The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

A box-plot was made and revealed the presence of four outliers. The first was from 217,
which was at the height of the 2 nd Punic war, probably the greatest war in late republican
memory. The only source for this is Livy. He sometimes uses prodigies to dramatize events
in general (Levene 1993: 84-85). It is possible that he has here collapsed the prodigy lists for
two years into one (Levene 1993: 38). The second observation is from 44. The explanation
here is analogous. 44 was the year where Caesar was killed. Here we have more sources, but
they also seem to dramatize by listing a greater number of prodigies, where some on closer
inspection more stringently could be called omina. As we shall see in chapter 10, omina were
directed towards private persons and not the state as prodigia were. There is therefore reason
to doubt that most of the prodigies for the year 44 are prodigia in the technical sence, that is,
in the same sense as the other prodigies in this investigation. The third observation stems
from the year 104, where a serious attack of the Cimbri on North Italy took place at the same
time as the second Sicilian slave war. It could therefore follow the pattern in Livy, where
especially important events are dramatized with higher amount of prodigies by collapsing
two years and integrating counting omina as prodigies. Unfortunately we don’t have Livy’s
history for this period, only the summary of Julius Obsequens. 102 Therefore we cannot
investigate this in detail. The last observation is from the year 163, where, as far as we can
see, nothing critical happened at all. Nevertheless 17 prodigies were reported. Unfortunately
again we only have the prodigy lists from Julius Obsequens, so we cannot determine whether
it is attributed to any dramatizing effect, but it can be seen that the prodigy lists from the
previous year are missing. Consequently, it is probable, either by purpose or mistake, that the
lists from 164 and 163 were collapsed into one. These four outliers were eliminated from the
data, since they were likely to skew the trend in the data.
The correlation coefficient for the trimmed data was 0,173 (r squared was 0,020), which is
not a very good correlation. 103 A linear regression analysis was made with degree of crisis as
the independent variable and number of prodigies as the dependent variable. This did not
reveal any significant relationship between degree of crisis and number of prodigies F(1,102)
= 3,151, P= 0.079. 104 Other regression models were tried, but the best fit was provided by the
linear regression. There is however a slight trend towards correlation.
102 Julius Obsequens was an historian who extracted the prodigy lists and other portentuous events from Livy
and made them into a separate work (Schmidt 1968)
103 For the untrimmed data r= 0.18 and r squared= 0.025.
104 The result for the untrimmed data was F(1,106)= 3.730, p= 0.056. This is actually slightly better than the
trimmed data, but still not significant.
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