The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

that prodigies are more attention demanding than regular omens. Furthermore it is shown that
the spatial distribution of accepted prodigies conforms to the expectations that can be derived
from the theory that divination is represented as the communication with a counterintuitive
agent. In a summary it is concluded that the factors isolated in chapter 6 as important for the
dissemination and resilience of oblative divination were present in Roman republican times.
Chapter 11 concludes that the general theoretical model of divination proposed in this
dissertation gives a reasonably fine grained explanation of why Roman divination was so
widely disseminated for centuries. It also suggests that the model may explain why divination
eventually disappeared. Further, it points to some perspectives raised by the dissertation.
The historical part is written according to standards in ancient history and the cognitive
parts according to standards in cognitive science. It is therefore inevitable that the reader will
have difficulty in reading and understanding certain parts of the dissertation. It is my hope
that the reader will bear with me and get through the parts anyhow. For the ancient sources I
have supplied a key for the abbreviations used in the text in a section on primary sources in
the bibliography. I have in general provided Latin passages along with translations and used
English editions of foreign language works for quotations, where they could be found. I have
also tried to make the investigation as open as possible by including appendices on the most
pertinent points.
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