ABSTRACT
As soon as he is born, Apollo stakes out the areas of his responsibility – “the lyre, and the curving bow,” and “to proclaim the unerring counsel of Zeus” (Hymn to Apollo 131f.), that is mousikē, shooting, and divination. We talked about the former two in the preceding chapters; this chapter is devoted to the third item. Divination – rituals to acquire “the foresight and knowledge of the future,” in Cicero’s somewhat narrow definition (On Divination 1.1) – played no great role in the Homeric world. Certainly, there were the seers: Calchas who accompanied the army in the Iliad, Tiresias whose ghost Odysseus consulted in the Underworld, and the Trojan Helenus who claimed to “hear the voice of the timeless gods” (Il. 7.53). And there were two main oracles, that of Zeus in Dodona “where thy prophets live, the Selloi, bare foot and sleeping on bare earth” (Il. 16.234), and Apollo’s oracle in Delphi where Agamemnon asked for advice about the outcome of the expedition to Troy (Od. 8.80). But neither Homeric poem seems aware of the important and often decisive role oracles played in the ancient world, from the Archaic Age of the Greeks to the end of pagan antiquity.
