The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

Lucania in 200 BCE (Liv.31.12.7) and the same in Bruttium in 199 (Liv.32.1.11). It seems that
the prodigy story kept circulating and was eventually reported again as a new prodigy.
Let us investigate what qualities of occurrences made them prodigies. 202 We saw that there
were three ways omens in general could be detected. But since prodigies are not directed against
the interpreter directly and not interpreted at the spot, they differ slightly from omina: they do
not relate to an individual’s own private concerns. Salience can therefore not be achieved by
reference to an individual’s personal current concerns. Some were identified according to
common knowledge, but this was only a minority. 203 We should therefore expect prodigies to be
more attention demanding in order to achieve salience. In chapter 5 above we found that
minimally counterintuitive events were more attention demanding than bizarre ones, which in
turn were more attention demanding than normal events. We should therefore expect more
minimally counterintuitive, than bizarre and more bizarre, than normal prodigies.
In order to assess whether this was the case, all extant prodigies from the year 218 to 44
BCE 204 were rated according to the above mentioned descriptions of counterintuitive, bizarre and
common concepts based on Boyer’s and Barrett’s work. Common concepts were those which
were not either counterintuitive or bizarre. Determining whether a given prodigy involved
counterintuitive concepts, that is violations of domain-level expectations, was relatively easy, but
202 The following section is based on (Lisdorf 2004a)
203 Some prodigies do resemble each other and probably many persons knew of typical prodigies (Lisdorf 2004a:
167), but they are not encoded in an explicit body of knowledge like the Babylonian omens (Labat 1933).
204 218 BCE is chosen as the starting date because prodigies seem only to become regular from this date. 44 BCE
is chosen as a somewhat arbitrary end, since the prodigies become irregular somewhere around this date. 44 BCE
marks the official end of the republic with the assassination of Caesar. It is after this time, and to a certain extent
also before, difficult to ascertain whether the system is still working, since the republic as it had existed prior to
the assassination of Caesar was significantly changed. Good lists of the known prodigies exist in (MacBain 1982;
Rasmussen 2003). They have been used as a starting point, but not followed in all instances. In appendix 5 I have
listed all the individual observations and discussed possible points of contention. The basic premise for labeling
an observation as a prodigy is that it seems to be directed at the state and has been treated according to the prodigy
system as described here. I have therefore not included many observations described as omens, which Rasmussen
has included. Other kinds of occurrences such as ritual faults or consuls’ death that may have been portentous but
not technically prodigies, have not either been included when they did not go through the prodigy system, but
were dealt with in isolation. One important justification for this selective use of the sources is that our main
sources for the prodigies were writing during the principate, where the prodigy system known from republican
times had collapsed. This sometimes makes them blend private omens with public prodigies. That said, it is rare
that we have any difficulty in identifying a prodigy as such. Since the intitial publication of this research in 2004,
further research has revealed another 10 prodigies. There is therefore a slight inconsistency between the tables
presented her and the number of prodigies in appendix 5. The prodigies do not, however, differ in character from
the others in the list, so it does not change the general conslusions.
206