Book contents
- Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World
- Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- General Introduction
- 1 Greek Divination as the Transformation of an Indo-European Process
- 2 On Divinatory Practices and la raison des signes in Classical Greece
- 3 Oracle and Client
- 4 Oracular Failure in Ancient Greek Culture
- 5 The Dynamism of Mouvance in the Pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle
- 6 Decentralising Delphi: Predictive Oracles, Local Knowledge and Social Memory
- 7 Oracular Tales before Historiography
- 8 Omens and Portents Foretelling Victory and Defeat: Ontological, Literary, and Cognitive Perspectives
- 9 The Use of Divination by Macedonian Kings
- 10 False Prophets and Fake Prophecies in Lucian
- 11 Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Oracular Tales before Historiography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2022
- Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World
- Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- General Introduction
- 1 Greek Divination as the Transformation of an Indo-European Process
- 2 On Divinatory Practices and la raison des signes in Classical Greece
- 3 Oracle and Client
- 4 Oracular Failure in Ancient Greek Culture
- 5 The Dynamism of Mouvance in the Pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle
- 6 Decentralising Delphi: Predictive Oracles, Local Knowledge and Social Memory
- 7 Oracular Tales before Historiography
- 8 Omens and Portents Foretelling Victory and Defeat: Ontological, Literary, and Cognitive Perspectives
- 9 The Use of Divination by Macedonian Kings
- 10 False Prophets and Fake Prophecies in Lucian
- 11 Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Against an earlier tendency to separate out the texts of oracles from the literary works that preserve them, recent scholarship on Herodotus has increasingly focused attention on the very tight way in which oracular responses are integrated into the narrative contexts that surround them. In order better to conceptualize such phenomena, scholars are increasingly employing the category of “oracular tales,” that is, stories in which (normally Delphic) oracles form an integral part of the narrative texture. The present contribution seeks to pursue this line of enquiry further in an attempt at determining what the use of oracular responses in metric form can tell us about the tradition of oral narrative that Herodotus’ Histories are based upon.
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- Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World , pp. 169 - 191Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023