Description
Book SynopsisThis book thoroughly revisits divination as a central phenomenon in the lives of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. It collects studies from many periods in Graeco-Roman history, from the Archaic period to the late Roman, and touches on many different areas of this rich topic, including treatments of dice oracles, sortition in both pagan and Christian contexts, the overlap between divination and other interpretive practices in antiquity, the fortunes of independent diviners, the activity of Delphi in ordering relations with the dead, the role of Egyptian cult centers in divinatory practices, and the surreptitious survival of recipes for divination by corpses. It also reflects a range of methodologies, drawn from anthropology, history of religions, intellectual history, literary studies, and archaeology, epigraphy, and paleography. It will be of particular interest to scholars and student of ancient Mediterranean religions.
Trade Review'...overall this is a highly successful volume. The editors are to be commended for an interesting and worthy collection of articles, logically organized, and tightly edited... The contributors are to be commended for rising to the challenge posed in Johnston's opening essay. They offer the reader interesting and thought provoking insights into the intellectual and social world of ancient divination. Divination is unveiled as an omnipresent and ubiquitous phenomenon in the public and private lives of the Greeks and Romans. At every turn, one finds divination integrated into the thought processes of the ancients. Its pervasive influence in religion, poetry, history, philosophy, and magic is manifest and profound. It is high time that the modern academy looked to the paradoxical world of ancient divination as a challenge to the intellect, an ainigma to be solved, and revealed its centrality in the epistemology of ancient Greece and Rome.' Alex Nice, BCMR, 2006 ' Das Buch ist eine unverzichtbare Lektüre für alle, die sich mit antiker Divination beschäftigen.' Karin Schlapbach, 2005
