The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

oth shared the same attitude towards the masses (Taylor 1949: 76). 94 Like Bloch and Latte,
she also sees the influence of Greek skepticism as the cause of the decay of divination into an
instrument of manipulation (Taylor 1949: 78).
A more limited use of the manipulation argument is offered by Bruce McBain who made a
study of prodigies in the republican period. He attaches special importance to the rituals
performed in response to the prodigies, the expiations. According to him divination was used
as an instrument in foreign policy: when an enemy threatened Rome from the North, that is
Etruria, then Etruscan divination experts were called to the senate to interpret the prodigies.
MacBain thinks that this served to strengthen the allegiance of Etruria to Rome (MacBain
1982: 60). It is thus a foreign policy 95 version of the political manipulation thesis expounded
by Taylor and others.
Drawing lots- chance and ritual
Another line of research is focused on sortition. Sortition was used as a form of public
divination, but has curiously been ignored in earlier research on Roman divination. 96 Since it
is a form of divination, it is necessary also to look at research on sortition.
Jaqueline Champeaux, whose work on Italian sortition oracles in general and the Fortuna
oracle in Praeneste in particular is immense, has an interesting observation on the ritual
nature of sortition. Contrary to previous treatments of the ritual element in Roman divination,
she does not consider it a mere sterile formalism of no consequence. She sees the chance
entailed in divination as the language of the gods, and continues: "dans les sorts s'unissent les
realisations du hasard et du destin" (Champeaux 1982: I, 434). According to her, the ritual
techniques employed are not just empty formalisms, but produce the chance element
necessary for sortition to "work" as the language of the gods.
Also working on sortition, but in relation to the public sphere in Rome, Roberta Stewart
touches on the problem of whether the Romans believed in their rituals. She thinks that the
Romans did take sortition seriously as a ritually circumscribed political procedure. This
signaled the patronage of Jupiter and was motivated by the wish to follow Roman political
94 She explicitly mentions Marx's dictum about religion as the opiate for the people on page 77. A more
explicit Marxist analysis in the same vein can be found in (Günther 1964).
95 Technically Etruria is not foreign in the period treated, but they were still to a certain extent perceived as
foreign by the Romans.
96 As an example I can mention the recent doctor phil. thesis of Susanne William Rasmussen about public
portents, where nothing is mentioned about sortition (Rasmussen 2003). Likewise the recent article on
divination in Republican Rome in Thessaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum has not included sortition (Rüpke
& Belayche 2005)
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