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The Delphic Oracle: Belief and Behaviour in Ancient Greece—and Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

C. R. Whittaker
C. R. Whittaker
Affiliation:
University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Salisbury, S. Rhodesia
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Extract

Until comparatively recently writers on religion were absorbed by questions concerning the origins of religious beliefs and practices. They endowed primitive man with a kind of rational logicality in his belief, or, like Frazer, they saw his religious practices as simply the application of erroneous reasoning. The modern trend is to try to view the religious or cultural institution as an essential part of society, existing because of the needs of that society. This is the theme, for instance, of Malinowski when he says that “religion is not born out of speculation or reflection, still less out of illusion or misapprehension, but rather out of the real tragedies of human life, out of the conflict between human plans and realities.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 1965 , pp. 21 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1965

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References

1 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., Taboo (1939), pp. 13–14Google Scholar.

2 Malinowski, B., “Culture”, Encyclopaedia of the Soc. Sciences, IV (1931), 641Google Scholar, but recorded in Lessa, W. A. and Vogt, E. Z., Reader in Comparative Religion (1958)Google Scholar, which I have found most useful as a convenient means of reference throughout this paper.

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ἀρχαί τε, πληροῦντές τε βουλευτήρια,

ίδίᾳ θ᾽ ὅσοι θεοῦ χρημάτων ἐϕέστασαν,

ϕρουρὰν ἐτάξαντ᾽ ἐν περιστύλοις δόμοις.

22 Euripides, Andromache, 1088–89 uses the phrase λαὸς οἰκήτωρ θεοῦ, which might mean the inhabitants of the precincts only, since it seems to be contrasted with the πόλις later on.

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24 Plato, Timaeus, 71E-72B, gives the full context.

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26 DO II, p. xxiii.

26a E.g., Plutarch, 3.386C; see DO I, ch. 9, for fuller references.

27 DO II, p. xxvi.

28 IG II2, 204; Amandry, op. cit., p. 245, no. xxi.

29 Xenophon, Anabasis, 3.1.5–7.

30 DO I, p. 18.

31 Amandry, op. cit., ch. 6.

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33 DO I, p. 19, quotes one example of another type of answer.

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93 Evans-Pritchard, op. cit., p. 338.

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95 Since completing this paper, I have had brought to my notice by the editor of this journal the article by Nock, A. D., “Religious attitudes of the ancient Greeks,” Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc. 85 (1942), 472–82.Google Scholar Nock's approach to the Delphic problem was much the same as mine, though the material we use differs. Nock is chiefly concerned to show what kind of liberal thought could embrace scepticism, whereas I have set out to show that there was no incentive to agnosticism in classical Greek society.