The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life (Oxford Handbooks in Classics and Ancient History) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-08-27T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

ANIMALS AND DIVINATION

PETER STRUCK

INTRODUCTION

ACROSS the whole ancient world, people used a broad array of techniques and disciplines to make themselves attentive to what they thought to be hidden information buried in the events unfolding around them. These practices, classified in Greek as the disciplines of mantikē and in Latin as divinatio, were utterly common. They were not, for the most part, considered esoteric or occult. The ancients understood that the universe had certain inclinations built into it, which were more or less closely tied to the inclinations of the gods. Like the weather, these were a part of the ancient atmosphere; and throughout the Greek and Roman sources we find people trying to gauge the prevailing winds. They perceived messages in a wide variety of signs, but nearly all of the most prominent and durable of the Greek and Roman systems make use of animals. Aeschylus’s overview of the classical terrain, put into the mouth of Prometheus, announces where humans might look to find these hidden indicators, and he gives animals the balance of attention:

And I marked out the many ways of divination, and among dreams I first discerned which are destined to come true; and I explained to them words overheard by chance and chance meetings. The flight of crook-taloned birds I distinguished carefully—which by nature are auspicious, which sinister—and each has a particular mode of life, some are hostile to each other, and they have affections and favourable positionings in groups; and the smoothness of their entrails, and what colour the gall must have to please the gods, also the speckled symmetry of the liver-lobe; and the thigh-bones, wrapped in fat, and by burning the long loin I set mortals on the right path in an art that is difficult and murky.

(Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 484–98)

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