The Seer in Ancient Greece
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0520252292
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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of how Melampus came to be a seer. But that does not mean that we should follow suit. On the one hand, stories about Melampus and other early seers obviously served to confirm and legitimate the claims to special status of those seers of archaic and classical times who identified themselves as their descendants, and it is natural enough to suspect that such stories were invented for just that purpose. It seems safe to say that myths, like oral traditions, reflect the concerns of those who tell them.
Tolmides and his seer of Plataean extraction; that is, Theaenetus named his son Tolmides after his employer, and this Plataean Tolmides named his son after his own father (see Herman [1989: 90–91], who leaves open the possibility that the Theaenetus mentioned by Thucydides is an Athenian and the son of the general Tolmides). It would be nice to know if all three were seers. 46 . W h o I s a S e e r ? for its seers,67 and was the homeland of that Aristander who so successfully served both
This was perhaps true of Greece as well. The Delphic priestess, at least by Plutarch’s time in the first century a.d., was a local peasant woman. Yet, as we shall see in chapter 8, it is possible that the Pythia was a well-educated, and perhaps upper-class, woman during the archaic and classical periods. OTHER QUALIFICATIONS FOR BECOMING A SEER As we have seen, belonging to a family of hereditary seers or being the son of a successful practitioner was extremely important in establishing one ’s
Xenophon’s own religious actions as described in the Anabasis (as noted by Price [1999: 86]). On the religious beliefs of Xenophon himself, see Dillery 1995: 179–94. T h e Rol e a n d I m age of t h e S e e r . 73 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF DIVINATION It is possible, however, to go beyond the definitions given by our sources to uncover the social function of divination. That is to say, the Greeks resorted to divination because they believed that the gods were willing to communicate with mortals;
brackets lines 746– 48 and 752–57; so too Dale 1967: 117–19. I agree with Wright (2005: 366–67) that the whole passage should stand. 140 . D i s b e l i e f a n d S k e p t i c i s m a b o u t S e e r s tlefields of ancient Greece: to wit, “I can only report what the gods are willing to make known.” The response—“Then why do we use divination at all?”—is not strictly logical, but it does have an emotional appeal. Seers, it might be thought, can tell us something useful, if not everything that