ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals about the method: to compare ancient Greece with modern world can prove deeply misleading - or enlightening - about the Greeks themselves, depending on the method used. It clarifies the history of our societies, including one of the most important and most startling developments of very recent times: the explosive role of religious prophecy in international politics and the case of divination shows how, by treating respectfully ancient evidence which is at first sight strange. The chapter detects the traces of ancient controversy as to whether divination deserved to be influential, but there seems to have been no dispute that it actually was so. It allows that a genuine prophecy may to some extent match the outcome of events because people deliberately followed the prophecy. The chapter traces in form of the inscription and the record of the statues, of two official references to prominent divination in any case, from the thinly documented period of Athenian history.
