Dodona is among the best-known Greek oracles, with thousands of lead lamellae relating the questions asked to Zeus. But understanding how they were used, relying on epigraphy, with the literary tradition and its usual stereotypes about oracles, proves impossible. Literary sources emphasise the ambiguity of questions and answers, while the engraved questions, ignored by the literary tradition, are obviously formulated to be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’. From this basis, this essay explores when these questions (and the answers that we do not possess) were written and used in some ritual way(s). This could have been at the beginning or the end of the consultation, or somewhere in between. We do not know if the texts transpose the question asked orally verbatim, nor if all the consultants were following a strict procedure. Most of the questions are too short to be understood by the officials, and the consultation was partly if not fully oral. Some detours about quasi-identical questions, abecedaries and lot oracles clarify this picture, but this enquiry highlights our ignorance about the procedure and warns against simplistic interpretations drawn from incomplete documentation.

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.