ABSTRACT
Ancient Greco-Roman discourse regarding “divination among the barbarians” is met in a wide variety of philosophical, antiquarian or polemic registers, and often acted as a readily recognisable cipher for the religious propensities or inadequacies of barbarian peoples either in historiography, poetry or rhetoric. This chapter examines the references to barbarian groups’ divination and diviners from the context of the Late Roman Republic and the Early Empire, during which many Hellenistic elements regarding barbarian peoples’ divinatory practices were first adopted into Roman literature, until the Later Empire, where the mixture of Judeo-Christian and Neoplatonic traditions influenced the ways in which the ethnography of ethnic (non-Greek or non-Roman) divinatory practices was handled. The texts studied range from Cicero’s On Divination (De divinatione) and Early Imperial historical and geographical writing to the Late Antique lists of “barbarian wise men” (which sometimes treated them as ἔθνη) in the works of Church Fathers and scholastic writing. This longue durée brings to the foreground several developments and some telling continuations in the ways in which “barbarian” traditions of divination were treated in Imperial literature and knowledge-ordering systems before and after Christianisation.
