The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

counterintuitive agent. In all the techniques great attention was paid to whether the operator
was able to influence the divinatory pattern. That would have resulted in a lack of
displacement of intention. We saw some examples of this. Cicero mentions that the sacred
chickens were starved in the auspicium ex tripudio in order for them to eat and therefore give
a good sign. He clearly does not see this as leading to credible information, since the
pullarius who starves them, and not the gods, is represented as the intentional agent. In other
words there is thus no displacement of intention and therefore no deficiency in the intentional
structure. The same is the case with the story about Verres who followed all the ritual rules,
but puts three identical lots with the name of his preferred candidate, instead of three
different ones, in the urn. There has been no displacement of intention since the outcome is
derived from Verres intention. A third case is the debate in Plautus’ Casina concerning
equality of the lots. This can be understood as a debate about whether proper displacement of
intention took place. If the lots were not equal, they did not have an equal chance of getting
picked. They would thus be amenable to the manipulation of an intentional agent, i.e. the
opponent and not the gods. A displacement would not take place.
As stipulated, these stories have usually been taken to show that the Romans knew that
divination was mere manipulation without any belief in the gods, but the present analysis
points to another interpretation. They show that a lack of ritualized action results in lack of
credibility. The Romans told these stories precisely because manipulation should be averted
in order that the divination should give a credible answer. Paradigmatic stories such as those
about Flaminius, and Appius Claudius Pulcher show that indeed failure to perform the ritual
in a proper (ritualized) way leads to great misfortune. The stories about manipulation show
that the absence of ritualized action did not achieve credible information from the gods,
which would lead to disaster. Ritualized action is a sine qua non for all divination practices
reviewed here.
Categories employed in technique
Based on the findings in chapter 4 we would expect that techniques employing humans as
producers of signs, e.g. ecstatic techniques, were more credible than techniques using animals
and these in turn were more credible than those using physical objects. Surprisingly,
however, we find that no techniques employ humans. Ecstatic techniques were altogether
absent from Roman culture at large. Out of the 13 known practices, 7 made used of physical
177