The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

achieve success. The prodigies were interpreted by the highest authorities giving the
interpretations credibility. The direct prestige of these authorities increase the credibility value of
the information entailed in the interpretation.
Conclusion
We found that the Roman vocabulary for omens was exceptionally rich. In Latin there are
numerous nouns describing different types of omens, and even more different types of adjectives
describing them as good or bad. Although there is great diversity in the terms they all build on
one basic model, according to which omens were conceptualized. This model (cf. fig. 10.1) first
of all identifies omens as an utterance from the gods or Jupiter to a person. The content of the
utterance is that the person is on a path towards either success or misfortune. The success or
misfortune depends on prior transgression of or compliance with duties towards the gods. In
some cases the omen also specifies that something can be done to avert an impending
misfortune. Since all omen words build on this basic model an analysis of a corpus of the most
important republican sources was carried out to assess whether it was often communicated.
Compared to two control words (dinner and gladiator) that also specified things that the Romans
took an interest in, and therefore most likely communicated a lot about, omen words were a lot
more frequently employed in the corpus. This suggests that the Romans really did communicate
about this relatively often, and that the cultural model was very widespread. A comparison with
a similar Greek corpus showed that the Greeks did not communicate about omens to the same
degree. It was also found that this difference was there when controlled for genre. The Romans
were simply a lot more interested in omens than their neighbors. We can therefore not explain
Roman omen practice with simple historical influence from the Greeks.
In chapter 5 we stipulated that an omen is an event that achieves salience in one of three ways.
We found all three ways among the Roman omens. The normal omens, primarily described as
omina and related to individuals, achieved salience by the relation of the event to the individual’s
current concerns. The event was not in itself something remarkable. We also found a number of
omens that were salient because they were part of a catalogue of signs. These signs ultimately
derived from the discipline of the augurs and thereby from their written records. We also found
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