The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

distinction between public and private, and Roman and foreign had simply disappeared
(MacBain 1982: 28). This does not, however, occur in Roman society in general. This solution
therefore raises more questions than it answers: Why would the senate suddenly stop making
such discriminations, which are absolutely central to Roman culture all the way through the
republic and well into the principate? We can conclude that previous efforts have not been able
to elucidate the basic principles behind acceptance of prodigies.
Since the theoretical model proposed here assumes that omens activate an inference of a
counterintuitive agent, and since prodigies were often explicitly conceptualized as
communications, most often warnings, from the gods, it would be natural to assume that they
followed principles from normal communication. According to the relevance theory of Dan
Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, reviewed above in chapter 4, a communicative stimulus should be
maximally relevant. A communicative stimulus is interpreted as being the most relevant the
communicator could have chosen to communicate his informative intention to the interpreter.
Given that the informative intention of a prodigy is already known to be a warning to the Roman
state, the most relevant communicative stimulus is one that involves the Roman state. We should
therefore expect that the stronger the connection of a prodigy to the Roman state, the more likely
it was that it would be interpreted as a prodigy to the Roman state. The two previously suggested
principles can be derived from this principle since public as opposed to private and Roman and
as opposed to foreign land more directly involve the Roman state. We can therefore explain the
two rejected prodigies by reference to only one rule and not two.
It might also explain all the excepted prodigies. An all round rough measure of the degree of
connection to the Roman state would be simple distance to Rome. Based on the assumption that
prodigies were taken as communicative stimuli from a counterintuitive agent and the principle of
optimal relevance, we should expect it to be more probable that a prodigy was accepted the
closer it was to Rome. Fortunately this can be tested since we know the place, and therefore the
distance to Rome, for many prodigies. Consequently, we would expect the number of prodigies
accepted to increase the closer we get to Rome. Mathematically that is a correlation between
distance and number of prodigies.
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