This chapter investigates instances of personal divination in the ancient Greek world. This includes the use of oracles, omens, forms of technical divination and the occurrence of prophetic dreams in personal matters that do not articulate the concerns of the polis. The chapter explores what personal issues warranted a consultation of the gods, as well as the scope and limits for individuals to use the divinatory system to their advantage. The chapter shows that consultation with the gods about questions of personal concern (about health, travel and questions of everyday life) was not merely available to the upper classes and those in power, but conducted by everyday people, including women, metics and slaves. Throughout, the chapter carefully distinguishes between what we know about actual personal oracle consultations on the one hand, and their representation in works of literature on the other. At the same time, the chapter presents several themes that run through different kinds of evidence and explores what they reveal about the use and abuse of divine knowledge (and the actions it is made to sanction) in the ancient Greek world.

An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

This chapter targets the local horizon of sanctuaries whose scope and spheres of influence transcended the local. Variously labelled as ‘regional’ or ‘Panhellenic’ sanctuaries, Funke’s contribution challenges the implicit dichotomy between these descriptors and the local. He begins with the observation that religious conduct in the polis was always subject to diverse spatial dynamics, articulated, for instance, in the different reach of urban and liminal cult sites. A similar spatial and functional diversification is pitched for Panhellenic sites. Rather than being elusive or purely notional, Panhellenic perspectives manifested themselves in the evocation of Greek gods and in cult practices that were considered genuinely Hellenic in nature. As shared points of reference, Panhellenic commodities were not only commonly accepted by the Greeks but, in fact, were substantiated through hardwired regulations that assured availability to all.

This chapter targets the local horizon of sanctuaries whose scope and spheres of influence transcended the local. Variously labelled as ‘regional’ or ‘Panhellenic’ sanctuaries, Funke’s contribution challenges the implicit dichotomy between these descriptors and the local. He begins with the observation that religious conduct in the polis was always subject to diverse spatial dynamics, articulated, for instance, in the different reach of urban and liminal cult sites. A similar spatial and functional diversification is pitched for Panhellenic sites. Rather than being elusive or purely notional, Panhellenic perspectives manifested themselves in the evocation of Greek gods and in cult practices that were considered genuinely Hellenic in nature. As shared points of reference, Panhellenic commodities were not only commonly accepted by the Greeks but, in fact, were substantiated through hardwired regulations that assured availability to all.

This essay is an attempt to test against the Greek evidence the broad assumption of most students of divination that, other things being equal, oracles and diviners want to give clients good news, to tell them what they want to hear or, if not that, what they expect to hear, what they will accept as a reasonable, plausible answer for a god or a god’s intermediary to give. Two related issues that obviously arise are those of how the oracle/diviner could know the client’s wishes and how responsive they could be even where those wishes were known, particularly now that we know that a technique comparable to the ticket oracles of Egypt, requiring a randomly chosen yes/no answer, was one method used at Dodona. Conventions governing the kinds of questions that could be asked and the terms in which they were framed emerge as crucially important. An appendix discusses ‘Two Functions of Divination: Advice and Prediction’. Advice relating to a decision was clearly what was sought from oracles and diviners throughout the Classical and Hellenistic periods, but a shift towards prediction can perhaps be observed in later antiquity.