain points to take into account. First, since both question and answer may have been altered by the literary authors or their sources—without necessarily any ill intent or change in meaning—, we cannot be certain of the exact words of Agesipolis. Indeed, the ancients themselves played on this uncertainty, and Aristotle took up this anecdote in his Rhetorica (b):
4 Herodotus .– = J.E. Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle. Its Responses and Opera- tions (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), no. Q . 5 Xenophon, HG ..– = Fontenrose, Delphic Oracle, no. H, on which see J.- C. Riedinger, Étude sur les Helléniques. Xénophon et l’histoire (Paris: Belles Lettres, ), . Many historians have followed H.W. Parke and D.E. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle, vol. (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, but cf. A. Giuliani, La città e l’oracolo. I rapporti tra Atene e Delfi in età arcaica e classica (Milan: Vita e pensiero, ), who is rightly critical.