This volume is the product of a research group organised, according to established custom, by the outgoing Director of the Finnish Institute in Rome. The contributors were drawn from participants in the Spring courses of the Institute. The theme was suggested by the then Director and reflects his particular research interests, though the distribution of the topics among the contributors was guided by their specific areas of work. This is quite an unusual way of producing an edited volume; rather than calling together specialists in relevant areas, the authors have been required to depart somewhat from their usual research territory in order to meet on the shared ground of ancient oracles and divination. This process gives the resulting volume both strengths and weaknesses, some of which this review will identify.
S.-I. Kittelä, ‘Dodona and Neoptolemus: Heroic Genealogies and Claims of Ethnicity’, performs a careful survey of the changing significance of Dodona and its associated heroes for the ethnic self-perception and self-presentation of a number of groups and individuals from Homer to the Roman period. This broad chronological range has the virtue of allowing comparison and a sense of gradual development, and yet it does have disadvantages. It gives the paper the quality of a survey, which is combined with a certain absence of rhetorical urgency or cumulative force: a central line of argument does not strongly emerge, and this is reflected in the lack of a conclusion which might have reflected usefully on consistent themes or wider implications.
A. Lampinen's ‘Oracular Functionaries at Claros and Didyma’ sheds valuable light on oracular personnel and procedure at the two sites. Its chief aim is to contribute to a current scholarly trend: the recognition that the roles of mantic practitioners rarely if ever conform with Plato's categorisation of them in the Timaeus (71e–72b). The resulting detailed discussion achieves some valuable insights, for example into the relationship between mythology and mantic reality, not only from a historiographic perspective (how we as historians can distinguish the two) but also in the ancient experience as the oracles work to maintain their origin-stories while accommodating contemporary practices and circumstances.
M. Buchholz, ‘Questions to Oracles in Graeco-Roman Egypt: a Quantitative Approach to the Papyrological Evidence’, deploys statistical analysis to establish the distribution of the (published) oracular enquiries in linguistic, chronological and finally geographical terms. Commendable care is taken to establish methods and confront inherent difficulties at the start, and the ensuing investigation produces some significant results. The chronological analysis is especially effective, dealing serious blows to existing theories and assumptions. As the paper notes (p. 95), historians seeking to explain the changing linguistic preponderance among the questions from Demotic to Greek have posited explanations in terms of the exercise of political pressure; however, Buchholz demonstrates that in fact the questions are representative of the linguistic shift in the overall body of surviving papyri, and so are merely keeping pace with general trends. The geographical section of the paper is similarly interesting, but in this case one is definitely left wanting more, and the discussion feels like the preview of a much more substantial piece of work (which perhaps it is, or could be!) which might include more detail of the oracles concerned: procedure, deities, types of enquiry and so on. The approach would seem potentially applicable to a wide range of different variables in future projects.
L. Buchholz's ‘Identifying the Oracular sortes of Italy’ shares certain essential features with that of Lampinen, in that both are interested in the problems of classification, Lampinen that of mantic personnel and Buchholz that of objects. As she makes clear, the fact that lot oracles were common in ancient Italy does not mean that historians and archaeologists always know exactly what to look for when classifying an object as a sors. In a detailed examination of literary and artistic depictions and of actual artefacts, Buchholz tries to sharpen up the boundaries of the corpus of ancient sortes, arguing very persuasively for the exclusion of certain types of object which some historians have previously included. This is a valuable and interesting contribution to our understanding of the topic.
Every Classicist is familiar with the story of the aged Sibyl approaching Tarquinius Superbus and trying to sell him some books of oracular texts. But for all their fame, the Sibylline Books are shrouded in mystery, as is made clear by J. Keskiaho's ‘Revisiting the Libri Sibyllini: Some Remarks on their Nature in Roman Legend and Experience’. As Keskiaho remarks (p. 144), past scholarship on the Books is copious, and the paper does not strike out into new territory; the debates on which it comments are well-established ones. However, the collation of so much material, ancient and modern, coupled with some competent and diligent Quellenforschung, makes this a useful introduction to the topic.
S. Randén's paper, ‘“Through Ambiguous Words, as is the Custom of Oracles”: Oracles, Roman Emperors and Imperial Historians’, identifies and examines a powerful motif in ancient historiography: accounts of mortal rulers (here Roman emperors) confronting divinity through the medium of oracles. The political potency of this story-type is immensely persistent (Croesus is of course an early example), and serves as a mutual testing of temporal and supernatural power, as well as an expression of Roman ambivalence towards Greek culture. Some of this potency is realised in Randén's diligent article, and the figure of Alexander as forerunner is a useful one to explore, though the full heritage is an older one than that. More could have been said about the way in which earlier examples influenced not only the Roman historians but also how rulers really conducted themselves in their oracular encounters, their behaviour consciously or unconsciously shaped by centuries of precedents.
O. Kaltio's ‘Valuing Oracles and Prophecies: Lactantius and the Pagan Seers’ concludes the volume with an examination of early Christian responses to ancient oracular people and practices. It gives a fascinating insight into Lactantius' strategies (perhaps that is too cold a word) for adapting pagan practices to the promulgation of Christian beliefs. Especially interesting aspects include the power of antiquity in Lactantius' work, the way in which it ‘served as proof of truthfulness and divinity’ (p. 208) and conferred a sort of religious neutrality. This recycling, and altered persistence, of oracular traditions serves as a powerful note on which to end the volume.
Each of the individual contributions represents a piece of competent and interesting scholarship, though the quality is somewhat uneven, corresponding probably with the extent to which each author is able to draw upon his or her long-standing specialism or is obliged to venture onto new ground for the purposes of the project. As noted above, this is a feature of the book's unusual compilation process. However, one simple addition would lift the overall quality of the collection considerably, and that is a proper introduction. There is much that the short preface does not supply. What is needed is some attempt to draw together the various threads of the collection and to assert its cumulative contribution to the scholarship on the subject vis-à-vis the more important recent publications (for example, S.I. Johnston and P.T. Struck [edd.] Mantikê: Studies in Ancient Divination [2005]). The editor is right to state (p. 7) that heterogeneity among the papers is not a deficiency; however, I was struck by the emergence of some very strong shared themes which linked the papers and the various time-periods, corpora and methods included, and it would have been very valuable to have some editorial statement of these. Perhaps the strongest of these shared themes is the articulation of power and authority, by people, by objects and by texts, and on this score the volume has genuine significance. Its worst fault is arguably that it does not do more to ensure that this significance is fully recognised.
