The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

“the making clear of something”. Divinatio originally had two different senses in the Latin
language: one, designating roughly what we today call divination and another, designating
the process of finding the litigator in certain legal proceedings. In the treatise De divinatione,
Marcus Tullius Cicero fused the first meaning of divination with stoic philosophy and
created a general category for interrogation. Cicero showed the universality of divination by
examples drawn from the entire known world of his time. This work has been the frame of
reference for all subsequent scholarship dealing with divination as a general phenomenon.
In chapter 2 the focus is turned to theories that have been proposed to explain divination.
Divination had disappeared as a central factor of European culture with the rise of
Christianity. Therefore, when scholars encountered divination among all the different peoples
of the world, they were in need of an explanation. Initially evolutionist ideas accounted for
the differences between the primitive people of the colonies and the scientific European by
reference to cultural evolution: the rest of the world had not yet advanced to the European
stage of culture. In Britain the evolutionistic argument rested on empiricist concerns such as
a deficiency in inductive ability of the primitives compared to the modern Europeans. In
France rationalist concerns such as collective representations and classification took center
stage. With the breakdown of evolutionistic anthropology after the First World War other
ways of analyzing divination came to the fore. It became apparent that the source material of
the arm-chair evolutionist anthropologies was not of sufficient quality. Extended periods of
field work became the ideal of anthropology. This ideal entered divination scholarship with
Edward E. Evans-Pritchard. By considering the everyday life of the people, the problem of
the rationality of divination was resolved. Focus shifted to the social relations and the
function of divination. The French tradition of research showed a continued interest in
cultural classification schemes. This had a great influence on a line of research focusing on
the meaning of divination. The problem of the irrationality of divination had, however, not
entirely vanished with Evans-Pritchard’s meticulous work on divination among the Azande.
Later, pragmatic linguistic philosophy was integrated to try to account for it in a more
principled way. It is argued that, while previous research has provided important insights into
divination, the cognitive basis of divinatino is still poorly understood.
In chapter 3 the foundation for the general theoretical model is laid out. A stipulative
definition of divination is given. Two types of divination are distinguished: impetrative and
oblative divination. Impetrative divination is divination employing a technique to produce an
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