The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

comedy is Old Greek Comedy, while Plautus and Terrence imitate the New Greek Comedy.
Second, there is a difference between the Roman and Greek comedy. Roman comedy was more
for the average people, high as well as low, whereas Greek comedy was more for the elite. The
results of the comparison can be seen in figure 10.6.
Instances per
10000 words
0,70
0,60
0,50
0,40
0,30
0,20
0,10
0,00
Omen words in Greek and Roman comedy
Omen
Prodigium
Portentum
Monstrum
Auspicium
Augurium
Word
Figure 10.6. Omen words in Greek and Roman comedy 198
Ostentum
Teras
Sumbolon
Sema
Minimum
Maximum
Although the result is not as clear, we see the same trend. The Roman comedy used more
different words and, taken together, more often than Greek comedy did.
The result might still be attributable more to the genre of Comedy, than because of an actual
difference. We can test this by comparing another genre: rhetoric. Speeches are also a good
source for assessing what people knew, since the success of a speech depends on convincing the
audience. Audiences are rarely convinced when they don’t know what is being spoken about. We
can compare Cicero’s speeches, which is the only proper source for Roman speeches we possess,
with the Greek speeches. The results can be seen in figure 10.7.
198 Phantasma and phasma were excluded because there were no instances of them.
202