Ancient history can be disappointing. Everybody knows that an inscription is often broken at the place where it gives crucial information, and the evidence for oracular consultation at Dodona is a similar case. The following discussion is neither fully new nor fully original. Keeping at bay numerous modern hypotheses, which have too often been considered as the objective truth, I have rather tried to untangle the complex web of evidence from Dodona into a series of logical and simple questions that badly need answering before any further enquiry can be made. This is research in progress, in the context of the Dodona online project.Footnote ¹

Introduction: Puzzling Dodona

For the site and the oracle of Dodona, we have (1) substantial archaeological remains, (2) extensive excavations, (3) a large and ancient literary tradition and (4) myriad lead lamellae reporting the questions asked to the gods, dating from the late sixth century BCE to the Hellenistic (or even Roman) era. These are four pieces of a challenging puzzle, which, nevertheless, proves impossible to solve.

(1) The archaeological remains, including the ancient seat of the oracle, mainly date from the late fourth century and the Hellenistic period. We do not know whether the sack of the sanctuary by Aemilius Paulus in 168/7 BCE rang the death-knell of the oracle, but the sanctuary itself never really recovered.Footnote ² (2) Since the first campaigns of Carapanos between 1872 and 1877, the numerous excavations that took place mainly from the 1920s to the 1970s have been poorly published, to say the least.Footnote ³ More importantly for us, (3) the literary tradition is scattered over many centuries and has more to do with literary topoi than with direct testimony. As a result, for example, extant texts give us no clear information about the mode(s) of divination. Finally, a Gordian knot, (4): the lamellae barely give any hint about the way they were used. This will be the focus of this essay.

Epigraphic and Literary Traditions: The Flickering Image of the Oracle

The lamellae, containing the questions asked of the oracle, form an impressive bulk of material. Although they were known from the late nineteenth century, they only popped up in modern research a century later, with Éric Lhôte’s new publication of all the previously published texts, and with Esther Eidinow’s work about oracles, curses and risk in ancient Greece (which contained some new inscriptions, passed on to her by the late Professor Christidis). In 2013, came the long-awaited publication of a corpus, bringing scholars about 4000 new texts. Among those texts, which were often damaged or reduced to mere letters, about 1500 provide useful information about the oracular questions asked by the consultants – quite an extraordinary event in the fields of epigraphy and Greek religion.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, some 4000 other lamellae, collected from Sotiris Dakaris’ excavations and later campaigns, are still awaiting publication in the museum of Ioannina.Footnote ⁵ This is to say that there is no shortage of texts. Quite the contrary: if we consider the total of all epigraphically attested oracular consultations, the Dodonaean oracle represents almost 90 percent of the corpus. In other words, Dodona has delivered thirty times more usable inscriptions than Delphi,Footnote ⁶ but, as at Delphi, no inscription directly illuminates the mode of divination.

Unfortunately, the literary tradition of Dodona, although rich and ancient, going back to Homer and Hesiod, makes no mention at all of the use of lamellae.Footnote ⁷ This is not surprising. Except for the case of the oracle of Trophonios in Boiotia, described in an outstanding account by Pausanias, himself a consultant, no Greek oracle ever received a detailed literary report about its practical functioning. There are a few lines of Tacitus about the oracle at Claros, an obscure paragraph of Iamblichus for Didyma, many scattered and small details for Delphi, and so on: this literary scarcity forces us to rely on rare epigraphic data, such as a famous inscription detailing some aspects of the oracle of Apollo Koropaios in Thessaly.Footnote ⁸ In the absence of textual information, architectural plans and remains stay silent, and Didyma, one of the biggest and best preserved oracular sites, has given rise to many divergent interpretations,Footnote ⁹ all of them debatable. This is partly due to the nature of Greek literature, which so often spreads topoi rather than precise information. We are far better informed about the ideal type of a Greek oracle for a Greek mind than about factual details. Again, Delphi is among the best examples.Footnote ¹⁰ Its rich epigraphy does not provide a single mention of the prophet, who is attested by Herodotus and Plutarch, while the priests are not attested on stone before the third century BCE.

Thus, matching literature and epigraphy for oracles proves highly perilous: there is an abysmal gap between the questions and answers provided by Dodona according to the literary sources, and the questions asked on the lamellae.Footnote ¹¹ The former obviously belong to the topoi of oracles, related by authors often much later than the events they are supposed to report. The latter are inscriptions written specifically for the consultation, and belong to the highest level of ‘reality’. Finding a compromise in accordance with our own logic is a temptation, but probably not the best solution.

Actually, the Dodonaean oracle is less well known than the manteion of Delphi itself.Footnote ¹² Homer, Pindar, Sophocles and Euripides speak about male Selloi or (H)elloi, who would have been hypophetai, whatever that could mean;Footnote ¹³ Herodotus and Sophocles about dove-prophetesses;Footnote ¹⁴ and Strabo mentions symbola (gestures), such as those used at the oracle of Ammon in Libya.Footnote ¹⁵ Plato alone speaks about inspired prophetesses,Footnote ¹⁶ Ephorus about prophētis, a ‘female prophet’;Footnote ¹⁷ Callisthenes/Cicero about lots.Footnote ¹⁸ The tradition transmitted by Aeschylus tells about ‘an oak that speaks’ (the oak more than its leaves).Footnote ¹⁹ Ephorus tells us about sound oracles thanks to the bronze whip of a statue attached to a lebes, ‘a cauldron’;Footnote ²⁰ or through the never-ending tolling of bronze cauldrons set in a circle.Footnote ²¹ Others speak about doves,Footnote ²² or even dreams.Footnote ²³

All kinds of hypotheses have attempted to align this polymorphous information, but they resemble intellectual contortions rather than reality. Often a chronological perspective is adopted: for example, the Selloi/ (H)elloi of Homer and Pindar would have been replaced by the prophetesses at the time of Plato and so on (and Strabo even specifies that the charge of the Selloi was abolished); nevertheless, this looks like a desperate way to give a semblance of meaning to a hopeless oral and written tradition.Footnote ²⁴ To tell the truth, we simply do not know who was delivering the oracles to the consultants. We also do not know whether divination was ‘induced’, that is, obtained through the interpretation of signs (like the behavior of doves),Footnote ²⁵ or ‘inspired’ by the gods in the prophet’s mind in order to be pronounced as a text (as Plato).Footnote ²⁶

Back to the Lamellae: What Were They For? And the Question of ‘Archiving’

This long introduction was necessary to make it clear that the role of the lamellae during the consultation is anything but an easy problem. If we read a lamella (e.g. Lhôte Reference Lhôte2006: no 14): the Dodonaeans ask Zeus and Dione whether it is because of the impurity of some man that the god sends the storm’),Footnote ²⁷ it is too easy to declare that this text was the written enquiry and to simply move on. Some problems remain: when and for what reason was it written, and why and when was it left in place? Many solutions have been proposed, none is fully convincing.

Apparently, each sanctuary had its own way to record its activity, or not.Footnote ²⁸ I say ‘apparently’ because not all the documents produced in oracular sanctuaries have been preserved. If the oracles were written on media that have now disappeared, like linen, wood, papyrus, wax and so on, any compelling conclusion from the extant evidence may be seriously biased. At Lebadeia, for example, all the pilgrims had to record on a tablet (called a pinax) ‘what they heard and saw’ during their contact with the god (so, at least ‘Trophonios’ answer’, and maybe the question).Footnote ²⁹ None of those Lebadeian tablets has ever been unearthed, but Pausanias, who himself consulted the oracle, is a generally reliable source.Footnote ³⁰ At Dodona, the situation is quite different: only the questions were engraved, not on stone but on lead strips. If some answers too were written, they remain so rare that they obviously represent a kind of exception, to which no logical explanation has been found.Footnote ³¹

Some marks on the lamellae have long been considered as a proof of archiving in a special room of the sanctuary, in order to track back specific consultations. Such archiving would have required some specific markers, like a date (never attested in the lamellae), a name, a patronym, a geographic specification and/or the topic of the consultation, and so on. At Dodona, there are some names (‘Melas’, DVC 3820A), and, at best, we find the nature of the question (‘Mr/ Ms So-and-so about children’, e.g. DVC 3023B), but nothing substantial enough to constitute a real collection of archival information.Footnote ³²

This theory has limitations for other important reasons: (1) although the lamellae were found mainly around the oracular enclosure, many others were scattered all over the sanctuary.Footnote ³³ (2) The idea of an archiving process was attractive as long as scholars were convinced that the raison d’être of major Greek oracles was big politics, like international and civil wars, or foreign policy. Now, the lamellae of Dodona statistically confirm that less than two percent of the questions were political, most of them concerning domestic policy, especially about polis religion: only three are directly aimed at the conclusion of an inter-state alliance or internal appeasement (peace rather than war!).Footnote ³⁴ (3) It would have been logical to file the oracles according to the answers, to keep a record of what the god said, but those in Dodona are cruelly missing.

By contrast, the questions were mostly personal, and always concern, as it were, ‘minor’ problems (even if they were important for those who experienced them, e.g., about the opportunity to take part in military actions).Footnote ³⁵ What could be secret in such a question: ‘Do I have to marry [x]?’, with the very probable answer ‘yes’. One consultant out of five asks such a question. (4) Most of the lamellae were folded often more than once; some were also nailed, with the purpose of hiding the written face of the lead scroll, so that only the ones that bear a kind of small abstract on the verso could have been properly archived. (5) Most of the lamellae were palimpsests (from two to ten questions on the same lamella [e.g. M210]). They were then part of a recycling process, which contradicts the idea of filing, because no archivist would have been able to date the lamellae, for example, in order to release the oldest ones first for reuse.Footnote ³⁶ Usually, as far as a precise dating is possible, the inscriptions on the same lamella are close in time, but not always.Footnote ³⁷

The Uses of the Lamellae: A Tentative Approach

The way the lamellae were displayed in antiquity is unknown. If we can plausibly abandon the idea of any archiving, it seems that the inscriptions were mainly set around the oracle, where they were mostly found. Maybe some were left in the open wherever there was some free space, maybe on light structures that left no visible trace during the excavations, like wood.Footnote ³⁸

Two preliminary clarifications are necessary. (1) The fact that some questions were ‘hidden’ could fuel the old debate about the dishonesty of the oracular officials. From the seventeenth century, scholars considered oracles as forgeries by sanctuary priests, who needed to know about the question in order to provide an answer. Any attempt to conceal a question was thus interpreted as an attempt to avoid any corruption of process. Again, this was an acceptable idea for oracles that were thought to mainly deal with kings and States, but it is difficult to understand why there would be any potential rigging of answers about marriage, job, illness, small business matters and the like, from unknown people coming from far away. Anyway, a nailed lamella is easy to unfold and read. Prophets and prophetesses were definitely not appointed to cheat people; they were there to pass the divine answer to the consultant, because they trust their own oracular god, in this case the supreme god himself, Zeus. (2) A second bias has been to suppose a malevolent action by the consultant, as if Herodotus’ stories were simply descriptions of reality. In these stories, the treacherous consultants are systematically and severely punished by the god. For the same reasons, it would be inappropriate to consider writing the question to be a safeguard, for the sanctuary, to avoid nasty or unholy questions. Even the inquiries which asked: ‘Is it more advantageous to do what I have in mind?’ were not an indication of dubious practice. If ‘what somebody has in mind’ is not explicit, it is not because the pilgrim wanted to hide its question to the officials, nor because he took the god for a dummy. The divinity knows everything, especially Zeus, as is clear as early as Hesiod, then Theognis and Pindar.Footnote ³⁹ It is just because the space to write on a lamella was desperately small, for projects that could not be described in two or three lines,Footnote ⁴⁰ or for projects whose initial idea was clear but still needed some maturation. The consultant literally expected the omniscient god to ‘read his mind’.Footnote ⁴¹

Having said that, the main question is this: when and why were the lamellae used during the consultation? As nothing definite stands out from the literary tradition, the only certitude left is that the questions, written on the lamellae were asked of the gods. The lamellae were almost always written by the consultants themselves. There are so many different dialects, so many kinds of script and levels of language, that this can no longer be in dispute. The questions are formulaic, and the two main patterns are: ‘Is it better and more advantageous to do X?’ (or similar), and ‘To which gods do we have to offer prayers and sacrifices to get X?’ (or similar). These are shared throughout the Greek world from the earliest oracular texts.Footnote ⁴²

The question of literacy remains tricky.Footnote ⁴³ Especially for the late sixth century and the first half of the fifth century, we do not know how many Greeks could read and write. Nevertheless, the situation was probably not that problematic. The pilgrims going to Dodona, a sometimes long and quite expensive trip, were probably not the most illiterate of the Greeks. Less rich and less educated people could have delegated their question to another pilgrim going to Dodona for his own business.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was always possible for a pilgrim to find a fellow pilgrim to write the question. This could partly explain the oddness of many lamellae, in which, for example, some features of one dialect are mixed with another dialect; the writer would have tried to adapt himself to another dialect but made some mistakes. Sometimes the question on one side and the ‘abstract’ on the other are written by the same hand (as far as we can tell),Footnote ⁴⁵ sometimes not. This could be explained by the fact that a first person helped to write the question and, later, a second kind soul engraved the name and the abstract. It is also possible that a local official helped.Footnote ⁴⁶ As regards now the members of the sanctuary, were they able to read the questions of the consultants? Usually, priests, prophets and others officials, including women, came from elite classes. Their potential illiteracy would, in any case, not have been an issue, because the consultants, as we shall see later, probably had to pronounce their question aloud.

In conclusion, it is unlikely that illiteracy would have prevented pilgrims from fulfilling their oracular duties. Therefore, we could infer that (il)literacy was no big deal. It also means that any clues regarding the lamellae’s style of letters or dialect must be interpreted with some caution, since the writer would not necessarily have been the consultant. So any conclusions based on statistics concerned with what was written on the lamellae may be biased, and this more clearly demonstrates how these texts are fraught with uncertainty.

What Information Can We Draw from the Inscriptions Themselves? Some Basic Elements

The Dodonaean questions themselves, then, are our last, and also least, resort, since these are entirely open to interpretation and can spur the fiercest debates.

The god’s potentially orally-given answers to the questions on the lamellae were not nearly as important as what these questions themselves represent. Although the lamellae were left on site at the end of the process, we do not know if these lamellae were true dedications. They could play such a role, as a human gift at the end of the oracular procedure, an offering that honored the god, and would have reinforced sanctuary traditions.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, as we will see later, certain lamellae left at the sanctuary were obviously not questions, but dedications, prayers, or calls to the gods to witness.

Answers could have been written, on lead or on other perishable material, which the consultants, when necessary, took with them when they left the place. The lamellae were so numerous, throughout time, that we would expect to have found at least some oracular lead lamellae elsewhere in the Greco-Roman world. Up to this day, however, no written answer or question from Dodona has been found outside the precinct of Dodona. In fact, writing the answer would have been pointless. Many of the private consultants came with a simple question, ‘Do I have to do this or not?’, and they did not need a reminder to remember the yes/no given by the god. Things were a little bit different when a consultant was someone else’s delegate, but it is not necessary to imagine longer or complicated responses. The questions, including the civic ones, were almost always answerable by yes or no.Footnote ⁴⁸ Written answers could be necessary if the oracle gave longer advice (e.g. for the ‘to which god’ questions).Footnote ⁴⁹

One question asked by Jessica Piccinini concerns potential traces of orality in the text of the lamellae. Are there ‘internal hints that the tablets were elaborated in writing only after the inquiry was expressed orally’; or ‘do the tablets contain extemporaneous expressions and, for example, words of mouth, which indicate an unprepared, unpolished and spontaneous words flowing as in any direct communication’.Footnote ⁵⁰ By her own admission, it is difficult to determine this with such very short texts, and she sends us back to considerations of literacy.

Most of the questions at Dodona are written in a definitely non-literary Greek, maybe closer to the spoken language of the consultants.Footnote ⁵¹ The usual Panhellenic formulas: ‘Is it better to do this (or no)?’, or ‘To which gods do we have to pray to get this?’, were usually followed by some words or a small sentence, which defined the question. Therefore, the typical question at Dodona is a mix of widespread formulaic habits and the presentation of the reason for the consultation. There do seem to be frequent verbal slips, but it is hard to tell how oral or literary they were. Some consultants seem to have been in a hurry; yet we do not know whether this haste is the result of external circumstances or the disorganization of some pilgrims – or even if that interpretation is correct.

The Role of the Lamellae during the Consultation

If we tentatively consider the lamellae as ‘offerings’ or something like them, did they play any role during the consultation itself? The functions are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they could be complementary. As regards the procedure, we can only speculate. The following proposals would work with inspired divination (divine inspiration in the prophet’s mind) as well as induced divination (divine clues through signs), whatever was the true Dodonean mode of revelation.

(1) Maybe the procedure was fully oral and direct, where the consultant went directly to the oracle, asked the question and, orally or sometimes by means of a technical process (e.g. lots, see below), got an answer. In other words, he/she asked the ‘prophet/ess’, who answered him/her. A lamella could be required from the beginning (e.g. because such is the habit of the place), or produced at the end in order to leave it as an ‘offering’ as well as a memory of the consultation.

(2) Or the procedure was fully written (as it seems to have been the case in Thessaly at Korope),Footnote ⁵² where the consultants were required to write their enquiry on a lamella, then gave it to an official (be it the ‘prophet/ess’ or any intermediary) who got the answer in the appropriate way. The intermediary would then deliver a written response to the consultant’s initial written question. A lamella was mandatory from the very beginning and was left at the end as a testimony of the consultation.

(3) Or else the procedure was a mix of (1) and (2), to varying degrees.

The uncertainty of these procedural proposals might be solved by returning to the lamellae themselves. Those lamellae that have a full question, either on its own or on the obverse with an abstract (e.g. ‘about a woman’ DVC 1010B, ‘about a child’ DVC 3666A) and/or a name (e.g. ‘Apellys’ DVC 85)Footnote ⁵³ do not help, since any of the proposed procedures could apply. More revealing are the many lamellae that only have a name or an abstract instead of a main question. If these represent the written question, then the prophet/ess would necessarily have had to have interpreted a great deal from the laconic lamella.

If, on the one hand, the written question has simply disappeared from the lamellae through damage or reuse, that could still fit our second proposal of a written exchange. A better understanding of whether that might have been the case would require a full autopsy of the evidence at the museum of Ioannina. Even so, since the majority of the lamellae are irremediably damaged, no further elucidation is reachable. If, on the other hand, the questions were never written on those lamellae, then it might mean that there was no need for them.

Some of these shorter inscriptions might imply that a complete question was not mandatory and the prophet/ess could infer a full question. For example, from ‘Agathon about children’, they might infer a question such as, ‘Will Agathon have children (with X)?’ or ‘Which god has Agathon to pray to in order to beget children?’ Therefore, such a lamella might satisfy both the first and second proposals, in terms of being oral or written.

When it comes to names only appearing on the lamellae, the first procedure becomes much more possible than the second. With the first procedure, the name is enough because the consultant will ask his question aloud, but the second, written procedure becomes impossible, because the prophet/ess would have had no verbal contact with the consultant and would never have been able to guess the question. So very short inscriptions, from names to short abstracts like ‘Is it?’, or ‘Isn’t it?’ (e.g. DVC 1040A), or ‘sacred’ (hiaros; e.g. DVC 3964B) make a fully written procedure impossible.

Our speculation has not been useless: we can propose a reasonable framework, although its details remain inaccessible:

1. (1) A question written on lead does not preclude the possibility that it was pronounced aloud; but a question reduced to one name or two words, or an abbreviation in writing, proves that some questions must have been spoken out loud. In the only Greek example where we hear about written questions sorted by lot from two sealed vases, the question to the Pythia was nevertheless asked aloud, as it is known from a well-preserved Athenian decree, corroborated by literary sources.Footnote ⁵⁴

2. (2) As orality is far more prevalent in Archaic and classical times, we could conclude that the majority of enquiries were made orally, and that at least part of the encounter with the sanctuary official(s) and the god was conducted orally.

3. (3) A lamella seems to have been part of the local practice, a bit like the pinakes in Trophonios’ oracle. At Lebadeia, the pinax came at the end of the process because its purpose was to illustrate the answer of the god (which possibly also required the writing of the question). At Dodona, only the question matters, and the time at which the lamellae was written during the consultation is simply unknown. Some pilgrims could be very diligent and write their question immediately, even if they were going to pronounce it aloud. Others will have been less careful, writing only the essentials, or nothing. Here, however, an important emotional factor might have come into play, given that the pilgrim was approaching the divine, and possibly expecting a moment of thambos (‘awe’).Footnote ⁵⁵ The written question could provide assurance that one would not forget the question once in front of the intimidating prophet/ess, during a high-intensity ritual. This moment does not appear tremendous for us, but for the Greeks, it definitely was. Zeus was the chief god, and the pilgrims nearly all made a long journey to ask their question. An oracular consultation is often close to an epiphany after a long pilgrimage.Footnote ⁵⁶ We cannot reject the idea that the lamella was only an ‘offering’ at the end of the visit, which was fully or mainly oral, but it would be surprising.

Some More Aspects: Isolated Letters and Double Display of a Quasi-Identical Question

Some lamellae display a letter.Footnote ⁵⁷ Since the archiving theory has been discarded, this letter is usually interpreted as the number of each consultant waiting in line for the oracle.Footnote ⁵⁸ If this is true, it provides another practical use for the lamellae, which would become indispensable at the very first stage of the consultation. For this supposition to be accurate, however, a number would have been written for each question, and many numbers would be recognizable on each palimpsest lamella. The sanctuary’s officials (e.g. the neokoros, the warden) never knew how many people would come during the day, except if the registration for the consultation was fixed at a given time, or by appointment. Anyway, all the lamellae without a number (the overwhelming majority, actually, 4153 of 4268) are then problematic.

A few lamellae display almost exactly the same question (e.g. DVC 2005A-2006A), and this could be considered as a case of more accurate rewriting. We can explain it according to our main two options. The consultant may have tried to be as precise as possible before asking the god, and thus made a second attempt at phrasing the question. This would be the proof that writing the question before the consultation was important. But the consultant, after asking the god, could also have written his/her question as precisely as possible, at the moment of the ‘offering’. There is no reason to reject the possibility that each consultant acquired a lamella at the beginning of the procedure, and wrote on it whenever he decided to do so. On that point, I note here that we have no proof that the questions were written verbatim, whether at Dodona or any other Greek oracle. This is obvious for the lamellae presenting only a name or an abstract: the name ‘Apellys’ is not a question you ask Zeus. For complete questions however, slight differences could surely be possible, as long as the message was respectful of the charis (mutual kindness/respect) owed to the gods. I will return to these almost identical questions later in this essay, because they could also be the sign of a lot-based procedure.

Abecedaries: Another Mantic Medium?

Seven inscriptions found among the lamellae were abecedaries, that is, the engraving of an alphabet. Some of them were probably complete (although today some letters are missing). Others appear to have been partial at the time they were engraved, and the question of whether they were originally complete or were left incomplete cannot be answered, because the lamellae are so badly preserved.

Complete abecedaries:

The engraved alphabet follows the rim of the lamella, with a bend at a right angle at the end of the text. The three first letters are missing on the left.Footnote ⁵⁹

An isolated one-legged Π appears just below Σ and Τ, and just beside it, if it is really a letter and not a scratch, a dotted koppa, Ϙ (2278B).Footnote ⁶⁰

(Maybe) incomplete abecedaries:

With an intentional (and extremely rare) ligature between Δ and Ε, that means that the two letters are joined (). On the same face, Διώνα[ν (Diona[n) could show another ligature between Δ and Ι, but this one could be incidental.Footnote ⁶¹

Both sequences of letters are on the same lamella, obverse and reverse; they could be from the same hand. As the lamella was turned over on its horizontal axis, we do not know how much of the object has been lost, because both faces begin with A on the left.Footnote ⁶²

As this sequence of letters is not attested in any Greek word, this is surely the fragment of an alphabet. The reading of this sequence depends on the Greek alphabet it is written in, but Lhôte in CIOD is in favor of the Thessalian alphabet.Footnote ⁶³

There are 3 cm left after the E, enough to write more letters, but nothing more appears on the lead.Footnote ⁶⁴ If the person who wrote Theodotos also wrote the alphabet, this means that he was able to write more than a few letters.

The meaning of abecedaries in such a context is not an easy issue. We can first think of the difficulty of writing on such lamellae. Lead is a ductile metal, but its surface is not like papyrus, stone or terracotta. I myself have tried to write on lead with a long sharp nail. To say the least, the results were not artistic, despite the fact that I am not totally clumsy. Literate people were not used to it, and thus consultants needed a bit of practice, the more so because many lamellae were very small, not exceeding a few centimeters across. Writing in very small characters renders the exercise more complicated, especially at a time when glasses did not exist. For some lamellae, could it have been that they were written before the lead was cut into a strip?Footnote ⁶⁵ The best way to learn the skills would have been to write some lettersFootnote ⁶⁶ or a name, or an alphabet, complete or not. The five letter As we find on DVC 910 A could be a trace of such a practice.Footnote ⁶⁷ One could engrave a full alphabet, or just the beginning of it, or some sequence of choice. The writing of some names (but a tiny minority) could also be indicative of such a fast training in engraving on lead.

Other scholars may say that mastering the alphabet was a skill worthy of being offered to the gods. At the sanctuary of Zeus on Mount Hymettos, for example, many abecedaries and inscriptions (of which the writers were proud) from the seventh century BCE have been brought to light.Footnote ⁶⁸ One can wonder, however, if this newly acquired competence in the high Archaic period kept its special attraction later in time, and it would be too easy to argue that Dodona was only a backward area.Footnote ⁶⁹ Anyway, the very idea of an offering of letters is no more than a guess. Still others may consider the abecedaries as a sign of functional illiteracy. The person who was not able to write nevertheless flaunted his ability to write the alphabet, or at least some letters.

So, offerings or not? Things are not simple, because Greek culture was not prone to clear-cut differentiation: just because Dodona is an oracle it does not follow that its activity must be only oracular. An oracular sanctuary is, first, a sanctuary, open to anybody eager to get closer to the gods, with no obligation to consult Zeus and Dione. Other ritual behaviors were welcome, like vows or prayers, which are similar to an oracular process. In Dodona, it means that nonoracular declarations and oracular questions could end up on the same medium, a lead lamella. Furthermore, the abecedaries would not be the only ‘offerings’ left in Dodona’s precinct. Some texts on the lamellae are obviously not questions asked to Zeus. For example, DVC/CIOD 2482BFootnote ⁷⁰ is a declaration about a loan; DVC/CIOD 2653 A about concerns regarding a house (?); DVC 34B and SGDI 1596–1597 (= Eidinow Reference Eidinow2007: 122, no 1–2) are clearly prayers.

In the context of oracles, an abecedary could act as a written question for poorly educated consultants, a bit like marking with a cross in order to sign a document. In this case, the god, who knows everything, would directly read in the alphabet the question orally asked to him by the consultant. We cannot discard this explanation, which could support our hypothesis of an oral consultation. The consultant would have enquired aloud while writing down just what he was able to write.

Abecedaries could also assume a more mantic meaning. What would be the point of presenting a fragmentary alphabet to Zeus, up to gamma or epsilon for example? I wonder if those abecedaries hid a particular type of question. Letters used as numbers would refer to potential mantic answers – not specified on the lamella for lack of space but asked orally, and written on a separate document by the consultant. For example, the five letters in DVC 1709B, ΑΒ̣ΓΔΕ, would give Zeus the opportunity to choose between five proposals. This kind of formulation would prove efficient for drawing lots between several pre-set answers, but an oral answer would be just as effective.

DVC’s edition foregrounds at least seven lamellae mentioning, beyond any doubt, a procedure of drawing lots.Footnote ⁷¹ The casting of lots could also better explain the meaning of other inscriptions,Footnote ⁷² thus at least partly acknowledging Cicero’s story about a monkey that turned over the vase and scattered the lots before a Spartan consultation.Footnote ⁷³ Not all the questions in Dodona were answered by lot,Footnote ⁷⁴ but some procedures involving drawing lots were obviously in operation.

What is true for partial abecedaries could also be true for the complete ones: each of the twenty-four lettersFootnote ⁷⁵ would correspond to twenty-four numbers on a (now lost) list, containing names, proposals/solutions, gods and heroes to pray to, and so on. This could explain the isolated numbers found on many lamellae, usually interpreted as the number of each consultant ‘in line for the oracle’. A set of twenty-four potential answers is huge, but under the Roman Empire, some dice oracles included verses extracted from Homeric poetry and its twenty-four ‘books’.Footnote ⁷⁶ It also brings to mind the famous Delphic consultation of Kleisthenes around 508 BCE. According to the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (21.6), the legislator asked the Pythia to choose a hero for each of his ten new Attic tribes, from a list of a hundred suggested names. The historicity of the story is not certain, but in any case, at the end of the fourth century, this kind of oracular process looked plausible to a peripatetic philosopher,Footnote ⁷⁷ and ultimately shows that our suggestion is not without sense.

But such a twenty-four-answer inquiry was surely not the rule. The usual scenarios might have involved two to five/six different suggested answers, and the most frequent case would have been the A or B, or the A and non-A alternatives. This would explain the huge number of As (thirty-one) and Bs (seventeen), far ahead of other letters,Footnote ⁷⁸ for inquiries up to five pre-set responses. This idea does not work, however, if the two- and three-letter groups are taken into consideration.Footnote ⁷⁹ At this point, no definitive explanation is possible, but it is nonetheless worth exploring potential solutions, in order to encourage further research.

Back to Lamellae in a Lot Oracle Context

The habit of writing, on two lamellae, the two alternatives of a question, A and non-A, is not unknown in the Greco-Roman world. In Egypt, this was the principle of the ‘ticket-oracle’:Footnote ⁸⁰ consultants would write the same question on two tickets, not necessarily word for word, the first one in the positive mode, the second in the negative, each one ending with the same formula, ‘give me this one’. Then, after the process of drawing lots, whatever it was, the consultant received a ticket back, requiring him to fulfill or to abandon his plan. In mid-fourth-century Athens, a decree follows the same process for an upcoming Delphic consultation. The Assembly write on two distinct tin lamellae the positive and negative versions of the same question, about the cultivation of an area of Eleusinian land sacred to Demeter and Kore. Each lamella is to be rolled up, wrapped in wool, then cast in a bronze vase that will be closed and shaken. Then one of the rolled lamellae will be taken out and put into a silver vase, the second one in a vase of gold, both of which will be sealed. This being done, the Assembly will send a delegation to Delphi, where the Pythia, when asked orally about cultivation, will give Apollo’s response by designating the silver vase or the gold one.Footnote ⁸¹

In Dodona, examples of an explicitly duplicated question are exceptional. Most of the enquiries, as we have said, imply a closed answer of yes or no: ‘Is it better and more advantageous to do X?’ This type of question, an alternative between A and not-A, is in its principle close to cleromantic divination, which works whatever was the operating mode of the sanctuary, be it by lots or through ‘inspired’ or ‘inductive’ answers.

Could it be that these duplicate lamellae are the sign of a general ‘ticket-oracle’ mantic mode at Dodona? The answer is no. This would mean that each lamella found around the seat of the oracle was the one that was left in the sanctuary, while the second would have been thrown away, or re-melted, or carried away by the consultants. In any case, there should be a quite even proportion of positive and negative questions, and this is not the case.Footnote ⁸² The hypothesis then is not valid and, consequently, the thousands of lamellae found in situ may not have been used for operational cleromantic purposes. In other words, the majority of Dodona’s lamellae were not used in any lot device.

This does not mean that the method of the ‘ticket oracle’ did not exist at Dodona. For orally asked questions, it is possible that an oracle official could have operated a cleromatic device, in a kind of black-or-white bean method, to generate an answer to the many enquiries that present simple alternatives. As there is no mention of any ‘black bean system’ in the lamellae, however, and given the fact that an oral answer was perfectly conceivable and in accordance to Greek mentalities, it remains safer to consider that answering by lot was probably not the usual method of divination in Dodona.Footnote ⁸³

Some exceptional lamellae, however, display a duplicated text that is strongly reminiscent of the ‘ticket-oracle’, as has been made clear by Robert Parker. The question is whether those lamellae themselves actually played a role in a cleromantic process, given that a lot device, of which we have no other trace besides these few lamellae, would have to return one of the two answers, yes or no. Speaking about DVC 2005 A and 2006 A (about the theft of a pig), the former positive, the latter negative, Parker specifies: ‘The editors suggest that the enquirer was dissatisfied with his initial formulation and tried again. But the switch from positive to negative suggests rather that both possible answers were written on the same lead strip, (…) and that in this case, for whatever reason, a separation leading to the return of one failed to occur.’Footnote ⁸⁴ I fully agree with the first argument. The slightly different formulation of the two texts refers to the same question, and in that respect, is close to the ticket-oracle system. But I remain skeptical about the second part of the argument, because the lamella has not been cut into two strips, and could never have been used in any draw procedure.

Three other lamellae provide duplicated texts written on the same strip of lead either head-to-tail,Footnote ⁸⁵ or following each other,Footnote ⁸⁶ and only once written on each side of a lamella.Footnote ⁸⁷ Their questions are close to the ticket-oracle type, but not in a way that could be used as such, because none of them was cut in half. We will never know how such types of question were asked nor how the oracle answered. It could have been orally, by stating A or non-A, for example; or by drawing lots, using a ‘black or white bean’ technique to reach the same result. Again, however, this small step in the understanding of the operation of the oracle does not help us pin down the exact moment when those lamellae, close to ticket-oracles, were written down. Consultants could have written them at the beginning, middle or end of their consultation, and not all consultants would have written them down at the same point.

This has been a long enquiry about a simple problem. I am afraid I have not delivered many strong conclusions, but knowing the limits of our knowledge is better than building brilliant ideas on a bed of sand. Any type of evidence is more complex than it looks at first sight, and more difficult to understand, but it is also richer in perspectives and full of hints leading to other questions.

It is probably pointless to try to establish the canonical way of consulting Zeus at Dodona – and perhaps there is no straightforward answer. Oral questions seem to have been the rule, like spoken answers; the existence of a lot procedure, however, is also attested, which does not preclude orality in the process. Indeed, many mantic procedures could have been in use at Dodona, simultaneously and/or successively, for its thousand years of existence.

The experience of consulting the oracle of Dodona is documented in literary and epigraphic evidence. The lead oracular lamellae unearthed within the sacred temenos preserved a good number of the questions, dating not earlier than the end of the sixth century BCE, addressed by private and public consultants, as well as a few answers delivered by the oracle.Footnote ¹ Beyond the specific contents of the tablets, which have recently fed the debate on the issues on which the god was consulted and ancient divination practiced in the oracular shrine of Zeus Dodonaios,Footnote ² one thing leaps out at the observer: the extreme brevity and straightforwardness of all the questions and (supposed) answers attested epigraphically. This feature is very much in evidence in the oracular story-telling concerning Dodona contained in historical narratives and in the fictional accounts in Athenian drama, which have so often been excluded from critical analysis. These, however, form an interesting cluster of evidence, as they not only cast light on playwrights’ thoughts about the oracular shrine but also allow us to assess the perceptions and expectations of the audience attending the performance.Footnote ³

Most fifth-century BCE Attic plays, conveying and handing down models of thinking and patterns of behaviour, drew on stories taken from Greek mythology.Footnote ⁴ In the tragedies, significant space was given to oracles, oracular consultations, and oracular shrines, often providing reasons for characters’ actions and reactions. As the great majority of these references concern Delphi, modern scholarship has largely focused on this sanctuary, highlighting its role in contemporary society.Footnote ⁵ Other oracles appearing in ancient drama – among them Dodona – have been investigated to a lesser degree and almost exclusively in the light of the research carried out on Delphi.Footnote ⁶ Most of these contributions, differing in scope and extent, share a common feature: they focus mainly on the reason(s) behind the inclusion of these oracular centres and prophecies in Greek tragedies. They regard this as the reflection of contemporary events, of the increasing fame of certain oracles and/or of the location and exoticness of certain others.

All the passages relating to the involvement of Dodona in Greek literary sources were first gathered by Parke, who supplied a very useful collection, but did not provide an in-depth analysis of the tragic plays. He explained the references to Zeus’ oracle in these works either by the convenient location of the oracle in northwestern Greece, if this fitted the geography of the tragedy, or by Dodona’s alleged primitiveness and exoticness. As a result Parke dismissed these mentions as merely incidental.Footnote ⁷ Equally dismissive is the opinion of Jouanna, who, in a long article on divination in Sophocles, does not identify differences between the use of one oracle and another. Dodona and Delphi, in particular, appear to him as essentially interchangeable and Sophocles’ choice is regarded as depending largely on the exploitation of these oracular centres in ancient and contemporary authors, namely Homer and Herodotus.Footnote ⁸

More recently, Marotta argues that the increasing presence of Dodona in ancient sources, especially in tragedies, was a reflection of Athenian interregional politics: as soon as Athens expanded its political, economic and territorial influence outside the borders of Attica, literary sources started to incorporate in historical and fictional accounts more distant and exotic places such as the Epirote shrine.Footnote ⁹ The implications of this latter hypothesis need to be assessed. Athenian politics in the fifth century were more focused on the Aegean Sea than on the northwest, where Dodona lies: thus, according to Marotta’s line of reasoning, other religious and oracular centres should have found more space in Athenian drama, but they did not. Moreover, the references to Dodona, either as an oracular centre or as a geographical location, are limited in number, and Delphic Apollo, along with the prophets inspired by him, still plays a major role. Finally, the recourse to the oracle of Zeus Dodonaios seems not to be casual but weighted, and its oracular prophecies are rather well characterized, especially in Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ plays.

In the last few years a shift of perspective in considering oracles, oracular consultations and oracular sanctuaries has been pursued by some modern scholars, who focus not on why an oracle was preferred to another by a certain author but how it was exploited, pointing to the nature and competences of the god(s) and the perception of certain oracular deities. For Dodona and fifth-century BCE tragedians, this type of investigation has been carried out by Greta Castrucci, who has approached the topic by comparing the shrines of Zeus Dodonaios and Delphic Apollo.Footnote ¹⁰ Through an examination of all the passages in ancient drama, she has pointed out the main difference between the treatment of Delphic Apollo and that of Zeus Dodonaios by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. While Apollo is primarily brought into play when the main character has to find the final resolution of her/his troubles, often suggesting in his prophecies detachments, departures and separation from the household,Footnote ¹¹ Zeus tends to indicate the way to return home, and to concentrate on the safety of the family, and on the attachment to one’s origins and roots. This fascinating reading, however, does not fully explain why in some cases Delphi and Dodona appeared to be consulted for the same issue.Footnote ¹²

More recently, an article by Heinz-Günther Nesselrath has further developed this angle of analysis, examining how Delphic divine intervention was exploited in Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ plays about the myths of the Atreidae and of Oedipus and in Euripides’ Ion.Footnote ¹³ Each tragedian had his own way of approaching and portraying the divine, which went beyond the specific topic of the question addressed to the oracle. He concludes that whereas in Aeschylus, Apollo gives precise and clear instructions to the characters, in Sophocles, the god forecasts the inevitable tragic fate, in Nesselrath’s words die Konstatierungen des Unausweichlichen, of the protagonist(s).Footnote ¹⁴ The case of Euripides’ Ion is rather different as, in this tragedy, the authority of Apollo is totally questioned.Footnote ¹⁵ Although limited to the example of Delphi, Nesselrath’s thought-provoking observations could be applied to other oracles, which, to different extents, are involved in the plots of Athenian tragedies.

This essay will take advantage of both Nesselrath’s and Castrucci’s approaches, but will focus on a further issue, that is, the way in which oracular utterances from Dodona, as attested in ancient drama, were worded. In antiquity Delphi’s cryptic wording and obscurity were proverbial, to the extent that they were allegedly responsible for one of the epithets of Apollo at Delphi, that is, Loxias ‘the Oblique’.Footnote ¹⁶ Were Dodonaean responses characterized by the same lack of clarity? Did Zeus’ utterances diverge from those of Apollo?

Wholly Dodonaean Tragedies

Sophocles built two of his plays to a large extent around a plot line provided by the oracle of Dodona:Footnote ¹⁷ of these two, Trachiniae has been transmitted fully, while Odysseus Akanthoplex is lost and only very few fragments have survived.Footnote ¹⁸

In Trachiniae, prophecies are used extensively from the beginning to the end as a means of creating the atmosphere of an overpowering fate, which neither Deianeira nor Herakles can escape. To a certain extent, Trachiniae may be defined as the drama of ‘a death foretold’ as, from the very beginning of the play, Deianeira, in expressing her concerns and grounded fears about Herakles’ welfare, foretells, as an oracle did, his death:Footnote ¹⁹

Deianeira is ‘almost certain’Footnote ²¹ (schedon d’epistamai) that something terrible must have happened as the husband has been away for fifteen months without any news. Her apprehension is not irrational as it comes from a divine message inscribed on a tablet that Herakles left before his departure.Footnote ²² The contents are now suddenly linked with his absence.Footnote ²³ In motivating their son Hyllos to look for Herakles, Deianeira vaguely refers to the tablet mentioned earlierFootnote ²⁴ and to ‘to-be-believed oracles’ (manteia pista),Footnote ²⁵ mentioning the country where Herakles ought to be at that moment:Footnote ²⁶

According to the tablet and the oracle(s), Herakles ‘either is about to come to the end of his life, or he will accomplish this ordeal and for the future live from now on happily’(ὡς ἢ τελευτὴν τοῦ βίου μέλλει τελεῖν,/ ἢ τοῦτον ἄρας ἆθλον εἰς τό γ’ ὕστερον/ τὸν λοιπὸν ἤδη βίοτον εὐαίων’ ἔχειν).Footnote ²⁸ Herakles had long spared Deianeira knowledge of the prophecy before his departure,Footnote ²⁹ and even after the revelation of the oracular utterance, its contents are underestimated until Herakles’ long absence become worrying:Footnote ³⁰ the oracular response, for long kept secret – first by Herakles from his wife and, then, by Deianeira from their son – immediately alarms Hyllos, so much so that he claims that if he had known it, he would have set off after his father long ago.Footnote ³¹

Only later does Deianeira explain that Herakles received these prophecies concerning his labours from Dodona:Footnote ³²

More specifically she says that Herakles left in the house an ‘ancient tablet, inscribed with signs which he had never before brought himself to explain to me when going out on one of his many labours’ (παλαιὰν δέλτον ἐγγεγραμμένην/ ξυνθήμαθ’, ἁμοὶ πρόσθεν οὐκ ἔτλη ποτέ,/ πολλοὺς ἀγῶνας ἐξιών).Footnote ³⁴ Before leaving, Herakles gave Deianeira testamentary directions on how to divide his properties after his death, as well as the response of the oracle,Footnote ³⁵ according to which ‘when he had been gone from our land for a year and three months, he was fated either to die at that time, or by escaping the end of the period to live thereafter an untroubled life’ (χρόνον προτάξας ὡς τρίμηνος ἡνίκ’ ἂν/ χώρας ἀπείη κἀνιαύσιος βεβώς,/ τότ’ ἢ θανεῖν χρείη σφε τῷδε τῷ χρόνῳ,/ ἢ τοῦθ’ ὑπεκδραμόντα τοῦ χρόνου τέλος/ τὸ λοιπὸν ἤδη ζῆν ἀλυπήτῳ βίῳ).Footnote ³⁶ That was what ‘the ancient oak at Dodona had once told him through the mouths of the two Peleiades’(ὡς τὴν παλαιὰν φηγὸν αὐδῆσαί ποτε/ Δωδῶνι δισσῶν ἐκ πελειάδων ἔφη).Footnote ³⁷

Later, the chorus specifies that this prophecy happened earlier,Footnote ³⁸ and Herakles himself, before dying, refers to his consultation at Dodona, where his father in the past predicted to him that he would have died ‘by no creature that had the breath of life, but by one already dead, a dweller with Hades’ (πρὸς τῶν πνεόντων μηδενὸς θανεῖν ποτε,/ ἀλλ’ ὅστις Ἅιδου φθίμενος οἰκήτωρ πέλοι):Footnote ³⁹

The oracular response is ambiguous, and Heracles misunderstands Zeus’ words, but the oracle’s language and phrasing are plain and straightforward.

Further prophecies from Dodona followed, ‘the new ones aligning with the old’ (manteia kaina, tois palai xunēgora).Footnote ⁴¹ These responses were written down by Herakles ‘at the dictation of the ancestral oak with many voices’ (exegrapsamēn/pros tēs patrōias kai polyglōssou druos).Footnote ⁴² Thus, the two oracles received at Dodona, at different times, predicted the time and the cause of Herakles’ death: his final rest would come at the end of the twelfth year due to a creature already dead.Footnote ⁴³ Somehow, as stressed in the tragedy, the two oracles agree,Footnote ⁴⁴ because each verifies the other.

The choice of the oracle of Dodona for a tragedy set in Trachis, west of Thermopylae, north of Delphi, is rather odd. The Epirote shrine was more difficult, though not impossible, to reach and rather distant from Trachis. Certainly, as Easterling rightly points out,Footnote ⁴⁵ the choice of Dodona rather than Delphi might be explained by reference to the oracular god worshipped there, Zeus, that is, Herakles’s father.Footnote ⁴⁶ If the Trachiniae dated to the early years of the Peloponnesian war, when Euripides shows a distinct hostility to the Pythian Apollo, one might wonder if Sophocles had also felt a wish to give credit for prophecy to some centre other than Delphi.Footnote ⁴⁷

But, according to Parke, it is more likely that ‘there is some dramatic motive’ behind the choice of Dodona: perhaps the ‘strange and outlandish’ nature of the Epirote oracle, which is in line with the ‘curiously inhuman and savage’ attitude of Herakles in the play.Footnote ⁴⁸ It would have been more ‘convenient’ to go to Apollo Pythios, especially considering that all other sources mentioning an oracular response concerning Herakles’ immorality after the labours refer to a Delphic oracle, not one from Dodona.Footnote ⁴⁹

The immortality achieved either after twelve years and ten labours or after twelve years as foretold by Delphic Apollo was also in Apollodorus and Diodorus Siculus.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is not possible to state whether Sophocles embraced an alternative tradition, not elsewhere attested, or whether he altered the myth to fully focus the tragedy around Dodona, but certainly the choice was not ‘incidental’: Dodona may have meant something specific for him and the audience.

In this respect, the recourse to Zeus Dodonaios in a drama concerning mostly family issues and the ultimate and inevitable journey of Herakles fits into Castrucci’s and Nesselrath’s hypotheses. What is here relevant is the reputation of the shrine of Zeus at Dodona, delivering ‘to-be-believed oracles’,Footnote ⁵¹ which do not contradict each other, that is, ‘the new fitting with the old’.Footnote ⁵² This is the reason for the fear that has been present since the first verses: Deianeira is not panicking irrationally, but she is ‘almost certain’ that something has happened.Footnote ⁵³ This is clearly because her source of information is Dodona, not just any oracle, but the centre that (always) delivers to-be-believed responses. In a crescendo of dramatic tension and self-awareness, which involves first Deianeira, then her son Hyllos and the chorus, the fear of Herakles’ inescapable downfall, which has been present since the first verses, is caused by responses pronounced by Zeus Dodonaios, to which Deianeira constantly refers as a further proof.Footnote ⁵⁴

But before any of the characters realize this, the audience becomes immediately aware of the inescapable end. The spectators knew the myth before attending the performance and easily connected the two oracular answers: there was no expectation of a surprise ending and Deianeira’s and Herakles’ words, describing the responses of the oracle, emphasize it. The responses were delivered according to the usual sibylline manner – the oracle never fails – but worded straightforwardly and precisely. The continuous reference to the prophecies from Dodona also seems to imply that until that moment, unaccountably, they all underestimated those oracles, and their distress is heightened by the realization that they should have known that the divine plan would be fulfilled as it came from Dodona. This also suggests that it is likely that the oracles delivered by Zeus Dodonaios were commonly taken at face value and were rather intelligible.

Sophocles also mentions Dodona in his lost tragedy Odysseus Akanthoplex. Although only a very few fragments of the play survive, it seems that it turned on an oracular response from Zeus Dodonaios:Footnote ⁵⁵

Odysseus, after returning from his wanderings, receives a prophecy that he will die by the hand of his son. With a typical oracular equivocation, this does not mean Telemachus, but Telegonus, Odysseus’ son by Circe, who arrives unrecognized and kills his father without having identified him.Footnote ⁵⁶ Not much else can be said about the plot, but in the few surviving fragments from the play, four verses certainly refer to Dodona.

According to Parke, who followed Pearson, these fragments belong to the beginning of the play, before the recognition scene.Footnote ⁵⁷ He argues that, because of the mention of Dodona and the familiarity of Odysseus’ with the Epirote oracle,Footnote ⁵⁸ the crucial prophecy of the death of the hero was likely a response from Zeus Dodonaios.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, we cannot exclude the possibility that more oracular centres were consulted by Odysseus, according to a practice well-attested in ancient drama, and especially given the double mention of Dodona and Delphi in fr. 460: ‘Now no one from Dodona nor from the clefts of Delphi would persuade me.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Whether Odysseus or someone else pronounces these verses cannot be established, but for the present discussion it is worth noting both the use of the verb πείθομαι ‘be persuaded, trust, obey’, which stresses the high reputation of the oracle, and the tragic reproach of the speaker to the god at Dodona, attested in fr. 461: ‘Make the god at Dodona to lose his praises’.Footnote ⁶¹ In other words, Zeus at Dodona, until that moment worthy to be honoured, has been found guilty of an unspecified fault by the speaker. These words do not necessarily mean loss of confidence in the oracle’s responses: an oracular response, not understood immediately but then fulfilled, could also have caused the anger of the consultant.

‘Incidental’ Dodonaen Consultations

Oracular consultations at Dodona are also mentioned in other fifth-century tragedies, specifically Aeschylus’ Prometheus Vinctus and Euripides’ Phoenissae and Archelaos, but in these cases the questions addressed to Dodona do not represent the crucial events around which the play revolves. In the Prometheus Vinctus Aeschylus refers to two oracular enquiriesFootnote ⁶² related to Io’s myth, which is at the core of the play:Footnote ⁶³ a double consultation of oracles, when Delphi and Dodona are consulted by Inachus, Io’s father, to learn the reason for his daughter’s frightening dreams (addressed below), and a single consultation of Zeus Dodonaios, which happened before the action narrated in the play and about which Prometheus reminds Io:Footnote ⁶⁴

The Talking Oaks,Footnote ⁶⁶ ‘an incredible marvel’,Footnote ⁶⁷ at some point in the past addressed Io ‘clearly and not in riddles’Footnote ⁶⁸ as she was to become the famous wife of Zeus. This ‘first’ crucial response that generates Io’s misfortune fits with both Castrucci’s assumption that the god to consult for family issues was Zeus Dodonaios and Nesselrath’s inference that prophecies in Aeschylus’ drama mainly predict upcoming events, not necessarily bearing negative consequences. It also matches what we have so far observed, that is, that Zeus’ responses were concise and expressed in plain words.

That Zeus Dodonaios was consulted primarily for matters concerning the security of the household and its members is also highlighted in Euripides’ tragedies. The dramatist refers to the shrine of Dodona in several tragedies.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Phoenissae, a possible consultation is planned by Menoikeus, Kreon’s son:Footnote ⁷⁰

Kreon is attempting to avoid sacrificing his son to save Thebes and suggests Menoikeus go far away, to the end of the known Greek world, where Dodona is. Delphi might be a more suitable destination, both in terms of geographical proximity and in terms of mythical connections with the Theban saga:Footnote ⁷² so why go to Dodona? Presumably because, as Kreon says, it was one of the most remote places in the known world, as well as being a sacred place which could guarantee the safety of Menoikeus, who has been told he has to die. Moreover, it should be remembered that Euripides was aware of the myth connecting the Boeotians, and in particular the Thebans, with Dodona. In this sense Dodona belonged to the cultural heritage of Boiotia and would not represent an odd choice. Menoikeus asks his father how the god will help him, and Kreon replies, ‘the god will guide you’;Footnote ⁷³ nothing more is said, so in this case, it is not possible to determine what guidance Zeus provided for the journey.

A different case is a fragment from Archelaos;Footnote ⁷⁴ Euripides reports the consultation of the oracle by Temenos. According to the myth,Footnote ⁷⁵ Temenos, son of Aristomachos and descended from Herakles,Footnote ⁷⁶ having conquered the Peloponnese with his brothers, then conquered Argos. His sons were forced to leave the country:

Here, one of the sons of Temenos, likely, but not necessarily Archelaos, tells the story. The fragment, despite its shortness, is valuable for our purposes in several ways. First, Temenos from Argos in the Peloponnese consults the oracle of Dodona despite the ‘inconvenient’ location. This could be explained as being because Temenos, as a descendant of Herakles, preferred consulting Zeus’ oracle rather than Apollo’s.Footnote ⁷⁷ Secondly, the question put to the oracle concerns a private matter, specifically regarding his future descendants. This question seems to be one of the usual topics among the questions put to the oracle of Dodona.Footnote ⁷⁸ Finally, Euripides mentions a priestess working in the shrine as a temple-servant to Dione (propolos Diōnēs), who reports the prophecy in clear and straightforward terms: the future birth of a male child with a ‘speaking name’: Archelaos, ‘leading the people’.

Thus, the straightforward nature of Zeus Dodonaios’ utterances emerges in Euripides’ Archelaos too: Temenos obtains a clear answer; that is, ‘Zeus will give you a son’.Footnote ⁷⁹

The Exception to the Rule?

To this picture in which ancient tragedians agree in depicting Zeus Dodonaios’s answers as clear, self-evident concise, and straightforward, the double consultation of Delphi and Dodona in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Vinctus seems to represent an exception. The consultation is part of the empathic dialogue between Prometheus and Io, fortuitously arrived in the remote place where the Titan is chained to the rock as punishment by Zeus:Footnote ⁸⁰

This first exchange between the two emphasizes Io’s desperate intention to tap Prometheus’ prophetic knowledge of her future after being turned into a heifer to escape Hera’s jealousy. Before learning her fate, which is finally revealed by Prometheus,Footnote ⁸² the chorus invites Io to recount the reason for her wanderings. In this context Io describes Zeus’ passion and her suffering caused by Hera’s jealousy from which Zeus failed to protect her. Since she was tormented by frightening dreams, messengers were sent by her father Inachus to both Delphi and Dodona to learn what he should do or say to please the gods. According to Aeschylus the oracles were consulted many timesFootnote ⁸³ and the theopropoi returned ‘reporting riddling, obscure, and dark worded oracles’.Footnote ⁸⁴ ‘Finally, a clear response came to Inachus’,Footnote ⁸⁵ explicitly commanding him to drive Io away from her home and country and to let her loose to roam to the ends of the earth.Footnote ⁸⁶ Should Inachus refuse, a fiery bolt would come from Zeus to annihilate the whole family. Persuaded by these oracles of Apollo Loxias,Footnote ⁸⁷ Inachus obeys and Io, turned into a heifer, immediately starts her wandering.

The need to have comprehensible prophecies is indeed a crucial and recurring aspect in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Vinctus. This is illustrated when Hermes invites Prometheus to describe everything about the marriage that would cost Zeus’ power: the god encourages him to speak, literally, ‘not in any riddling way’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Moreover, ironically, he warns Prometheus not to let him make the same road twice,Footnote ⁸⁹ alluding to the possibility that Prometheus’ response might have been obscure (like that of Apollo Loxias?) and also to Greeks habits of consulting oracles several times about the same issue. This statement acquires meaning when we consider that the person demanding clarity is Hermes, the herald of an oracular god, Zeus, who, as affirmed in the play, speaks ‘clearly and not in any riddling way’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In other words, Hermes is saying, ‘behave and speak clearly as does Zeus, not as Apollo’. The clarity of Zeus, who does not deceive, is further emphasized by Hermes in the attempt to persuade the stubborn Prometheus to reveal his secrets in order to be free at the end of the play:Footnote ⁹¹

The legend of Io was exploited not only in Aeschylus’ tragedies but also in other literary sources.Footnote ⁹³ Zeus Dodonaios, however, does not appear in other evidence for the myth. For this reason, Parke assumed that the whole episode was quite probably Aeschylus’ own invention, not derived from any other sourceFootnote ⁹⁴ and dismissed all the references to the Epirote oracle in the tragedy as ‘incidental’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Mitchell, on the contrary, highlights the ‘leading role’ of Dodona over DelphiFootnote ⁹⁶ as Dodona in the play is the first port of call in Io’s wanderingsFootnote ⁹⁷ and, most importantly, the Epirote shrine foretold to her that she was meant to be the bride of Zeus.Footnote ⁹⁸ Mitchell argues that the involvement of Dodona in Io’s myth was a device to foster Euboean ties in northwestern Greece.Footnote ⁹⁹ This hypothesis, however, does not fully explain the choice of Aeschylus, who assigns to Dodona the crucial role of triggering Io’s personal drama, that is, the response from the Talking Oaks to become the wife of Zeus,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ which chronologically preceded the double consultation by Inachus.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Seemingly, Aeschylus had no interest in nurturing the ties between Euboeans and the northwest.

Although there is no need to over-emphasize the role of Dodona in the plot or in the eyes of the viewer, let alone to argue that it was portrayed as being ‘superior’ to Delphi, it might be possible to agree, at least in part, with Castrucci that Dodona was perceived as different from Delphi because Zeus was the god of oikos.Footnote ¹⁰² But the need for Inachus to have a double consultation is not in line with this assumption: Why did the situation require more divine authorities?

In this consultation, the responses of both oracles were defined collectively as ‘riddling, obscure, and dark-worded oracles’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Only eventually, after many embassies, did a clear prophecy come from Delphi, that is, that Io is to be cast out from her family and home.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This might be read as contradicting the claim here that Zeus Dodonaios’ responses are clear and straightforward. Yet, a close analysis of the verses can help to resolve this seeming problem. The obscurity of the first responses delivered by the gods of Delphi and DodonaFootnote ¹⁰⁵ might depend on the difficulty that any consultant would have in harmonizing two distinct utterances, which, by definition, are, regardless of the content, different in their formulation and wording. The human mind of any ancient consultant was challenged in interpreting the divine messages, but in the case of two distinct and different oracles, the major difficulty was to find a viable solution, without offending either one of the gods and establishing a (personal) hierarchy of divine authority. Moreover, it is not surprising that this oracle comes from Delphi (and not from Dodona), as the god who orders Inachus to let Io roam free,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ far away not only from Hera’s jealousy but also from Zeus’ passion, could never have been Zeus himself.

In conclusion, this piece of evidence, pointing to an apparently obscure response from Zeus Dodonaios, cannot be considered as an exception to the rule; rather, it looks like a clever trick to stress human responsibility (and ability) to interpret correctly divine messages, as well as a diplomatic way to avoid the possible embarrassment of an oracle contradicting another.

Zeus Dodonaios Master of Clarity

From this analysis of the verses attesting prophecies and consultations of Zeus Dodonaios in Aeschylus’, Sophocles’, and Euripides’ tragedies, it emerges that Zeus Dodonaios was primarily consulted about issues concerning the security of household, family and final journeys taking someone home.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This picture is confirmed by the oracular consultations found on the lead tablets at Dodona: although the oracle was not consulted exclusively for these issues, among private queries, those concerning health, marriage, family, children, residential shift and travel constitute a considerable part of the evidence.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Moreover, an in-depth reading of the plays also shows that Zeus Dodonaios, regardless of the specific enquiry, has his own specific way to formulate the divine answer, characterized by conciseness. In this respect, the straightforwardness and clarity of Zeus Dodonaios’ responses are revealed as being in opposition to the reputation of Apollo at Delphi, who, according to literary sources, expressed himself mostly in an elliptical and obscure manner. Besides Aeschylus’ consideration of Dodona as an oracle delivering clear prophecies with no riddling, Sophocles characterizes Zeus Dodonaios’ utterances as clear and to-be-believed, and Euripides points towards the straightforwardness of Dodona’s responses. The oracular utterances of Dodona may be ambiguous, like all oracles, but unlike those of Delphi, they are not characterized by obscure language. The clarity and concision of the questions and answers delivered by the Epirote oracle is indeed a distinctive feature confirmed by the epigraphic evidence: queries are not longer than a few lines; more often a few words, if not one, expresses the worries of the consultant(s). Equally laconic are the few divine answers, which are often so straight and direct as to sound more like orders than divine counsels.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The Dodona Questions as Narratives

It might be difficult at first sight to consider the texts from the tablets at Dodona as offering ‘narratives’. Traditional approaches to narrative have privileged a linear temporal structure, with a recognizable beginning, middle and end, usually told by one active teller.Footnote ¹⁵ But, offering an alternative framework to these more established forms, there is a category of narratives that Alexandra Georgakopoulou has described as ‘small stories’.Footnote ¹⁶ This offers a dynamic and emergent approach to the creation of narrative: ‘small stories’ are brief, even fragmentary narrative activities, which may include not only ‘tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell’.Footnote ¹⁷ They are locally occasioned and closely connected with the contexts in which they unfold: in this model, narrative is viewed as ‘a trajectory of interactions rather than as a free standing, finished and self-contained unit’.Footnote ¹⁸ It is understood as relational, in terms of both the other discourse activity with which it interacts and the larger context in which a narrative of this kind occurs. Thus, this approach to narrative requires consideration of the narrative in its environment, along with the occasion and interactions within which it emerges.Footnote ¹⁹

As an example of this approach, we can consider some analyses as small stories of the (brief) messages found in social media, a context that Georgakopoulou considers as affording its users ‘opportunities for sharing life in miniaturized form at the same time as constraining the ability of users to plunge into full autobiographical mode’.Footnote ²⁰ She draws attention to the ways in which, if the analysis concentrates on those writing the messages – what she calls ‘the tellers’ – we can identify ‘narrative stancetaking’, that is:

This is a process achieved through ‘the circulation/circulatability of the activities beyond the single speech event, not necessarily as actual, cataloguable events, but as interwoven into the here-and-now of any activity’.Footnote ²² Georgakopoulou emphasizes how the particular telling of a story draws on past experiences and future resources and how such ‘stories will refer to and anticipate previous tellings, tellers and audiences’.Footnote ²³ In this way, she implicitly draws attention not only to the community within which the story was told, but also to the role of relationality and temporality in the telling of a story. This has further ramifications: building on this notion of narrative stancetaking, Bamberg and Georgakopoulou suggest that small stories are ‘sites of identity work’, where individuals are seeking to find ‘identity constructions of sameness in the face of adversative conditions and constant change’.Footnote ²⁴

Attention to this area of social practice, and engagement with the ‘small story’ as opposed to ‘big story research’ (as Georgakopoulou puts it),Footnote ²⁵ has been described as indicative of ‘a late modern focus on the micro, fleeting aspects of lived experience’.Footnote ²⁶ It is an emphasis that seems to align, in the current context of the field of the study of ancient religion, with the recent exploration of ‘lived religion’, and its concern ‘with action and experience’.Footnote ²⁷ And, I suggest, it offers a stimulating way to think about the Dodona question tablets, as small stories from the lived action and experience of consultation, each offering insight into a narrative that comprised multiple other interactions and revealing moments of narrative stancetaking.

We can see this larger narrative of oracular consultation, comprising multiple interactions, illustrated by the many oracle stories related by the fifth-century BCE historian Herodotus. Each of these accounts of oracular consultation begins with a problem discussed or reflected upon by an individual or community; the question is formulated and taken to the gods; the answer is received and perhaps discussed and interpreted again; and, finally, but surely on multiple occasions, the story of the consultation is told in a particular context. In fact, we could argue that the text of Herodotus and, in turn, the many readings of this text by scholars can also be seen as an ongoing part of that process of narrative unfolding.

I suggest we can also find parallels to the ‘identity work’ that Bamberg and Georgakopolou detect. When we, as modern historians, read the texts from Dodona, we observe the expressions of a person in a moment in time, and a moment in a person’s life. We do not know – but can imagine – something of the surrounding contexts and their narrative(s): how those stories might be told; what episode in those narrative(s) these texts evoke. Nevertheless, I suggest, whether the question concerned making a choice, or requested further information, we can be certain that each of these questions reflect a moment of change, and one in which an individual depicted himself or herself in a process of changing. Thus, these questions may be understood as expressing something of the experience not just of consultation, but also of the self in consultation. Moreover, they not only express that experience, but also, we can argue, as part of the relational process of narrative, they created it; thus, in turn, these texts were part of a process of the (continuing) creation of the self.

In what follows, I want to explore the narratives presented by the Dodona questions as ‘stories of the self’, with a particular focus on those texts written wholly or partly in the third person and introducing theories from narrative analysis, alongside psychotherapy and psychology. While I suggest that there are, as Bamberg and Georgakopoulou emphasize, attempts to develop identity constructions of sameness, I also want to draw attention to a different aspect. I suggest here that the ‘small stories’ of the Dodona tablets, now themselves so brief and fragmentary, may reveal how pilgrims to Dodona experienced a sense of a self fragmented in – and by – a moment of stress or choice, before they then were able to use the process of consultation to find some relief from that experience. In what follows, I start by exploring the notion of a fragmented self, before considering the potential potency of third-person formulations, and the ways in which they may reveal the role of the question tablets as narratives-in-interaction, ‘sites of engagement where identities are continuously practised and tested out’.Footnote ²⁸

A Sense of Self or Selves

In putting forward the idea of a fragmented self in the context of studying the ancient individual, I am again building on previous work, where I have used theories from relational sociology to argue for the self as switching between different identities in different relational networks. In ‘Networks and Narratives: a Model for Ancient Greek Religion’, I suggested a dynamic and fluid paradigm for ancient Greek religion, drawing on the work of Harrison White.Footnote ²⁹ Challenging the more static model offered at that time by polis religion, this approach emphasized the emergent nature of religious practice, and how it informed and was informed by (in a constant process of change) individuals and their relationships. In particular, White drew attention to individuals’ struggles for control and identity that occur within relational networks, emphasizing the role of narratives in these processes, as individuals created their different selves.Footnote ³⁰ Working with these ideas, my essay built on the polis religion model to suggest that what scholars call ‘polis religion’ emerged from a meshing of social and cultural networks; and that, alongside those of the polis, there were other networks and interactions, which, at the very least, helped to define it.Footnote ³¹

Since then, I have developed this relational approach to consider ways in which ancient communities of religious identities formed. Importantly, these communities included the supernatural alongside mortals: the divine shared in these networks of identity, evoked through the interrelation of human cognition and activities. Indeed, since mind and body are integrally related, this apparent duality, so debated in scholarship on ancient religion, must be reconsidered; most recently, I have argued that we might think of such interactions with supernatural entities (interactions that may range from ritual to story-telling) as each, in and of themselves, comprising an experience of (what scholars have struggled to understand as) ‘belief’.Footnote ³² Here, as part of the analysis of the third-person formulation in the question tablets at Dodona, I want to build on this idea of the individual self as comprising multiple selves.

This is not an experience limited to the ancient world: a sense of self as partible may be one that in the normal run of life is less evident, as we move between different situations; but, in moments of crisis and/or decision making, this fragmentation can become more apparent. In part this may occur because we are, in such moments, experiencing ourselves as outside our usual experience and ‘ordinary self’, in terms of our relations with the world.Footnote ³³ Brian Good suggests that this occurs when we experience ourselves in chronic pain.Footnote ³⁴ He describes the life-narrative of a twenty-eight-year-old man who has lived his life with pain since he was two.Footnote ³⁵ Good explains how, in the young man’s experience, the pain is ‘a demon, a monster, lurking within, banging the insides of his body’;Footnote ³⁶ and in turn the body ‘becomes personified as an aversive agent. It is invested with menacing autonomy’.Footnote ³⁷ The young man himself describes how he feels as if he’s,

To this, we can add some considerations of the ways in which these experiences may, in turn, create a particular relationship with the sense of time. Good explores how, for people experiencing chronic pain, like Brian, ‘time itself seems to break down, to lose its ordering power’;Footnote ³⁹ time may be slowed down or lost; its passing may be more distressing.Footnote ⁴⁰ This sense of difference may then result in a loss of connection with the social world and its concerns: ‘Pain threatens to unmake the world, and in turn to subvert the self.’Footnote ⁴¹

If we return to the pilgrims at Dodona, and the formulation of their questions, these reflections on those experiencing pain may be helpful for understanding those who came to the oracle in distress. Most obviously, it offers a parallel with those seeking physical healing: looking back to the questions at the beginning of this essay, it may be that Lysinos, for example, addressed the gods in the third person because he felt distanced from, or outside of, his physical body, distanced from the social world. Building on this, we may also consider those who were experiencing mental pain, including anxiety or distress about a particular problem or choice that they faced. Perhaps the third-person phrasing of their questions to Zeus indicates that they, too, were experiencing a sense of a fragmented self, separated from community.

This sense of self-fragmentation and dissociation is studied in psychotherapeutic approaches that aim to support those who experience trauma: the Structural Dissociation model offers a way for those who have experienced some kind of profound trauma, and those who work with them therapeutically, to better understand the nature of their inner worlds. This may include a sense that their identities are multiple, that they have ‘split’ or fragmented; a sense of dissociation, that is, a sense of disconnection from those around them, from the world and its concerns; even a sense of depersonalization, a sense of being disconnected from themselves.Footnote ⁴² But, while it vividly illustrates the experience of fragmentation that I want to indicate here, I suggest that a traumatic experience is unnecessary for a sense of partibility to emerge. General reflections on such an experience suggest that the sense that we comprise different parts or selves is, at a much less extreme extent, something of an everyday experience.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, we can observe how it transpires in a number of contexts through a common experience, that of self-talk: ‘what people say to themselves either silently or aloud, inherently or strategically, to stimulate, direct, react and evaluate events and actions’.Footnote ⁴⁴ And this suggests that such self-talk may indicate not only a sense of different parts of the self arising in moments of stress, but also that it has an important role to play in coping with that sense of fragmentation and the stress that underlies it.

Soothing Self-Talk

Experience, as well as research, suggests that individuals talk to themselves all the time, having developed this strategy, as children, for coping with challenging situations.Footnote ⁴⁵ They may do this aloud, or in their heads; research has indicated that overt self-talk in adults emerges, naturally, in response to particular cognitive challenges or stresses.Footnote ⁴⁶ Individuals tend to address themselves (as if they were separate individuals or comprised separate parts) in situations in which they need to provide ‘conscious self-guidance’;Footnote ⁴⁷ and further research indicates that it is particularly prevalent when self-control is required, and in situations where behaviour change is needed.Footnote ⁴⁸

As my initial account of the neuroscientific research on taking third-person perspectives indicates, it seems that self-talk activates brain regions associated with the manipulation of others: in particular, while there is some complexity in the findings,Footnote ⁴⁹ this research supports the idea that those regions that are engaged in expressing compassion and empathy to others are also then engaged when expressing self-reassurance and self-compassion towards oneself.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, such self-talk not only provides guidance, but may also influence emotions.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, overt self-talk has long been recognized as having potency in psychotherapeutic settings and is a particular focus of research for improving performance in sport.Footnote ⁵²

In much of this research, self-talk is about addressing oneself using ‘you’ or ‘I’. Recent research in psychology and psychotherapy, however, emphasizes the ways in which it is effective to think about and address parts of the self in the third person. Research shows that addressing oneself through self-talk by name and/or thinking of oneself in the third person can provide the distance required to facilitate ‘self-control’;Footnote ⁵³ helping individuals to self-distance, regulating their thoughts, behaviours and feelings;Footnote ⁵⁴ and supporting them in finding future situations more challenging than threatening.Footnote ⁵⁵ As noted by the researchers, this aligns with research that argues that language shapes emotional experiences.Footnote ⁵⁶ Significantly, this research also indicates that the brain regions usually engaged in the cognitive control of emotions do not seem to be activated by third-person self-talk. As one of the researchers, Ethan Kross, summarized in an article on this work, ‘third-person self-talk may constitute a relatively effortless form of emotion regulation’.Footnote ⁵⁷

While this analysis has so far been drawing on modern research, we can add that experiences of self-talk may be traceable in ancient evidence. It is well known that, at times of stress, the characters in Homeric epic often address themselves – or a part of themselves. Odysseus, for example, at Iliad 9.401–412, finding himself alone on the battlefield, speaks to his heart about beating a retreat; similarly, at Iliad 17.90–108, we see Menelaus speak to his own great-hearted spirit about abandoning Patroclus. These are just a couple of numerous such examples in these poems. The idea of the divided self is also familiar from other work, notably, the internal dialogues of characters in tragedy, and the philosophy of Plato, specifically in the Republic. As Christopher Gill has so eloquently argued, literary and philosophical evidence seems to suggest that, in ancient Greek culture, thought was understood as a kind of dialogue, conducted internally.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this essay, I want to suggest that such a paradigm may also be traced in the Dodona oracle questions.

When we turn back to those questions, especially those that are phrased in the third person, these observations suggest that perhaps they offer us some insight into not only the operation of oracular consultation, but also something of its emotional effects. It seems possible that the use of self-talk, and frequently third-person self-talk, as part of the creation of the oracular question, soothed the anxieties of individual pilgrims, enabling them to bring fragmented parts of the self into dialogue with each other, and to find sufficient emotional and cognitive distance to reflect on their dilemmas. In what follows, I want to explore that process in some more detail, by bringing to bear some research on the cognitive blending of Viewpoints.

Blending Viewpoints at Dodona

The theory of ‘cognitive blending’, developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, argues that, when we develop new concepts, we are bringing together separate constructions that are held, as it were, in distinct mental ‘input spaces’.Footnote ⁵⁹ These may be drawn from ‘mental spaces’, which are local and individual conceptualizations built up from many different sources, including conceptual ‘domains’.Footnote ⁶⁰ If mental spaces become established, then they become ‘frames’ that can be activated at once.Footnote ⁶¹ Fauconnier gives the example of the frame ‘Jesus on the Cross’, which can also evoke, in turn, other mental spaces (e.g., ‘the frame of “Roman crucifixion”, of “Jesus the baby”, of “Jesus the son of God”, of “Mary and the Holy women at the foot of the Cross”, of “styles of painting the crucifixion”, of “moments of the liturgy that refer to it”’, etc.).

In a process of blending, different elements from different domains are brought together – they ‘blend’ – to create a new emergent mental space.Footnote ⁶² We perform this kind of cognitive process all the time, because we bring concepts from different mental spaces (and from different domains) together all the time in thought and language. We do this, perhaps most obviously, with figurative language, for instance when we use metaphor. As an example Fauconnier and Turner offer us, ‘They dug their own financial grave’: this appears to be a metaphor that draws from the concrete domain of burial (graves and corpses) to the abstract domain of ‘getting into trouble, unwittingly doing the wrong things, and ultimate failure.’Footnote ⁶³ But Fauconnier and Turner note how analysing it in terms of a blend, rather than a straightforward metaphor, allows us to see ‘extraordinary mismatches’ between the source and target of the metaphor.Footnote ⁶⁴ For example, among them is the inversion of the causal structure: while foolish actions cause failure, grave-digging does not cause death. Similarly, the internal event structure does not match either: in the target domain you may risk failure if you are in more trouble, but that does not arise from the source domain, since you are not more likely to die if your grave is deeper.Footnote ⁶⁵ What happens is not a straightforward metaphor but, rather, a blend, in which both domains are providing input into the final meaning of this phrase. The source domain of burial provides the concrete structure; the target domain of being foolish is also an input space, providing the causal and event structures. The result is a blend of mental spaces that has proved so successful it has become conventional.Footnote ⁶⁶

But our use of blending is also more mundane and frequent than this more elaborate illustration suggests. For example, we also perform this blending activity when we use language (as a Hearer or a Speaker) to gather information about viewpoints – and develop representations of what other people are experiencing. In the realm of linguistics this can be analysed using mental spaces theory, which uses a number of technical terms: a Base is ‘the subjectively construed Ground of interpretation’;Footnote ⁶⁷ the Ground is the physical and temporal discourse setting of the Speaker and the Hearer.Footnote ⁶⁸ Where attention is concentrated is called the Focus space; the Event space is where an event takes place; and, finally, we access conceptual content via the Viewpoint space.Footnote ⁶⁹ Spaces may play more than one of these roles at the same time;Footnote ⁷⁰ they may also be ordered hierarchically according to temporal or epistemic relationships.Footnote ⁷¹

As a brief illustration of how these terms may be used, and the hierarchical quality of temporality, let us briefly take an example given by Eve Sweetser: Chris drove to San Francisco.Footnote ⁷² The Ground or Base space is the interaction between Speaker and Hearer, which contains an implicit reference to the present (the use of the past tense, ‘drove’) which they share; the Viewpoint space through which we access the Focus space is in the present space, in which the drive is now over.Footnote ⁷³ The attention, or Focus space, is on Chris, and the use of the past tense indicates this is a past Event space, which we access through the present.Footnote ⁷⁴ If we develop this sentence, then we start to view conceptual content through multiple Viewpoints: for example, Ann knows that Chris drove to San Francisco.Footnote ⁷⁵ This, to begin with, opens up a separate mental space, a Focus space that evokes Ann’s knowing. It also adds a further Viewpoint space from the shared Ground of interaction, since we are now accessing Ann’s Viewpoint space as well. If the speaker of the sentence had used another verb, one that implies doubt such as Ann believes, for example, then this would also open up a further Epistemic space, indicating the Speaker’s mental Viewpoint on Ann’s Viewpoint.Footnote ⁷⁶

Eve Sweetser argues that such a process is intrinsic to our everyday communication and unavoidable: ‘we are not just capable of multiple viewpoints; we are in fact incapable of keeping to one single viewpoint of space, or of cognitive structure, when other humans are present.’Footnote ⁷⁷ This may be, in part, because of our mirror neurons, which cause us to experience the world not only as we see it, but also with cognition of how others, whom we experience, are, simultaneously, experiencing the world and us in it.Footnote ⁷⁸ One everyday example of such a blended viewpoint is the response to a party invitation ‘Can you come to my party?’, which uses the verb ‘come’ as in ‘Sure, I’d love to come’: this participates in the deictic structure of the invitation; it takes the viewpoint of the inviter not the accepter of the invitation.Footnote ⁷⁹

The idea that humans have this capacity to blend or separate representations, to generate new imagined representations from existing representations, is an important part of what mental spaces theory offers. We are constantly building mental space structures by drawing on our representations of the world, and our use of language is part of that process of representation.Footnote ⁸⁰ I want to suggest in what follows that we can usefully unpack the Viewpoint blends of the Dodona tablets so as to better understand what effects their phrasing may have achieved.

Conclusion: The Power of Awe

By considering the Dodona question tablets as ‘small stories’, I have argued in this essay for a reconsideration of the information they may provide, in particular what the formulation of the question may reveal. If we view these texts as fragments of narratives about the self, supported by analyses of pain narratives, we can suggest that, in formulating their questions for Zeus, pilgrims at Dodona were expressing a sense of their lived experience, including, perhaps, a sense of themselves as fragmented in – and by – a moment of stress or choice. Drawing on psychological and psychotherapeutic theories, we can argue, in turn, that the process of composing their questions for Zeus offered a way for pilgrims to engage in self-talk, considering their dilemmas and soothing their concerns. By engaging in this form of self-address and self-talk, they could return to a state of self- and community integration.

Building on cognitive linguistic theory, I have developed this argument to suggest that the third-person phrasing of the tablets enabled pilgrims to experience, simultaneously, multiple viewpoints on their lives, from multiple temporalities. Not only did these include the (past, present and future) viewpoints of their selves as mortals, but also, I have suggested, another viewpoint of their own, cast as that of the ‘divine’. Through their participation in a ritual in which they considered themselves from a distance, pilgrims were able to engage with these multiple viewpoints and, potentially, forge new narratives: we can speculate that this process perhaps offered them a self-narrative that both integrated the different parts of the self within themselves and themselves within their communities.

In an essay that has focused primarily on human psychological processes, I want to end by focusing on the ancient experience of the divine in this context. In the sanctuary of Dodona, in which these question tablets were found and these experiences took place, individuals understood themselves to be in the presence of the king of the gods. It was a location in which, it seems likely, pilgrims would have experienced awe – and such an experience, I suggest, may have been essential for this process of oracular consultation. Recent research suggests that awe – defined as ‘the emotion that arises when one encounters something so strikingly vast that it provokes a need to update one’s mental schemas’Footnote ⁸⁵ – expands perceptions of time; moreover, it prompts individuals to seek new knowledge and develop knowledge structures. Experiences of awe, researchers suggest, may be the ideal context for decision making.

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.

The normative Western post-Enlightenment understanding of the world is that whereas there are many different cultures, both now and in the past, there is, and indeed only can be, one underlying nature. This modern Western position can be called ‘naturalism’.Footnote ¹ But what if the nature/culture dichotomy is not universally valid? What if in some places, or at some times, various peoples have inhabited a natural world that is specific to their culture? In the case of the ancient Greeks, it would be a nature in which they shared the world with supernatural beings of many different kinds, one in which even trees and springs might be alive. If this were true, it would obviously have a huge impact on the way we study, understand and describe ancient Greek religion.

Since its inception in the late 1990s, the ontological turn in anthropology has asked us to take seriously what is specific to a particular culture’s lifeworld, while at the same time seeking to collapse the traditional dichotomy between the multiplicity of culture and the uniformity of nature.Footnote ² Advocates of the ontological turn in its original, and most controversial, articulation maintain that pre-modern and contemporary traditional cultures inhabit different worlds, each existing within an alternate reality. In other words, it is not only cultures that may vary but even nature itself may vary.Footnote ³ As expressed in a very influential edited volume, ‘If we are to take others seriously, instead of reducing their articulations to mere “cultural perspectives” or “beliefs” (i.e. “worldviews”), we can conceive of them as enunciations of different ‘worlds’ or ‘natures’, without having to concede that this is just shorthand for “worldviews”.’Footnote ⁴

In other words, the ontological turn differs from cultural relativism in the claim that it is not only epistemologies (forms of knowing and understanding) that may vary between cultures, but even ontologies (forms of being or existing).Footnote ⁵ According to the Greeks’ ontological conception of how reality is put together, the gods took an interest in the welfare of human beings and were both willing and able to interact with them either directly (through epiphanies, dreams, and oracles) or more indirectly through omens and signs.Footnote ⁶ The most radical form of the ontological turn would take this a step further and posit that in the world of the ancient Greeks their various gods and other supernatural beings actually existed. By contrast, the traditional anthropological approach to cultural difference has been to speak of different worldviews, all of which share the same underlying reality. At this point it is worth stressing that even if that traditional approach is actually the correct one, it is still fundamentally necessary to take seriously the ontologies of other cultures as viable ways of experiencing their worlds.Footnote ⁷

In their most recent treatment of the subject the anthropologists Martin Holbraad and Morten Pederson have significantly modified the radical claims mentioned above, asserting that the ontological turn in anthropology is ‘decidedly not concerned with the “really real” nature of the world or any similar metaphysical quest. Rather, it is a methodological project that poses ontological questions to solve epistemological problems’.Footnote ⁸ To put it simply, they argue that anthropologists need to adjust their analytical categories and concepts in order more accurately and appropriately to account for their ethnographic data and its underlying ontological assumptions. Their assertion that the ontological turn has never been about metaphysical claims may seem somewhat disingenuous, given their own previous scholarship.Footnote ⁹ Nevertheless, in this discussion I accept their revised position that taking different worldviews/lifeworlds seriously does not necessarily entail the conclusion that nature is itself mutable.

This essay pursues an ontological understanding of consultations at Dodona by employing the second wave of ontological theory as advocated by Holbraad and Pedersen. My premise is that if we are to understand a divinatory consultation as the Greeks themselves did, then we need to put aside our own Western post-Enlightenment (largely secular) ontological assumptions and view the world through the ontological assumptions of the Greeks themselves.Footnote ¹⁰ This is a much more radical suggestion than the traditional injunction of putting on the cultural filters of the ancient Greeks, in as much as that step is then invariably followed by an act of cultural translation.Footnote ¹¹ That is, I wish to sidestep the translation of their cultural notions into our own Western Euro-American explanatory terms; for most translations of this kind are invariably mistranslations, since the terms involved are incommensurable. In effect, I am suggesting that the practice of divination should be both analyzed in emic terms and then described in those terms as well, rather than being redescribed in our own terms.

Consulting the Gods at Dodona

The best case study for understanding Greco-Roman divination in this way may well be Dodona with its vast corpus of surviving questions. So far, over 4,000 oracular inscriptions, inscribed on some 1550 lead tablets called lamellae, have been published. Some of these lamellae contain answers as well as questions.Footnote ¹² The longstanding debate about the nature of Delphic verse responses that are preserved in literary sources will probably never be settled; but even if we cannot know for certain how the lamellae were used at Dodona, we nevertheless have objects to investigate, which are both artifacts of the consultation and texts contemporary with it.Footnote ¹³ According to the most common reconstruction, the lamellae were written either by the consultants themselves or by someone acting on their behalf. The lamellae would then be handed over to some official of the shrine or to one of the priestesses. Either before or after the conclusion of the consultation, they would have been rolled and folded, and some, or perhaps all, of them would have been left in the temple as a votive. As things inscribed with texts they participated in a network that linked gods (Zeus and his consort Dione), one or more priestesses and possibly priests, a human consultant, and perhaps other actors (such as scribes) as well.

Nonetheless, a caveat is in order over and beyond our uncertainties about the mechanics of the consultation and the uses of the lamellae. The individuals who chose to consult oracles occupied a particular standpoint in their society. Others may have been less likely to consult seers or oracles for a variety of reasons ranging from skepticism to outright rejection of their truth claims. The lamellae represent the particular ontology and belief system of one (and an undoubtedly very large) set of situated observers – those who both believed in and felt the need to consult oracles. For my own part, I have no doubt that the number of agnostics and atheists in classical Greece, primarily to be found among the sophists and their elite students, was relatively small.Footnote ¹⁴ After all, our main eyewitness for the whole range of Greek divinatory practices is Xenophon, a member of the international elite who was a follower of Socrates and perhaps a student of Prodicus.Footnote ¹⁵ However that may be, the situated knowledge of the skeptics and doubters, whatever their actual number, would have been very different from that of the many thousands of consultants at Dodona. By ‘situated knowledge’ I mean the proposition that all forms of knowledge are affected by the specific historical, cultural, linguistic and value contexts of knowing persons and reflect their social identities and social locations.Footnote ¹⁶ As the anthropologist Sherry Ortner has observed in relation to her own intellectual development, by the end of the twentieth century anthropologists had begun to think differently about ‘cultures’, regarding them as ‘more disjunctive, contradictory, and inconsistent’ than she had been taught.Footnote ¹⁷

Ontology, needless to say, is not the only theoretical lens at our disposal, even if it is one of the newest. Functionalist, symbolic and performative perspectives all have value in revealing what is at stake and at play in divinatory rituals. But they are etic, rather than emic perspectives. As Martin Holbraad has astutely expressed the situation:

The crucial point is that the Greeks, even if their culture was not completely homogenous (as no culture ever is), had a different understanding of reality, of what constituted the ‘really real’, than our own. And the methodological problem is the way that their ontological assumptions and categories have been mistranslated into modern secular ones. Agnosticism, for instance, has been re-described as atheism and belief as ritual practice.

The problem, however, with giving a purely emic account is its entanglement with cultural relativism as a way of coping with cultural difference. One can imagine this kind of mindset, ‘How quaint – the Greeks believed that they were communicating with their gods – I respect their belief, but I know that it’s wrong because there weren’t any gods there to communicate with. What they were doing, whether they knew it or not, was this – resolving indecision, reaching consensus, negotiating a solution through performance, and so on.’Footnote ¹⁹ A better way to approach cultural difference is through an ontological perspective which takes seriously that the Greeks had both a culture and an ontology that was different from our own. So by putting both etic and emic accounts within an ontological framework I hope to reach an understanding of a consultation at Dodona that would be consistent with the world that the Greeks actually inhabited rather than with the one that most modern scholars do.

Let us start with a very basic question. Why would a person invest their time and money in order to consult the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, or indeed other oracle centers, such as Delphi? Plutarch (Mor. 386c) implies that inquirers at Delphi typically asked ‘if they shall be victorious, if they shall marry, if it is advantageous for them to sail, to farm, to go abroad’. This type and range of question are confirmed by the lamellae from Dodona. Inquirers seek answers to matters that affect their personal lives, including marriage and children, health and well-being, business dealings and the manumission of slaves, employment and military service, theft and adultery, forthcoming court cases and athletic contests.Footnote ²⁰ Twentieth-century functionalist anthropology was not wrong to insist that when a person made a consultation it was to resolve such dilemmas. In his Memorabilia, Xenophon attempts to show that Socrates’ religious attitudes and practices were both traditional and completely normative by having him say (4.3.12): ‘In so far as we are unable to foresee what is advantageous for the future, the gods themselves work with us, indicating through divination to those who consult them what is going to happen and teaching them how to obtain the best results.’

Where modern scholarship, both anthropological and in the disciplines of Classics and ancient history, has encountered difficulty is in explaining who was responsible for giving the requested advice and how the answers were delivered. It is precisely here where ancient Greek and modern ontologies, emic and etic understandings respectively, become incompatible. If you were able to interrogate a Greek standing in line at Delphi or Dodona for an explanation of how their question was going to be answered, you would be told that a god was going to deliver it. And if you asked them how they knew that, they could quote a number of texts, most famously perhaps the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo (287–293), where Apollo says that he intends to establish an oracular center where he will give ‘unerring advice’ to all who consult it. If pressed further, they might say that this is also what they were told by their parents, and was common knowledge. And finally, if asked if they really believed this, you might get a blank stare.

Such things were not a matter of high intensity creedal belief, as they might be for a Christian living within a religious marketplace, but were rather a matter of common knowledge and, most importantly perhaps, of direct experience.Footnote ²¹ As Bruno Latour has argued in his essay, ‘“Thou Shalt not Freeze Frame” or how not to misunderstand the science and religion debate’, Christianity is not at all about belief (‘Belief is simply immaterial for any religious speech-act’: p. 122), but about experience (in the form of immanence rather than transcendence).Footnote ²² At Delphi the priestess known as the Pythia served as the mouthpiece of the god Apollo. The Greeks who actually consulted her, if not the modern scholars who merely rationalize the entire procedure, had no doubt that Apollo possessed her and spoke directly through her; the voice was hers, but the words were his.Footnote ²³ And whoever put the following question to the oracle at Dodona in the early fifth century BCE must have been certain that the gods would not only give him an answer but could even know his thoughts: ‘By praying to which of the gods would he accomplish what he has in mind’ (tini ka theōn euxamenos praxai ha nooi eche;).Footnote ²⁴ As I have argued before, it was in the context of the divinatory ritual that the real presence of the divine was commonly to be experienced by the Greeks. Footnote ²⁵

Divinatory Truth as Transformative

All of this, however, raises the thorny question of what kind of truth-claims Greek divination was predicated upon. As Martin Holbraad has shown in his paradigm shifting study of Ifa Divination practiced in Cuba:Footnote ²⁶

Likewise, the truth that Greek oracles pronounce may strike us as irrational or primitive because it is a nonrepresentational truth insofar as it cannot be doubted or falsified. This is a different kind of truth from normative common-sense notions of truth because its source, the god Zeus, knows all things. His declarations, whether delivered at Dodona by himself, or at Delphi through this son Apollo, are both true and indubitable.Footnote ²⁷ The Greeks conceived of oracular truth as not only being indubitable but also as true for all time. This conception is well illustrated by an episode recorded by Plutarch in Nicias (13.1). Before the Sicilian expedition of 415 BCE the oracle of Zeus Ammon at Siwah oasis delivered an oracle that ‘The Athenians shall capture all the Syracusans’. Plutarch later comments (Nicias 14.6) that the seers serving the Athenian forces were distressed by the possibility that this prophecy was accomplished when the Athenians captured a Syracusan ship conveying tablets recording the complete list of Syracusan citizens; but Plutarch then adds that it was also said that the oracle was fulfilled later (353 BCE) when Kallipos, an Athenian, killed Dion and took possession of Syracuse. The interesting point is the normative belief that the fulfillment of oracles was inevitable, either in the short term or even many decades later.

But we may go even further and say that the oracles delivered by Zeus are not just predicative: they are also simultaneously transformative, insofar as they irrevocably change the life circumstances of the consultants who receive them. They are a special transformative kind of truth that is fundamentally different from most of the truth-claims uttered by mortals.Footnote ²⁸ Given that the Greeks considered Zeus and Apollo’s verdicts to be indubitably true, if it turned out otherwise, one of the main pillars of their ontology would collapse.Footnote ²⁹ This is not to say that no Greek consultant ever expressed doubts – but those doubts centered on the competence and honesty of freelance seers and on the authenticity of specific oracles. General statements of disbelief are exceedingly rare, and in literary texts quickly and decisively disproved.Footnote ³⁰ As mentioned above, Bruno Latour has suggested that in Christianity religious speech-acts are not really about belief but rather about transformative experience; they are not so much informational as transformational.Footnote ³¹

Despite Latour’s protestations against extending this insight to other religious traditions, it does seem relevant to how the Greeks interacted with and communicated with their gods. In most religious systems objects play an important role in activating the experience of immanence, and for the Greeks this role was played most obviously to us by statues, images on vases and relief sculptures, but also undoubtedly by the lamellae themselves. They are not simply records of a consultation, to be taken home or hung in the sanctuary. They are also the consultation’s embodiment. To touch a lamella, to read it or hear it read, is to experience divinity. And even the most banal of answers are not merely or simply informational. They are also transformative. Or, as Holbraad has argued in his ground-breaking work on Ifa divination, they change the very nature of reality. Perhaps the views of Latour and Holbraad, although dealing with different religious traditions, converge in an unexpected way. Hearing the words of the Priestess at Dodona as she gives the god’s response, or (re-)reading the response on the tablet, is transformative in that it unalterably and unquestioningly alters the course of one’s life.

Such must have been the experience of an inquirer named Arizelos when, sometime in the fourth century BCE, he asked what occupation he should undertake: no alternatives are given and the question is essentially open-ended:Footnote ³²

The existence of essentially open-ended questions belies the common modern assumption that questions were always carefully formulated so as to restrict the range of possible responses. To be sure, they often were, but that does not foreclose the possibility that some consultants had so much confidence in the gods that they were willing to let their lives be utterly transformed in a way that the gods judged best.

Epilytos also was willing to let the gods transform his life, as we know from a question that he posed in the middle of the fourth century BCE:Footnote ³³

The complexity of Epilytos’ question is not unparalleled. Isodemos also poses a three-part question, dealing with marriage, children and citizenship (fourth–third century BCE).Footnote ³⁵

Epilytos and to a slightly lesser extent Isodemos were amazingly brazen in the number of questions they posed at the same time. Epilytos, in particular, was definitely taking a risk that the whole course of his life might be altered: for instance, he might have gone home to a new wife and new profession. The latter is not as unlikely as it may sound.Footnote ³⁶ These three Greeks (Arizelos, Epilytos and Isodemos) were willing to let the gods, speaking through the medium of their oracle, transform their lives. Zeus is not giving advice here – he is being asked what they should do, and they were willing to be transformed by an answer that was not subject to falsification or doubt.

The How and Why of Divine Communication

Although modern anthropological studies have revealed that the divinatory ritual has consequences that are social, political and psychological,Footnote ³⁷ it is essential not to conflate or confuse the by-products with its fundamental purpose.Footnote ³⁸ First and foremost, divination is a system of communication that is intended to expand the range of ordinary human knowledge.Footnote ³⁹ But, like other religious practices, divination also has various direct and indirect consequences that impact individual consultants in profound ways – such as alleviating anxiety, reducing uncertainty, managing risk and resolving indecision. These are, in effect, divination’s secondary functions. The same can be said of Greek religion generally – that the purpose of all of its rituals and practices was communicative in that they were the means whereby communities and individuals attempted to seek advice from the gods, win their support and favor, establish reciprocal relationships and even to gain their friendship.Footnote ⁴⁰

Classical scholars understand Delphic prophecy through the lens of a modern Western ontology, not least of all in their sureness that the Pythia herself, being an uneducated woman, could not have generated spontaneous verse oracles in hexameter verse (the verse of Homeric epic), even though it is not especially difficult to do so and despite comparable evidence from contemporary non-Western cultures.Footnote ⁴¹ The same problem holds for Dodona, and some scholars have gone so far as to substitute ‘priests’ for ‘priestesses’ in their discussions, even though only Homer and Pindar mention a male priesthood (the Selloi).Footnote ⁴² All other sources refer to one or more priestesses. Herodotus tells us that the priestesses at Dodona expressed to him their own speculations about the origins of the gods and were well informed about the mythical origins of Dodona.Footnote ⁴³ He clearly sees them as the local authorities, he names them and he implies that any other officiants at the site had positions of lesser importance and prestige: ‘The priestesses of Dodona said these things, of whom the oldest was Promeneia, the next Timarete, and the youngest Nicandra. And the other Dodoneans who are involved with the temple agree with them.’

According to Plato in the Phaedrus, both the Delphic priestess and the priestesses at Dodona prophesied in a state of altered consciousness (which he calls mania), and were practitioners of ‘inspired prophecy’ (mantikē entheos).Footnote ⁴⁴ Euripides similarly links the Pythias at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona in a fragment of his lost play Melanippe, but without specifically mentioning ecstatic possession by a god. Melanippe asserts that women are better than men for many reasons, including their essential role in worshipping the gods: ‘In Phoebus’ halls women proclaim (prophēteuousi) Apollo’s will; and at the holy seat of Dodona, beside the sacred oak, womankind conveys (poreuei) the will of Zeus to all Greeks who wish to know it.’Footnote ⁴⁵

Rather than dismissing these emic accounts out of hand, it is methodologically preferable to work from the reasonable assumption that, as in other cultures, more than one method of divination might be employed simultaneously both at the same shrine and even by the same person.Footnote ⁴⁶ At Dodona in particular, the varied testimony of our sources strongly indicates that different divinatory techniques may have been in use either concurrently or in conjunction. Sarah Iles Johnston plausibly reconstructs how the priestesses at Dodona might listen to and interpret the sounds made by doves, ringing cauldrons, rustling leaves or a murmuring spring, while simultaneously being in an altered state of consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, there are cultures in which a diviner will both become possessed and at the same time practice an empirical form of divination such as ornithomancy (observing the flight of birds) or cleromancy (drawing lots).Footnote ⁴⁸

There is, in fact, an abundance of evidence, especially from literary sources, but also from the lamellae, that the priestesses at Dodona sometimes gave fully articulated answers.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 367 BCE the Spartans won a battle against the Arcadians that came to be known as the Tearless Battle, because not a single Spartan was killed. Diodorus, undoubtedly drawing on the fourth-century BCE historian Ephorus of Cyme, claims that this had been foretold by the priestesses at Dodona: ‘The Priestesses at Dodona proclaimed to the Spartans that this war would be tearless.’Footnote ⁵⁰

Xenophon does not name the battle in his Hellenica, nor does he report any oracle in connection with it.Footnote ⁵¹ For Parke this was sufficient reason for rejecting the historicity of the oracle and postulating that it was later invented in the form in which Ephorus recorded it.Footnote ⁵² Even leaving aside the implicit, and unproved, assumption that Ephorus was not a very careful researcher, no scholar alive today would reject as unhistorical all of the things that Xenophon does not tell us that are mentioned in other sources.Footnote ⁵³ Yet Parke’s full explanation, although written in 1967, reveals the still dominant way in which scholars erase the evidence for verbal responses: ‘Of course, it would be possible to argue that the oracle itself was an invention, particularly as the method of divination used at Dodona did not lend itself readily to these verbal details in the responses.’Footnote ⁵⁴ The circularity of the reasoning is transparent – if one dismisses all of the evidence for ‘verbal details’ both in the literary testimonies and in the preserved lamellae, then of course this is no evidence for them.

Although the evidence is late, it seems that before their invasion of Sicily in 415 BCE the Athenians consulted three different oracles: the oracle of Zeus Ammon at Siwah oasis in Libya,Footnote ⁵⁵ the oracle of Zeus at DodonaFootnote ⁵⁶ and the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.Footnote ⁵⁷ Pausanias reports the answer from Dodona as follows:

The fact that Thucydides does not mention these consultations is hardly an objection to accepting their authenticity. The luminous historian shows a very limited interest in oracular responses, which is not to say that he never reports them. The important thing is that his silence, as also with Xenophon’s, can never be used to prove that something did not take place, as the debate over the existence of the Peace of Callias all too well illustrates.

Finally, it would be hard to justify a total rejection of the testimony of Demosthenes, who in three of his speeches cites oracles from Dodona.Footnote ⁵⁸ To take just one of these, in his speech Against Meidias of 347/6 BCE, Demosthenes quotes two oracles from Delphi and two from Dodona, and these texts are included in our manuscripts. Their authenticity as genuine oracles has been much debated, but the first of the two Dodona oracles has every appearance of being an actual answer (as opposed to being a later pastiche or outright invention):

This oracle, it must be admitted, is irrelevant to Demosthenes’ case that Meidias had committed impiety by assaulting him when he was a choregos (‘chorus-producer’) at the Greater Dionysia, except insofar as it reinforces the general point that it is essential to perform festivals in the proper way in order to avoid angering the gods.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Athenians failed to send a sacrifice and sacred embassy to a Dodonian festival at the appropriate time and now they have to make amends. There is no reason at all to doubt the genuineness of this particular oracle either on philological grounds or on the basis of its content: ‘The deities, sacrificial animals, and dedication all suit a genuine occasion and oracle.’Footnote ⁶⁰ If one follows the methodology of judging each of the documents (legal or religious) cited in the Attic orators on its own merits, then there is absolutely no rational reason for dismissing this one as a much later insertion.Footnote ⁶¹ But even if one took the extreme position that all of the oracles quoted in the texts of Demosthenes’ speeches are later ‘forgeries’,Footnote ⁶² that still leaves us with the fact that Demosthenes quoted fully articulated oracles in his speeches and that must entail the further fact that he expected his audience to accept the existence of such oracles.

Nevertheless, most scholars reject the historicity of these and other prose and verse responses from Dodona that are quoted in literary texts, and they do this despite the fact that a wide range of Greek and Roman writers take their authenticity for granted. The way that Parke rationalizes the evidence is typical of the standard modern approach to the literary evidence, which rejects as literary fiction or explains away as subsequent embellishment anything that seems impossible in terms of a Western secular ontology. This approach is nothing less than an act of cultural mistranslation, whose only purpose is to make explicable in modern terms that which seems inexplicable in its own terms. Reality as experienced by the Greeks was not the same as that experienced by us, no matter how absolutely certain one is that the secular, post-Enlightenment intelligentsia knows better than the subjects of their inquiry, whether those subjects be ancient Greeks or the members of contemporary traditional societies and religious groups.

The dominant position in modern scholarship is that at Dodona, as at Delphi, the vast majority of questions and answers took a very simple form. The consultant posed his question in this way: ‘Would it better and more profitable for me to do x’, or ‘which god or gods should I sacrifice to?’ We do have examples of questions put in this form. Nonetheless, this scenario allows the comfortable and rational conclusion that most answers were correspondingly in the form of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or very occasionally of a ‘do x or y’, or of a list of deities to whom one should sacrifice, all of which could potentially have been answered by the priestess drawing one or more lots. Additionally, it has been argued that a system of lottery was employed in which the consultant sometimes submitted two tablets containing alternatives.Footnote ⁶³ Yet, it should be noted, the single literary reference to the use of lots at Dodona does not conform to these standard modern reconstructions of the procedure.

According to the fourth-century BCE Greek historian Kallisthenes of Olynthos (as paraphrased by Cicero), when the Spartans were enquiring ‘about victory’ before the battle of Leuktra in 371 BCE, the Spartan ambassadors themselves ‘set up the vessel containing the lots’ (legatique vas illud, in quo inerant sortes, collocavissent) and when a pet monkey overturned it, ‘the priestess who is in charge of the oracle said that the Spartans should think about safety, not about victory’ (sacerdos dixisse dicitur de salute Lacedaemoniis esse, non de victoria cogitandum).Footnote ⁶⁴ Even in our single extant description of how a lottery system may have worked, the priestess, however exceptionally, articulates the answer on her own.

Now most oracular responses at both Dodona and Delphi were probably fairly prosaic (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word). Nonetheless, a few of the handful of recorded answers at Dodona give very specific answers to specific questions. There is no ambiguity or wiggle room in these answers. They close down options rather than letting the questioner negotiate a range of possible actions. Here are two examples. The first (middle of the fourth century BCE) is inscribed:Footnote ⁶⁵

Side A:

Side B:

The single word ‘sea’ would certainly have been a satisfactory answer, and perhaps the one that Lysias was hoping for. But the god has gone further and directed that Lysias do nothing by land. Considering how risky it was to ‘take a share of a ship’, especially for purposes of sea-borne trade, this is far from being a safe or conservative injunction. One wonders if Lysias had contemplated the possibility that he could be given so restrictive a response, one that effectively eliminated the possibility of economic diversification.

My second example (first quarter of fourth century) is similar to this one.Footnote ⁶⁶

Side A:

Side B:

Here again, the answer is restricted, but this time to the safer option, since just as commerce by sea was much riskier than that by land, so too naval warfare was more dangerous than a land campaign. In addition, there was the very real danger that if you died at sea your corpse might not be retrieved for a proper burial. It is noteworthy that the questioner assumes that Zeus and Dione do not need to be told his name or the circumstances of any particular military campaign that he may be contemplating. The gods simply know these things and there is no presumption at all that such information might also be useful to the priestesses who were involved in the consultation.

There is something especially striking, and so far unprecedented, about this particular response. The use of the Attic-Ionian form of the dative (gēi) and of the verb (skethe), which is rare in prose but frequent in Homer, lends it an epic flavor and tone.Footnote ⁶⁷ This may seem surprising if viewed strictly in the context of the other tablets, but it is less so in the context of the literary tradition (Pausanias 10.12.10, for instance) and of Herodotus’ depiction of the priestesses as highly educated individuals.Footnote ⁶⁸ In any case, even if no other example of Homeric or poetic language is ever found on a lamella, that is not a reason for reinterpreting the status of this one (DVC 108B) as an answer.Footnote ⁶⁹ The gods, as well as the inspired priestesses who communicated the gods’ answers, did not follow some sort of rule book dictated by modern scholars. The gods could, and indeed did, respond as they wished. And inspired seers, as we know from well-documented Tibetan examples, sometimes speak in highly poetic language and sometimes not.Footnote ⁷⁰ We have no warrant to deprive Zeus and Dione, nor the cult personnel, of their agency.

Gods as Objects in an Object-Oriented Ontology

Of course, someone might object that for the ontological model to work, the Greek gods needed to really exist. Otherwise, no matter how cleverly Holbraad and Pederson nuance the claims that they and others had previously made about the existence of alternative realities, we are right back where we started, with priestesses and priests formulating the recorded responses and being fully in charge of the disposition of lots. Agency, therefore, is still in their hands, as well as in the hands of chance depending on how one reconstructs the use of lots.

The vast majority of modern scholars have written the gods out of the script in their efforts to reconstruct how an oracle consultation ‘really worked’.Footnote ⁷¹ Taking the gods out of the script, denying them any agency in the divinatory ritual, has serious consequences for how the ancient evidence is interpreted: spontaneous verse oracles are generally considered to be ontologically impossible; a system of lots has been imposed upon the Pythia, in the absence of evidence;Footnote ⁷² and, as noted earlier, binary lots have been read into the lamellae where the Greek does not necessary carry this meaning. What we are then left with is a thoroughly etic reconstruction that takes no account of emic explanations – an account that is written by and for ourselves, composed from the high perch of our own supposedly value-free, objectively valid and scientifically more advanced understanding of the ‘really real’. That is how we reach the truth, or is it? By transferring agency from the gods to the calculations of religious personnel and the randomness of the lot, don’t we moderns run the risk of radically misunderstanding the actual lived experience of the subjects of our inquiry, thereby transforming the ethnographic enterprise into a flagrant act of cultural mistranslation?Footnote ⁷³

In any case, whether the Greek gods were real or not is surely the wrong question to ask, and not just because it is unanswerable.Footnote ⁷⁴ I want to stress that I am not making the strong ontological claim that the Greek gods ‘really’ existed, only the weaker claim that the Greeks interacted with them, experienced them visually and aurally, and were influenced by them as if they did. Conversely, I cannot assert categorically that the Greek gods were not really there, in one form or another.Footnote ⁷⁵ Cognitive science can only tell us which parts of the brain are activated during a ‘spiritual’ experience – it cannot tell us that the brain in and of itself is the cause of that experience.Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, the very same neuroscientific data can be used to argue both for and against the existence of god.Footnote ⁷⁷ But there is something of which I am more certain. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch has stressed the importance of the anthropologist being a participant observer and of providing an ethnographic account of the conceptualization of a society that makes sense to one’s native informants.Footnote ⁷⁸ This essay has been an attempt to write an account that an ancient Greek consultant at Dodona would have understood, one that would, in her or his understanding of reality, make ‘sense’.

If we wish to gain real insight into how Greek consultants might have experienced a consultation at Dodona, there needs to be an active role for the gods. In terms of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory the assemblages would have consisted of the interaction of consultants, priestesses, gods (Zeus and Dione) and lamellae. What we then have at Dodona is a human/nonhuman hybrid relational network consisting of things, people and supernatural beings. The things are lamellae, the sacred oak tree, cauldrons, urn; the mortals are inquirers, priestesses and their various assistants; and the supernatural beings are the gods Zeus and Dione. All of these participants, human and nonhuman alike, exert agency. Agency is not the sole product of human intentions but rather the product of this particular network of relations – agency is effectuated when the various relational elements interact with each other.Footnote ⁷⁹ The gods cannot be left out of this network or given minor roles as mere social constructions or figures of the imagination. Rather, in any given divinatory session, consultant, lamella, god(s) and priestess(es) all share agency as objects. We need to steel ourselves to think in terms of an object-oriented ontology, one that postulates that the world is composed not of ‘subjects on one hand and noumenal objects on the other, but rather of nothing but objects, animate and inanimate, human and non-human, all of which have to be taken as agents’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Greek gods, therefore, must be taken seriously as objects that are equivalent to all other objects in their ability to both affect and be affected by those other objects, human and otherwise, that they becomes entwined with.Footnote ⁸¹

Needless to say, there was no Greek articulation of ‘network theory’. Nonetheless, the application of higher order concepts can reveal relationships that are not consciously articulated by people themselves. Here especially an ethnographic parallel can help to illustrate this point, and a particularly pertinent one can be found in Navaho religion. The Navaho are the largest Native American tribe in the United States, with more than 400,000 enrolled members, many of whom live on their reservation (officially called the Navaho Nation).Footnote ⁸²

The contemporary Navaho medicine man (hatałii, or ‘Singer’) Perry Robinson describes the casual relationships between gods, medicine man and patient in Navaho ceremonials, in terms of what can fairly be called a human/nonhuman hybrid relational network consisting of things, people and supernatural beings.Footnote ⁸³ During Navaho healing ceremonies, such as the Nightway Chant (Yei’ Bi’ Chei) that takes place over nine consecutive nights, the patient, medicine man and Holy People (Diyan Diné, the Navaho Gods), all have to cooperate and fulfill their roles if healing is to take place.Footnote ⁸⁴ The patient must have positive thoughts and the desire to be healed; the medicine man conducts the ceremony, sings the songs and offers the prayers that summon the Holy People to the ceremony; the sandpainting (on the floor of the hogan in which the curing takes place)Footnote ⁸⁵ outlines the origin story of the ceremony, prescribes the steps to be taken, and holds the power to help the patient; and the Holy People effect the cure if they are satisfied that the entire ceremony has been conducted in precisely the correct way and that all in attendance are in the right frame of mind.

So too in ancient Greek culture, religious specialists (priests, priestesses, seers) need to pray using the correct words and conduct sacrifices in the prescribed ways; worshippers need to provide unblemished, suitable and pleasing gifts and sacrificial animals; and the gods need to be both pleased with and willing to accept the gifts and sacrifices and consequently to grant whatever request was being made (such as for advice, healing, health, children, a good harvest, success in war and so on). The effectiveness of divine-human-material networks is not automatic either in Navaho or Greek society. In Book 2 of the Iliad (402–420), Agamemnon sacrifices a bull to Zeus, with the prayer that Troy be captured before the setting of the sun. Zeus accepts the sacrifice, but rather than granting the prayer’s request for an immediate victory, he increased the toils of the Greeks.

Latour, for his part, explicitly employs network theory to explain relationships that he takes seriously as including the agency of supernatural beings. His own ontological commitments are revealed when he imagines a scenario that all too well captures the current methods of most scholars of ancient religions:Footnote ⁸⁶

Critical scholars, in other words, know that this is not what is really going on for the seemingly simple reason that it is ontologically impossible to be ‘called by the Virgin Mary’. ‘Impossible’ for them perhaps, but not for the person who believes in the power and presence of supernatural beings.

In the universe inhabited by the Greeks, and many other cultures past and present, the gods made themselves present to mortals in many different ways – oracles, dreams, portents and even, if more rarely, through epiphanies. The records of these manifestations still exist – through inscriptions, votive reliefs and literary texts. When a pilgrim, tablet in hand, read his question aloud at Dodona, he stood in the presence of supernatural powers. Those powers could read his mind, they knew his situation and they were able to enact a transformation in the circumstances of a human life through their response. That, at least, is how a Greek would have explained it to an anthropologist from the future.