Let us suppose you are an ancient farmer somewhere in northwestern Greece. You till the same land that your father worked on, and your grandfather before him. You have a wife, who is pregnant again. You are hoping the child will make it through the first year this time. You have a slave, too. The other one ran off long ago. Except for your small parcel of land, you do not own much. But with what little you have, you are making ends meet. You have neighbors that help when they can, although you suspect that someone may have stolen that piglet that went missing. You know it’s time to plough once the cranes let out their shrieks. And you know when to bring in the last harvest by observing the rising and setting of the stars in the morning or in the evening. Your father taught you that. But for all of your practical knowledge, and for all of your experience in reading the signs of the natural world, you are still unsure whether there is going to be enough yield. And whether the land is still good enough to carry enough fruit to feed your family. This uncertainty nags at you, year in, year out. And when you reach a point where you just can’t bear to worry any more, you decide you must just go to the god and ask his advice. What will the god answer this time?

We cannot say for certain if a farmer deciding to visit the oracle of Zeus and Dione at Dodona in north western Greece was really confronted with a situation such as this; or what the reasons were that made him (or her) go the sanctuary. But it is with a reasonable amount of confidence that we can say that the overall context may have come pretty close. In the more than 4,000 inscribed questions on lead tablets that were asked of the oracle between the late Archaic and the Hellenistic period and that were published in 2013,Footnote ¹ a large number have to do with what Fontenrose once referred to as ‘Res Domesticae et Profanae’Footnote ², that is, matters of birth and death, marriage and health, private business transactions and choice of profession. And a significant proportion clearly deals with agricultural matters. The question of whether the earth will bring forth enough fruit was quite a common one, reiterated in numerous sources.Footnote ³ This does not mean that all of the visitors to the sanctuary were involved in agricultural labor. In fact, many of the questions raised in the tablets suggest a very mobile world, with a lot of people that chose professions that did not allow them to settle down for long or demanded a certain flexibility for re-location.Footnote ⁴ But there can be no doubt that the issue of crops, of food supply and the inevitability of hunger loomed large in a pre-industrial agrarian society.Footnote ⁵

My essay will discuss the historical experience of visiting Dodona against the background of the peasant world roughly sketched out in my opening lines. It is possible that the interpretation of signs, and especially of signs from the natural world made up a central backbone of the practical knowledge of farmers in the ancient world.Footnote ⁶ But if many people living in that particular social context were gifted in reading the signs of ‘nature’, why did they still depend on an oracle to tell them if their fields were any good, how the harvest would turn out and even whether to cultivate a specific parcel of land or not? I suggest that part of the answer to this question lies in how agricultural resources were religiously framed in the ancient Greek world. In this context, I want to argue that oracles (and especially Dodona) functioned as sites where material practices of daily life could be negotiated with the gods in a ritual as well as communal context and reflected on in the face of nonhuman forces. Oracles, in other words, presented a way of communicating with the natural world.Footnote ⁷ On the other hand, they were also places where the individual could present himself (or herself) in relation to this world: not only how he or she depended on its fruits for survival but also how he (or she) could make or re-make the resources it had to offer so that it would flourish. As I want to show, this particular interrelationship between agricultural labor and oracular consultation relied as much on the performative act of enquiry as it did on practical knowledge. In order to illustrate these interconnections and to reflect on future directions for research, my essay will draw on recent trends in environmental history and especially in resilience studies. It will begin by outlining these theoretical frameworks, before moving on to reconsider the ancient evidence of the Zeus Oracle at Dodona in light of these approaches.

Resources and ‘Sustainability’ in Ancient Greece

The starting point for my reflections is recent work on environmental history in antiquity. Up until now, there has been a lack of systematic studies that examine human-environment relations in antiquity in terms of their ‘sustainable’ dimensions. Recent years have seen a sea change, however, and numerous studies have appeared which illustrate that the concept of sustainability can serve as a heuristic tool that allows us to trace ancient environmental behavior.Footnote ⁸ Sustainability is here understood as the careful use of natural resources that guarantees their undiminished preservation for future generations.Footnote ⁹ Especially in terms of its normative dimensions, this is a modern concept. As Joachim Radkau has argued, however, the topic has a deep historical dimension insofar as it encompasses geographical spaces and the cultures that, along with their institutions and traditions, have grown in them.Footnote ¹⁰ The historical dimension of ‘cultural landscapes’ can be seen in the way in which humans intervened in and changed environments, but also in the way these environments were perceived. According to this view, pre-modern societies had to develop strategies in order to manage with limited natural resources and to cope with weather- and climate-related fluctuations in crop yields.

In this context, the question of how ancient societies processed experiences of temporal change, of generational succession and of future consequences of present actions is crucial insofar as different scales of time or temporality play a role in the formulation of principles of ‘sustainable’ environmental behavior. This already starts with insight into the potential finiteness of resources and extends to understanding that one’s own behavior will have a direct influence on future generations. Although my essay is less concerned with notions of temporality per se, expectations of the future and cultural techniques that express or negotiate them cannot be considered completely detached from temporal experiences. Envisioning or anticipating the ways that environments may change over time, for instance, can be seen as cultural acts of time-telling that can vary considerably if societies track change according to linear units of time or rather opt to highlight variations in cyclical and recurrent patterns observed in ‘nature’.Footnote ¹¹

According to Reinhart Koselleck, pre-modern agrarian society was determined by the cycles of the natural lifeworld; the world of human experience and the horizon of expectations associated with it would largely correlate.Footnote ¹² Using the example of the poet Hesiod’s Works and Days in particular, Jean-Pierre Vernant has illustrated how inextricably the human labor of agriculture, service to the gods and the regulated order of the lifeworld are related to one another in Hesiod’s text. Ritualism is a key dimension that brings these different dimensions together. Everything must be performed at its prescribed time in the prescribed formFootnote ¹³ – such as, for instance, ploughing at the onset of winter when the crane lets out its shriek in the sky.Footnote ¹⁴ The person who knows about these rules and does his work in reverence to the gods, who knows how to read the flight of birds, can trust in divine justice,Footnote ¹⁵ his storehouse will fill with grain.

The latter aspect – harvesting enough crops – is the decisive one: the lifeworld of the Archaic Greek poet and landowner Hesiod, who describes the annual cycles of agricultural labor in his didactic poem, was threatened by the omnipresent danger of crop failure. Accordingly, the religious framing of his text should not obscure the fact that it is mainly about hard work, for which he gives practical instructions. The mythological narrative of the poem, which is linked to the negotiation of one’s own harsh world of experience, is consistent and coherent and offers a literary framework within which one’s own life experience, which is otherwise strongly characterized by uncertainty, becomes understandable. Hesiod’s narrative is thus not solely about people’s moral transgressions, but is as much concerned with the right environmental behavior. Successful work in this context means paying careful attention to the environment (and its signs), modifying it according to human possibilities (both core elements of Greek agrarianism) and dealing prudently with fellow human beings.Footnote ¹⁶

As Tanja Scheer has recently pointed out in a multi-faceted article on religion and sustainability in ancient Greece,Footnote ¹⁷ one of Hesiod’s main themes is the scarcity of resources – keeping in mind not only his own in the present, but also that of the next generation.Footnote ¹⁸ What can be said for Hesiod’s work, can be observed for Archaic and classical Greek culture in general: the most important addressees and participants were the gods, especially in the case of resource problems, drought, crop failure and hunger. People owed them reverence and active worship. The Greeks knew which deities were responsible for what from local traditions and/or widely known tales of the deeds of individual gods, the myths. Myth as well as the cults associated with the deities shaped the attitude of the individual and this in turn, according to Scheer, affected their behavior towards natural resources. ‘A universally applicable rule was not actively formulated as a commandment in this regard’, but natural resources, according to Scheer’s main thesis, proved to be ‘religiously marked’ in Greek culture.Footnote ¹⁹

The title of her essay ‘Nichts im Übermaß’ (‘Nothing in Excess’) refers to one of the inscriptions that were attached to the temple of Apollo in Delphi.Footnote ²⁰ The obscure aspects of the origin of the sayings cannot be discussed in detail here.Footnote ²¹ Of importance, however, is the testimony of ancient sources, which attests to their widespread use. The aphorism ‘Nothing in excess’ did not have to be recognized as a binding religious commandment. Delphi, however, was considered as a particularly important religious place of the greatest possible publicity in the Greek world. As Scheer suggests, the inscription on the temple of Apollo may have implied a moderate, appropriate action also in relation to the environment or rather in relation to resource consumption: ‘Its origin’, she writes, ‘was a pre-industrial agrarian society that was searching for ways out of its resource problems. In this society, there were voices that had identified injustice, greed, and insatiable gain as pernicious, and that promoted respect for the gods and knowledge of right measure as maxims promising success’.Footnote ²²

In general, the role of Greek oracles for negotiating social processes of natural resource use has hardly been discussed in environmental historical contexts. Although research on divination points to the role of divinatory practices for ‘risk management’, to oracle consultations in times of crisis like plagues, famines and even settlement conflicts, the focus is on the social processes underlying these consultations. The broader ‘ecological’ problem context that could give rise to divinatory mechanisms, however, is usually left out. This does not solely amount to a discussion of how, for instance, oracles were embedded in the landscape but also to their discursive and symbolical function when it came to resolving environmental problems. As I will argue, divinatory practices can themselves be understood as social resources that offered ancient people assistance with concrete issues affecting the environment.

Divination and Environmental Knowledge

But first a note of caution: we should not read an environmental agenda into the source material too quickly. For although resource problems were a pressing concern in ancient culture (and possibly more so than models underlining the connectivity of the Mediterranean world suggest),Footnote ²³ these issues were not discussed as environmental problems per se. As especially Lukas Thommen has illustrated, we cannot assume that an ‘ecological’ awareness existed in the ancient world – at least not in our modern sense of the term.Footnote ²⁴ Yet, as Scheer’s arguments make clear, the issue is complex and the real question for us is how to frame the environmental behavior of the ancient Greeks and Romans in terms that do not appear anachronistic or that mistakenly presuppose mindsets that were, in reality, far removed from our own.

Another problem lies in the source material on which modern environmental histories of the ancient Mediterranean world have been based. The literary evidence reflects, for the most part, the view of the intellectual elite, who wrote from a standpoint far removed from some of the material realities that other social classes had to deal with. Cordovana and Chiai discuss this problem under the notion of a ‘common-sense understanding of the environment’, which they define as ‘the shared common knowledge and perception of the environment by ordinary people’.Footnote ²⁵ As they argue, ‘A critical selection of documentary sources, considered together with the archaeological evidence, can show the presence of a common-sense environment in the Greek and Roman world’.Footnote ²⁶ While they do not include the oracular tablets of Dodona in their discussion (nor any other evidence from an ancient oracle), this material arguably presents us with this sort of documentary evidence. But how can we frame these sources in environmental terms?

In a recent monograph on natural catastrophes in ancient Greece, Ludovic Thély has illustrated in great detail how ancient Greek culture (or rather particular authors) developed modes of anticipating future disasters. These prognostic techniques were, as he claims, proto-scientific as they were based, for the most part, on accounts of physical and geological interconnections in nature.Footnote ²⁷ As he also points out, however, the interplay of cause and effect was not merely a secularized affair but also a key component of ancient theories and methods of divination.Footnote ²⁸ Physical as well as religious interpretations of natural catastrophes went hand in hand in antiquity,Footnote ²⁹ but whereas modern studies have traditionally looked at how these catastrophic events were narrated in hindsight, little attention has been paid to the way the ancients thought about the possibility of and limits to anticipating occurrences, such as droughts, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.

We have plenty of evidence to suggest that they did. Philosophers, like Anaximander who foretold to the Spartans that an earthquake was imminent, were famous in antiquity. In his dialogue De Divinatione, Cicero’s brother Quintus uses this example to distinguish prognostic techniques based on natural evidence from divine inspiration.Footnote ³⁰ This comparison is part of a larger argument about the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘technical’ forms of divination.Footnote ³¹ At first sight, the distinction results from the fact that natural divination (i.e. oracles and dreams) do not require the same interpretative ability on the part of the diviner as can be found in technical divination (e.g. auguries).Footnote ³² According to Quintus, technical divination is based on what we may term scientific methods, that is, observation (observatio), interpretation (interpretatio) and conclusion. It is based on key cultural features like memory and tradition: ‘For what is known in advance from entrails, lightning, portents, and the stars is recorded as a result of observation over a long period. In all these areas the great length of time produces an extraordinary science through prolonged observation.’Footnote ³³

As Walter Burkert remarked in a late essay, ‘Looked at it in this way, divination is nothing “divine” but rather an accumulation of experiences about the relevance and meanings of signs’, adding that ‘the results of such experiences will, of course, be recorded within the cultural memory of a civilization, and as soon as writing is available, it can be further preserved in written form’.Footnote ³⁴ It amounts to a very practical knowledge of finding one’s way in the world, a knowledge that is largely based on experience and follows an intrinsic cultural logic; at the same time, it is also universal. Burkert mentions the example of navigating by the stars and of observing their constellations in order to mark the seasons of the year: ‘Neolithic farmers possessed this knowledge, and possibly even Palaeolithic hunters.’Footnote ³⁵

Farmers, just like doctors or boatmen, ‘sense many things in advance’ (multa praesentiunt), as Quintus remarks in De Divinatione,Footnote ³⁶ but whereas they base their projections on observable features of the material world, it is less certain ‘how prophets and dreamers see those things which do not exist anywhere at the time’.Footnote ³⁷ And although Quintus is not entirely certain how divination works, he knows this much to be true: the gods give humans signs of what is to come. From cultural memory and tradition follows cultural anticipation. For reasons of survival alone, ‘humans cannot escape the necessity of making projections into the future’.Footnote ³⁸ This form of anticipating things or events that have not yet come to pass does not necessarily have to rely on a religious framework – a fact of which Quintus is well aware. That is why he is struggling to distinguish different forms of divination, forms that, as he is quick to admit, have more in common than his seemingly clear distinction had presupposed.Footnote ³⁹

The discussion of the philosophical implications and traditions of Cicero’s treatise is beyond the scope of this essay. But there is one further aspect that is important for my argument: Quintus claims that divination is universal; at the same time, he notices that societies seem to specialize in different forms of divination. Quintus combines this observation with the respective environmental living conditions of the people he talks about.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, the Arabs or Cilicians rely, for the most part, on the observation of birds, because they pasture and herd animals, traversing vast distances between the seasons. On the other hand, societies that depend on farming pay more attention to portents. While the comparative aspect is the decisive one, illustrating Quintus’ main point that divination is ubiquitous, the environmental dimension should not be underestimated. Although it draws on a form of determinism quite characteristic of Greco-Roman cultural theories,Footnote ⁴¹ the connection between divinatory practice and environmental frameworks is firmly established by Quintus, whose comments are based on a number of (especially Stoic) precursors.Footnote ⁴² In this perspective, divination provided a powerful framework for getting into contact with a world beyond the human, a world of the more-than-human.Footnote ⁴³ From natural living conditions follow cultural systems of meaning.

Negotiating Material Environmental Practices

Oracles do not appear in Quintus’ enumeration at this point. But we know from other sources that (foundational) stories connected to oracular sites could be replete with environmental details. We only need to think of Delphi’s famous chasm that was said to evaporate ‘vapors’ inspiring the oracle’s medium, the Pythia.Footnote ⁴⁴ While we cannot take all such narratives at face value, the more so as they primarily functioned as a device to heighten the numinous quality of an oracular site, we should not thrust them aside altogether. Environmental media like vapors, water (mostly for purification) or plants play a fundamental role in many sources that tell us about ancient oracles. More than mere embellishments, these details can also be interpreted as the expression of cultural memories attached to particular places. For instance, the shrine of Dodona was situated on a high plain along important ‘communication’ and ‘commercial routes’. As Piccinini has suggested, it functioned as a kind of early landmark in transhumant circuits.Footnote ⁴⁵

Arguably, the most famous landmark connected to Dodona was the oak tree. Although we do not know how divination worked at Dodona, many narrative sources suggest that the oak played a fundamental role in the consultation process. According to one foundational myth, a logger attempted to fell the tree, but was dissuaded by a talking dove that nested in its branches. After this, an oracle was founded at this spot.Footnote ⁴⁶ The connection between the tree and peleiai, female doves (possibly referring to priestess called ‘Doves’), was an established trope in the narrative sources.Footnote ⁴⁷ It might be possible that the rustling of the leaves of the tree was interpreted by the priestesses,Footnote ⁴⁸ or that the oak’s bark may have played a role in the process.

The important thing to notice though is that the oak stood in a metonymical relationship to the oracle, both in pictorial and written sources.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus consulted Zeus’ will from the ‘high crested oak’.Footnote ⁵⁰ A fragment of Hesiod gives the most extensive description of the oracular site preserved from the Archaic period.Footnote ⁵¹ What we can take away from the fragment is not only that people were expected to bring gifts/offerings to the site (underlining its economic function) but also that the oracle’s setting is rendered as a particularly pastoral one. The people living in this place have good pastureland and plenty of flocks of breeding animals. As the poet relates, these people receive prophecies from the bark of the oak tree, where doves are nesting.Footnote ⁵²

Rosenberger interprets the oak as the material manifestation of the connection between above/sky and below/earth: while the trunk and crown spreads above the earth, the root system grows below.Footnote ⁵³ Not relying so much upon monumentalization, which set in relatively late in Dodona’s history,Footnote ⁵⁴ the oak presented a powerful cultural symbol that was firmly rooted in the very earth the local communities relied upon. From what we know, Dodona did attract worshippers from far away, but was mostly visited by locals or people living in relatively close proximity to the sanctuary.Footnote ⁵⁵

In part, this symbolical connotation of the place may have led enquirers to seek out the oracle’s advice when it came to material practices related to the soil. There are a number of enquiries that, in fact, concern trees.Footnote ⁵⁶ In a consultation dated to the middle of the fifth century BCE, someone asked about cutting off the top of a tree (DVC 1108A).Footnote ⁵⁷ A pair of consultations concern (olive) trees in a hero shrine, although it is unclear how or whether they relate to one another (DVC 2430 A and 2432B). In essence, as Liapis argues, the fundamental problem context seems rather clear: someone may have accidentally harmed a wild olive tree in the temenos of a hero and enquired what should be done about the injury.Footnote ⁵⁸ The answer, or alternatively one solution implied in the question, was that this particular tree (or another one) should be consecrated to the hero and no longer be used for grafting olives for domestic use.

In another instance, the Dodoneans asked the oracle about what to do with the offspring of the sacred oak (DVC 2952B). As Lhôte and Carbon propose, the context of the question may have to do with the integration of the oak in the enclosure of the temple of Zeus Naios sometime in the second half of the fourth century. Because oaks are prolific, the question of its offspring, which may have threatened to invade the enclosure and the temple, had to be addressed. Lhôte and Carbon bring this enquiry together with another question on side A of the tablet (DVC 2951A). After the question on side B had been folded, it seems that an Athenian, who had transplanted a shoot from the Dodonean oak to his country, asked whether this offshoot may be pruned and cut back. They suppose that the Athenian in question may have talked directly to the Dodoneans and that his own enquiry may have, in fact, been formulated on the same day that the local inhabitants posed their own question to the god.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although we cannot possibly determine what the exact temporal and social connection was, there can be no question that a lack of care or even a mutilation of the tree could be regarded as a sacrilege and needed to be addressed beforehand.

These examples show some of the mechanisms that were at play in oracular consultations concerning the nonhuman world. They, in fact, go together well with documentary evidence related to other oracles in the Greek world. One particularly interesting, but highly obscure, example concerns an ostrakon from Salamis in Cyprus, possibly related to a Zeus oracle.Footnote ⁶⁰ The ostrakon had originally been broken into two pieces that fit together, and which was inscribed on both sides with at least seven separate texts. The shard uses Cypriot letters to express Greek words and is dated by researchers to the end of the sixth century BCE. It contains the oracle itself, in two versions (one in prose, the other in verse). Even if the wording of the request is missing, it almost certainly follows from the answer itself: someone had asked whether it would be beneficial and useful if the stream near the sanctuary were filled in. While the verse version is longer and needs to be interpreted by the enquirer and/or a priest, the prose version is more concise, and a refusal of the request is briefly formulated.

If the reading of the ostrakon is correct,Footnote ⁶¹ it presents us with an important source in both a cultural historical and an environmental sense. The verse oracle justifies the refusal with reference to the cattle pasturing near the stream that is supposed to be filled in. The verses speak to a fundamental understanding of the connection that existed between the body of water and the flourishing of vegetation as the basis of the animals’ nourishment or animal husbandry. In this example, Scheer’s thesis of the religious marking of natural resources finds confirmation. The question concerned an area in which misconduct could have lasting negative consequences. The precarious balance of the natural environment and the divine order present in it could not be interfered with.

Although it would be going too far to read a conservationist idea into this, which I explicitly do not want to do, the source fundamentally illustrates a reflective performance that was religiously framed and clearly involved natural resources. Through the reply of the god, the nonhuman was given a voice. I would claim that part of the same logic applies to the enquiries at Dodona referred to above. For although the questions themselves mainly concern questions of appropriate religious behavior (and entail consequences for cultic practice), they nevertheless also encompass natural vegetation where advice on right or appropriate behavior is sought.

Arguably, the Salamis example is rather opaque, but there are better-known and comparable cases such as the Athenian consultation of the Delphic oracle on the cultivation of the sacred precincts of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone.Footnote ⁶² In 352/351 BCE, the sacred Orgas of Eleusis became a religious problem for the Athenians: Should it be left fallow or should it be leased out in order to use the proceeds to finance work on the famous mystery sanctuary of the two goddesses? The dilemma was solved by a popular decision preserved in inscriptions: the two options were written on two identical tin tablets, rolled up, wrapped with woolen threads and thrown into a bronze hydria in front of the assembled people; the Pythia merely chose from two options – an actual oracle saying was no longer necessary.Footnote ⁶³

Beyond this remarkable consultation process, for our context, the core problem of the inquiry is the crucial point. The inquiry is concerned with two interrelated sets of questions: where exactly boundary stones should be placed to mark the sacred precincts, and the problem, already addressed, of whether to lease portions of the sacred land for cultivation. Whereas the former problem could be dealt with in social forms of discussion, the second question, whether the goddesses wished the land to be cultivated, could not be answered by reason alone: that was precisely why an oracle had to be consulted. The fact that the oracle gave the Athenians a negative answer, which is not preserved in inscriptions but is only fragmentarily recorded, shows in any case that the Athenians had to look for other land for cultivation or leasing.Footnote ⁶⁴

The fact that the Athenians took these measures with regard to the sacred plain at Eleusis does not have to do solely with the special prestige of this specific site. Rather, it is a hallmark of Greek religious ideas as a whole that natural resources and the resources on them could be marked as the property of the gods.Footnote ⁶⁵ Leasing to private individuals was common practice in order to ensure the upkeep and maintenance of the precincts or sanctuaries. It can be argued that this was primarily a matter of the financial interests of the city states. This explanation does not go far enough, however, when one looks at the inscribed leases, which give very detailed information about what the tenants were allowed, or not, to do. A certain cultivation sequence could be prescribed, as well as the prohibition on removing accumulating foliage from the district and so on.Footnote ⁶⁶ These rules ultimately amounted to ensuring the usability of natural resources for the future.

That a transgression or violation of the rules could have dire consequences for a community resonates for us mainly in literary sources, which add a narrative layer to the strongly normative content of the documentary sources. As we have already seen above, agriculture and the resources associated with it were strongly mythologized. The civilizing good par excellence, namely grain, was considered a gift from Demeter, who also taught people how to use it. People were expected to make offerings in return, as well as to take care of sacred places and districts; those who failed to do so ran the risk of falling back into a pre-civilization state.Footnote ⁶⁷ In order to avoid missteps and to secure the benevolence of the gods, it was necessary to communicate with them when it came to dealing with nonhuman resources and land that was closely associated with them. From the Archaic period well into the Hellenistic, oracles were central sites of this particular form of communication.Footnote ⁶⁸ Here, the nonhuman could be given a voice and material environmental practices could be negotiated in a highly relational setting that involved the sanctuaries as places of the gods, the social world and the world of ‘nature’.

Performing Resilience

Aside from these highly normative aspects of consultation processes that concerned the environment, there is another element at work. As I have already discussed in the introduction, many of the surviving tablets pose agricultural-related questions of a very general manner.Footnote ⁶⁹ Issues encompassed the fertility of the fields (DVC 2319A), the keeping of sheep (Lhôte 80), the digging of a well (DVD 1441A), the rearing of ducks (DVC 82A), the recovery of a plough (DVC 3327B), or the very frequent enquiry whether to farm at all (DVC 57A, 2291A, 2293B, 2353B; 2755A). As Parker has noted, ‘As for the “Should I farm?” questions, what is perhaps surprising is that they even needed to be asked so often.’Footnote ⁷⁰ I want to suggest that these enquiries fulfilled a crucial discursive as well as performative function in the agrarian society discussed above. They, too, were concerned with material practice (i.e. working the land), but rather than dealing with a concrete problem (i.e. should I fell that tree or dam that creek) they seem to express a specific sense of uncertainty that needed to be communicated and resolved.

Admittedly, the Dodona tablets are also literature – just like the other inscriptions discussed so far; and even if over a thousand oracle tablets have been preserved and edited in the meantime, we do not know exactly in which form they were accessible.Footnote ⁷¹ What we can say with certainty, however, is that the sources from Dodona document a considerable range of everyday concerns, the unifying element of which is perhaps ultimately best expressed in a request from the inhabitants of Korkyra, an island on the west coast of Greece, who asked ‘by sacrificing and praying to which of the gods they may live most fairly and safely, and may there be fine and fruitful crops for them and enjoyment of every good fruit’ (Lhôte 2).Footnote ⁷² This concern for the good life and for the immediate circumstances of the future did not, however, relate solely to cultic concerns, but was primarily an expression of an ever-present insecurity with regard to harvest yields or food supplies. Thus, it is not surprising that a considerable part of the inquiries revolved around the topic explicitly formulated in the Korkyrean example, namely of whether the earth or the arable soil would yield enough fruit.

As Esther Eidinow has argued in several works, these inquiries and the broader social context in which they were situated give us an idea of what ancient people were afraid or worried about, how they perceived the ‘risks’ that their lifeworld entailed and how they tried to cope with the vagaries of everyday life.Footnote ⁷³ From an environmental-historical point of view, the concern for secure food was certainly a central problematic context that preoccupied people from all social classes. The question of how to deal with natural resources, how to manage them so that they could continue to provide a secure livelihood in the future, certainly preoccupied the Greeks not only since the time of Hesiod. Divination with the oracle system discussed here offered one of the communicative social contexts in which individuals or social groups negotiated these questions. And it offered a central medium for fostering resilience.

Resilience has been defined as the ‘ability to revert to a previous state after experiencing setbacks’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The term derived from systems ecology (as well as psychotherapeutic contexts) before it appeared in social studies towards the end of the twentieth century, where it is now frequently used to understand how communities recover after disaster has struck.Footnote ⁷⁵ Resilience forms a direct analogy to nature in the sense of the ability of a social system to undergo cycles of change, adaption and (possibly) transformation in the face of external (in our case environmental) stressors.Footnote ⁷⁶ While there is now a great deal of scholarly literature that draws on resilience theory in order to study how past societies (including those of antiquity) dealt with particular crises, the focus has been very much on the imminent recovery after catastrophic events such as natural disasters or wars.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, the more so as it points to the central significance of cultural memory and narratives in dealing with existential threats,Footnote ⁷⁷ resilience as a social phenomenon is hardly simply a backward-leaning affair, but a forward-looking endeavor. Hannig defines resilience as ‘the ability to anticipate danger and resist damage’. The point, according to Hannig, is not ‘to prevent risks per se’Footnote ⁷⁸ but rather to develop strategies that prepare a system or an individual to deal with future calamities. Prognosis and anticipation are central in this regard. Divination can be seen as one cultural strategy by which imminent crises could be reflected on the ancient world. As, for instance, Haldon et al. argue, ‘in the pre-modern/pre-scientific world, moral and religious responses were as important as practical responses’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In his view, the open question is: ‘Did rulers and elites, or farmers and producers, implement policies that would mitigate risk and absorb future shocks?’Footnote ⁸⁰ One strategy to deal with uncertainty in agrarian contexts was the building of store-houses, but there was never a guarantee that a surplus could be harvested – this depended very much on the possession of land and potential workforce.Footnote ⁸¹

Another strategy, especially when it came to the question of self-sufficiency, ‘bears’, as Haldon and Rosen note, ‘upon the role of ideas and belief’.Footnote ⁸² As they illustrate, ‘the fact that patterns of belief affect the causal logic or rationality of a culture and therefore the way that culture (or parts of it) react to challenges or stresses’.Footnote ⁸³ Resilience studies often have a tendency to look at events in hindsight, with the inherent, but not unproblematic assumption that people living in a given society are conscious of the interconnections and causal relationships of particular events. A reversed perspective, however, that looks at how people in the past have tried to anticipate specific developments and have negotiated strategies that would help them deal with a certain situation or problem makes more sense insofar as this perspective highlights underlying patterns of belief and social structures rather than isolated events. ‘Beliefs, and how they fit into the broader complex of concepts and tacit knowledge that people have of their world, certainly set limits to and/or facilitate how they respond and react to their environment’,Footnote ⁸⁴ as Haldon and Rosen argue. ‘Beliefs respond to perceptions of the world as much as they represent a narrative about the world: a dynamic interaction that implies conjuncture and contingency.’Footnote ⁸⁵ The type of narratives connected to the oracle of Dodona outlined above may have created just this: a framework in which the experiences of the lifeworld could be connected with the nonhuman forces that were constantly shaping and re-making this world. These narratives were therefore, as Eidinow has observed, highly relational in that they ‘included a sense of interdependence’ between human individuals and the ‘supernatural’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Although the long-held division between belief and practice should probably not be overstressed,Footnote ⁸⁷ what Haldon and Rosen term ‘belief’ is a somewhat vague term in this context. While they use it as an umbrella term that encompasses all kinds of social systems of meaning, they also make clear that ‘belief’ is a dynamic category that entails highly relational and responsive elements. Accordingly, beliefs are never simply there or remain unchanged, but they can adapt to changing situations as long as a distinctive core element is retained and passed on. Adaption is here understood as a ‘capacity (…) enhanced by a rich social memory of alternative situations and responses, and by the accumulation of social capital in the form of the networks of trust, shared knowledge, and actual materials needed to facilitate those responses’.Footnote ⁸⁸ As Redman and Kinzig point out, ‘societies cannot always be buffeted by alternative responses; true resilience will lie in knowing when to change course and when to forge ahead.’Footnote ⁸⁹

I want to suggest that an oracle site such as Dodona presented exactly this: it was an institution where (alternative) responses to particular situations could be sought and communicated. Communication is central in this regard. Not only because the place may have presented a site of interaction where people with similar problems came together and exchanged stories but also because it provided people with the opportunity of communicating their doubts, worries and uncertainties in the face of nonhuman forces. These issues could be related to the specific problems of resource use outlined above, but in a figurative sense I want to suggest that the consultation of an oracle can itself be seen as a sociocultural resource of resilience.

This has to do with the fact that resilience is never an in-built property of a system. It needs to be established, asserted and possibly defended. In a social sense, resilience is therefore not just there but it is fostered by performative acts. When it comes to the environmental dimensions of the consultations at Dodona, this latter aspect becomes apparent in two interrelated ways: firstly, in framing the oracle as a central religious institution that was intrinsically tied to the soil itself. The post-classical author Pausanias relates a story connected to the sacred women of Zeus and Dione at Dodona, namely that they were the first to chant:

This cultic incantation is a particularly striking instance of the interconnection between the oracle and the fertility of the earth. Its agrarian origin seems rather obvious. It may have been connected to the religious festival of the Naia, a festival that, according to an old thesis, may have involved types of rain magic.Footnote ⁹¹ While this is highly speculative, the supposed relationship between Zeus’ epithet ‘Naios’ and the element of water is an ancient one.Footnote ⁹² It would therefore not be surprising that worship of the Zeus (and Dione) at Dodona entailed elements that emphasized the needs of an agrarian society and especially the dependence on good soil and plenty of rain.

In a sociocultural sense, this cultic dimension, along with its regular features of festivals, offerings/sacrifices and prayer, may have served to symbolically frame Dodona as a place where the availability of and access to natural resources could be safeguarded in the face of environmental uncertainty. Without question, there are cycles in ‘nature’ that could be relied upon, but it was nonetheless unclear whether a particular season would always bring along the right environmental conditions for farming. Religious performances that implicitly addressed this precarious interrelationship between natural world and the human cultivation of the soil were one way of establishing a framework in which it became possible to express not only fear but also expectation and hope. That hope for better times and/or survival was not unfounded was underlined by the seemingly age-old tradition of the oracle and the narratives attached to it. Here, a community of worshippers had continued to gather in order to formulate and negotiate remarkably unchanging sentiments. This, along with the specific environmental knowledge that had accumulated over the ages at this place through oral (and written) interaction, provided an invaluable resource for dealing with times of environmental crisis.

A related, second aspect can be found in those questions attested in our source material and referred to above, whether the earth will bring forth enough ‘fruit(s)’. In one example, someone named Kraton ‘asks the god about the crops which the earth bears if they might come to fruition’ (Κράτων ἐπερωτᾶι τὸν θεὸν/περὶ τῶν καρπῶν ὧν ἡ γῆ φύ/ει (vac. 5?) ἦ ἂν ἐντελέες/Γίνωνται) (DVC 2319A). Another person, Eirana (?), asked whether she will be able to reap the harvest of all the fruits (DVC 3426A). These kinds of enquiries are quite common. Usually, the general term karpoi refers to agricultural produce, that is, ‘fruits’ of plants or of the soil. Sometimes this relationship between soil and fruit is formulated explicitly when tablets refer to ‘fruits which the earth makes grow’ (DVC 2153 A and Lhôte 77). Sometimes they include a question about which god to pray to in order to have plenty of crops (DVC 2319B). Although the problem context seems to be evident, the puzzling question for us is probably why these enquiries seem to have occurred relatively frequently. Was this really the expression of a very general sense of uncertainty regarding the way the harvest would turn out? Or was it rather the expression of a very conscious suspension of knowledge in the face of nonhuman forces? The inconsistent way of ‘nature’ or natural processes may have played a role here.Footnote ⁹³ But what if this kind of communicative performance of ‘unknowing’ was also a way of expressing a certain reverence and humbleness as regards the environment and the divine elements in it?

What I mean by this is that this kind of question is not only a way of obtaining reassurance from the god but can also be read as a statement of the worshipper’s place within an environment whose myriad parts clearly surmounted the individual’s ability of control. As we saw above, there were problems related to working the soil, to rearing animals or to cultivating plants that were relatively straightforward, whereas the enquiries related to karpoi seem to be of a slightly different nature insofar as a farmer could possess ‘expert’ knowledge in all of these fields listed above (including reading and interpreting the signs of nature) and still not succeed in harvesting enough crops. How then could these kinds of questions contribute to fostering a sense of resilience in the face of unforeseeable circumstances?

As the founder of ecological resilience theory, C. S. Holling, argued, it was possible to safeguard sustaining productivity in any system even under insecure and instable conditions. Vital to this was, however, that long-term expectations were cast aside in the favor of ‘the need to keep options open, (…) and the need to emphasize heterogeneity. Flowing from this would be not the presumption of sufficient knowledge, but the recognition of our ignorance: not the assumption that future events are expected, but that they will be unexpected’.Footnote ⁹⁴ As Walker and Cooper comment on Holling’s theory, ‘this is an approach to risk management which foregrounds the limits to predictive knowledge and insists on the prevalence of the unexpected, seeking to “absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may take”’.Footnote ⁹⁵ When it comes to ancient contexts, we may need to modify the theory with regard to the limits of predictive knowledge. The individual and the wider community could not claim to possess the ability to foretell the future, but there were places they could turn to and look for guidance. And the consultation of an oracle may have functioned as a full disclosure of these limits of knowability as well as the trust in higher powers when it came to facing an unpredictable world of natural forces.

Because natural resources could be religiously framed in the ancient world, oracles functioned as central places where material environmental practices could be negotiated and reflected on. In the consultation process, nonhuman nature could be given a voice. Oracles also provided a space where environmental knowledge could be shared, discussed and/or temporarily suspended in the context of crises or unforeseeable events in the future. Dodona’s connection to the soil was constantly reaffirmed in cult and enquiries. Both cult and consultation played a fundamental role in fostering resilience for the worshippers. It gave them an opportunity to present themselves in relation to nonhuman forces and to lay open their own limits of knowledge concerning the ways of the natural world. This could strengthen resilience, because the worshippers were ready to face the unexpected, and to adapt if things did not turn out as planned.