The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

& Scheid 1994; Linder & Scheid 1993; Lisdorf 2005b; Scheid 2005; Smith 1990). Second, it
is worth noting that nothing in the sources seems to indicate that there was any general
disbelief in the efficacy of divination or any other rituals (Beard, North, & Price 1998: I,
126). What seems to be the problem is a misreading of the sources. There are stories about
magistrates and others who manipulate or disregard proper ritual action, but these stories do
not at all show skepticism towards divination. All "anti-ritualist" protagonists face a grim
end, usually death in a military defeat. That would suggest that the Romans saw rituals as
quite important.
Other scholars who have done research on sortition have showed a more fruitful way of
conceptualizing divination rituals. They have stipulated that chance is a crucial component in
how the Romans believed their gods to communicate. Champeaux, for example, calls chance
the language of the gods. While I do not believe she has explained the relation between
chance and the gods by calling it the language of the gods, I agree that a technique involving
chance is a necessary precondition for representing the extraction of credible information
from the gods in divination (see chapter 4).
The fear thesis
This is probably the most common thesis, going back to Livy. The central tenet of the fear
thesis is that fear is the cause, in one way or another, of divination. Sometimes fear is calmed
through divination techniques (Liebeschuetz, Gladigow, Rosenberger), but most often fear is
produced by crises (Krauss, Bloch, Dumezil, Gladigow, and Rosenberger). By far the most
frequent empirical observation to substantiate this claim is the handling of prodigies.
The basic logic is that crises, such as wars, produce fear in the population 99 , which produces
a high number of prodigy reports, since the population is reporting prodigies to the senate.
This would qualify as an explanation, because it stipulates some causal mechanism.
Fortunately this is a theory which can be checked more rigorously against the historical
record, since we have reasonably good evidence of the number of prodigies accepted per
year 100 and good evidence of the number of wars or other critical events per year in the period
between 218-44 BCE. It is therefore possible to test the thesis empirically.
99 It should be mentioned that some versions of the fear thesis stipulate that the cause was individual fear
without any apparent outer reason (Kraus, Dumezil, and Gladigow), but there is no way we can test this. It
therefore remains a possibility, but should be considered speculation.
100 For a more thorough treatment of prodigies and the sources for the prodigy records see chapter
10.
131