Oracles and Greek Mentalities: the Mantic Confirmation of Mantic Revelations
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.
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