The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

Based on the evidence available to us, the null-hypothesis cannot be rejected. Still we
cannot say that fear can explain the number of prodigies reported in the Roman Republic in
the period from 218-44 BCE. This period forms the bulk of our evidence of prodigies in the
Roman republic. Previous theories explaining divination with recourse to fear, what I have
called the fear thesis, is not consistent with the findings presented here. It should however be
borne in mind that there are important uncertainties tied to the quantification of the number
of prodigies and the degree of crisis and individual observations may be contended. The trend
however, is reasonably clear. It should also be noted that I am not the first to reject this
thesis. Also Rasmussen rejects the fear thesis, because it is entirely based on “a very few
vague passages from Livy taken from the period around the Second Punic War” (Rasmussen
2003:29). The quantitative analysis presented her thus yields the same result.
The functional thesis
The functional thesis has two different forms. The most common is the manipulation thesis,
and the other is the social functionalist thesis. Both explain divination by reference to its
function. The problem with these explanations is that, like the historical explanations, they
argue from a correlation between a mechanism (divination) and a stipulated effect (political
influence, social cohesion, calming of fear). No reason is given why precisely this
mechanism should cause that effect. The effect might be spurious. Neither is there any
demonstration that the absence of the mechanism entailed the absence of the effect. In most
cases it is impossible to measure the effect. How do we measure social cohesion? How do we
measure how much fear was calmed? No one has provided anything but vague formulations.
The general picture is therefore that we are left without any specification of how the
mechanism produces the effect, and also without any way to measure the effect. As long as
this is the case, the functional thesis remains speculation (cf. Penner 1989).
There is one instance, though, where it is possible to test the functionalist thesis. That is the
assumption that the expiatory rituals performed in response to the prodigies, called
procurationes in Latin, had the function of calming the fear. It would then be reasonable to
assume that, when fear was high, there would be more fear to calm and hence more
expiations. By using the same crisis index as above in the section on the fear thesis and
counting the numbers of expiations 105 mentioned it is possible to test the assumption.
105 It should be mentioned that the number of expiations are not given by our sources as conscientiously as the
number of prodigies. We have several years where none are mentioned. Further it should be mentioned that
135