Divination and the seers

What is attested

Extispicy was the routine, expected form of Greek divination on campaign, and the Roman equivalent before public business was the taking of auspices by the magistrate himself; neither is what the literary tradition preserves best. A seer killed an animal, examined the liver and other organs, and pronounced the signs favourable or not; where they were not, the sacrifice was often repeated, though Xenophon also records days of repeated sacrifice that never came out favourable and an operation abandoned in consequence. Armies did this before marching, before crossing a river, and again immediately before engagement. Xenophon, who commanded and who describes the procedure repeatedly from inside it, treats the pre-battle sacrifice as an ordinary operational step with a professional attached to the staff, and records the pay involved: Cyrus gave the Ambraciot seer Silanos three thousand darics for having correctly told him, eleven days earlier, that the King would not fight within ten days. That single notice tells us more about the economics of the profession than any oracle story.

The practitioners were specialists, often hereditary, and they moved. Herodotus' account of Tisamenos of Elis is the fullest portrait: a member of the Iamid lineage associated with Olympia, recruited by Sparta, and finally granted Spartan citizenship — with his brother — as the price of his services, an award Herodotus says was unique. The grant is an administrative act and stands on its own; the Delphic response that Herodotus makes the hinge of the story is set out below among the aitia, because it has the shape of an explanation supplied after the career it explains. Seers appear as named individuals with reputations, fees, and negotiating power. They could also die in the line of work: Herodotus records the seer Megistias at Thermopylae, and an epigram commemorating him.

Institutional oracles were a separate matter, and the documentary evidence for them is dominated not by responses but by questions. At Dodona, excavation has produced thousands of small inscribed lead strips on which consultants wrote their enquiries — the corpus published in 2013 from the Evangelides excavations comprises over four thousand inscribed tablets, spanning roughly the mid-sixth century to the mid-second century BCE. Their content is domestic and practical: whether to marry, whether a child is one's own, whether to move, whether to take up a trade, what to do about livestock, which god to propitiate. The standard formula asks the god whether it is better and more advantageous to do a given thing. These are yes/no or either/or enquiries, written by the enquirer, and preserved by accident of material. They are the single most important body of evidence for what ancient divination was actually used for, and they look nothing like the oracles of literature.

Roman public divination was procedural and magisterial rather than inspired. The auspices were taken by magistrates within defined rules about place, time and observation, and the negative power — to report an adverse sign and stop business — was politically live. Alongside this stood the discipline imported from Etruria: haruspices reading the entrails, and specialists in lightning and in the rules for expiating prodigies. The Etruscan technical literature is entirely lost; what survives of it survives in Latin summary and in one extraordinary object, the bronze model of a sheep's liver found near Piacenza in 1877 and dated to the late second or early first century BCE, divided into sixteen outer sections with divine names inscribed across its surface — a physical map of the correspondence between regions of the sky, regions of the organ, and gods.

The intellectual status of all this was contested inside antiquity, which matters because it prevents any simple story of universal credulity. Cicero's dialogue on divination, written in the mid-40s BCE, sets a defence of divination on Stoic principles against a systematic demolition; in the sceptical book he relays Cato's remark that he wondered one haruspex could look at another without laughing. Cicero himself held an augurate. The same culture maintained the apparatus, staffed it with its elite, and produced from within itself a sustained argument that it did not work.

How the rite worked

Extispicy on campaign followed a fixed sequence. The victim was killed, the liver removed and inspected for lobe shape, colour, marks and the presence or absence of particular features; the seer declared the signs favourable or unfavourable; if unfavourable, another victim was brought. A distinct rite, the sphagia, was performed immediately before contact with the enemy, with the throat cut and the flow observed. Armies could be held in place for days by unfavourable signs, and commanders who overrode a seer did so as a recorded act. Because the procedure was repeatable, it functioned as much as a mechanism for managing timing and morale as a source of information — which is a description of its operation, not a verdict on what participants believed.

Consulting an institutional oracle involved fees, queueing and priority: enquirers paid before consultation, and the right to consult ahead of others could be granted to a city or an individual as a standing honour. The procedural detail commonly repeated in modern summaries comes from late and partly reconstructive authors, and the consultation procedure of any single sanctuary belongs with that sanctuary rather than with divination as a technique. At Dodona the mechanism is better evidenced by the material itself: the enquirer wrote a question on a small lead strip, folded it, and submitted it; some strips carry a short reply, but most preserve only the question — which makes this the one substantial body of oracular evidence not shaped by knowing how things turned out.

Payment structured everything. Seers were paid; oracles took offerings; the Delphic and Dodonan sanctuaries were substantial economic institutions. The three thousand darics for Silanos are an outlier tied to a king's satisfaction, but they establish that a successful seer could be paid at a level that made the profession worth entering, and Tisamenos' extraction of Spartan citizenship shows the same in a different currency.

Roman procedure ran on offices and calendars rather than on inspired specialists. The magistrate observed within a defined ritual space; the feeding of sacred chickens produced a favourable sign when they ate greedily enough to drop grain. Prodigies reported from across Italy were referred to the senate, which decided whether to accept them as public and which body of specialists — the haruspices, or the keepers of the Sibylline books — should be consulted on expiation. The result was a set of prescribed ritual remedies rather than a prediction. Livy's annalistic prodigy lists show the system operating year by year as an administrative routine.