The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

ating whether a prodigy involved a common or bizarre concept, that is, kind-level violations,
often proved to be more a question of degree. A case could be made for most common concepts
being bizarre, as they do involve some kind of violation of expectations. 205 An example is the
birth of triplets, which is a violation of regularity. Another example is storms, which are
sometimes reported and sometimes not. The bizarre concepts often depart from culturally
specific expectations, hence the animals in awkward places: wolves or owls within the city walls
or in temples during the day. These prodigies are only bizarre given a kind-level expectancy for
wolves to remain in nature outside the city. The largest group of bizarre prodigies is lightning
strikes against temples or sacred areas accounting for 19% of the total amount of prodigies.
These have been categorized as bizarre, because this clearly has been felt to be a violation of
expectations concerning sacred areas, whereas lightning strikes against normal buildings were
not seen thus. Another possibility is that lightning being a central part of Roman and Italic
religion, often seen as expressions of divine will, had a special significance when it struck sacred
areas, which in Roman culture was the property of the given god. The ratings were checked by
an independent rater familiar with Roman prodigies and the theories of counterintuitive and
bizarre concepts. Cases of doubt were discussed. Examples of what prodigies were classified as
counterintuitive, bizarre and common can be found in appendix 6.
Year BCE
218-190 189-162 160-132 131-103 102-74 73-44 Total
Counter Intuitive 0.55 0.60 0.63 0.55 0.58 0.38 0.56
Bizarre 0.43 0.32 0.35 0.39 0.39 0.59 0.41
Common 0.02 0.08 0.02 0.07 0.03 0.03 0.04
N 212 106 51 77 101 58 605
Table 10.1. Distribution of types of concepts in the prodigy reports from
218-44 BCE
The results can be seen in table 10.1. The distribution fits the findings of Barrett & Nyhof, and
Boyer & Ramble. It follows the expectation that prodigies would be attention demanding:
counterintuitive prodigies are more frequent (56%) than bizarre prodigies (41%) and the
205 This seems to be a general problem (cf. Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller 2006: 544)
207