Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Public Sphere 215
An oracular response did not remove the responsibility of decision
making from the petitioner, as the following anecdote told by
Herodotos (1.53) clearly indicates. When Kroisos, king of Lydia,
consulted Delphi about the advisability of declaring war on the
neighboring kingdom of Persia, he was informed that, if he did so,
he would destroy a large empire. Emboldened by this response,
Kroisos duly declared war on Persia and fulfilled the prophecy—by
destroying his own empire. What this cautionary tale reveals is that
Delphi was not a place to get a quick fix on life’s problems. On the
contrary, the value of its utterances was nil if the petitioner did not
inform them with a proper sense of his own limitations. Not for
nothing was the injunction “Know yourself” engraved on the sanctuary
wall.
Other means of foretelling the future included examining the
entrails of sacrificial victims, observing the flights of birds, and
interpreting the significance of dreams. Natural phenomena such
as eclipses and earthquakes were also thought to presage the future.
The reading of these signs was in the hands of itinerant seers, who
hired out their services to individuals as well as states. Seers played
a particularly important role on the battlefield, where they supervised
the sacrifices that preceded any decision to join or delay battle.
It was on the advice of a seer that the Athenian general Nikias took
the fatal decision to delay withdrawing his forces from Sicily after
an eclipse of the moon had taken place in 413 b.c.e. , thereby bringing
about the complete destruction of his army.
Breakaway Sects
Mainstream Greek religion offered a wide choice of deities from
which individuals were free to choose on the basis of a variety of criteria.
These included family tradition, social status, personal preference,
and last, but not least, ease of access to the deity’s shrine. In
addition to the worship of individual deities, there were cults that
demanded unwavering and exclusive devotion by their adherents.
Two such cults, as noted earlier, were Orphism and Pythagoreanism,
both of which rejected state religion and sought to establish
separate communities of worshipers. Neither Orphism nor Pythagoreanism
appealed to anything but a tiny fraction of the population,
however, and, as religious movements (if indeed they can be
so called), they hardly feature at all in the Classical or Hellenistic
Period.