the course of action dismissed by the Pythia would have brought. The response to
a question of the sort ‘‘whetherone will marry’’ is more critical. But across the
board erroneous responses could not be expected to have exceeded 50 percent.
The oracles accordingly responded in satisfactory fashion to at least 75 percent
of questions with ‘‘whether.’’ In other cases, where the oracle responded, for
example, with a riddle, the answer was deduced by the consultant himself, with a
risk that any error could imputed to him (Parker 1985:79–80).
Next, the consultant often triangulated his inquiry to glean further indications
and to form a more credible convergence: a dream could be confirmed by another
dream, a prodigy by the examination of a victim’s entrails, or by a coincidence
(Xenophon,Anabasis6.5.2). And at the heart of mantic rituals, several divinatory
sacrifices sanctioned the god’s good disposition towards the petitioner. Numerous
instances, legendary and historical, display the confirmation of one oracle by
another: thus in 388 BC King Agesipolis, having obtained a favorable oracle at
Olympia, protected himself by obtaining an analogous response from Delphi
before invading the Argolid (Xenophon,Hellenica4.7.1–3).
3 This mixture of credulity and reason brings us to the counterfeiting or falsifi-
cation of oracles. An improbable number of historical events were predicted by
oracles that are today cataloged in literary sources: unless we believe in the
percipience of the Greek gods, an enormous majority were responses forged
after the fact, orpost eventum, as we say. It must be stated frankly that these
texts are bogus, and constitute one of the problems the historian must deal
with.
This does not mean that these texts are without interest. Quite the reverse. The
Greeks, first of all, regarded them as authentic, and they therefore exerted a
historical impact. Further, thesepost eventumoracles tell us about the patterns
of thought of the period that invented and disseminated them. Whether they were
put into circulation by the sanctuaries themselves, or with their approval, or
simply without them being able to do anything about them, these bogus oracles
were not so much designed to deceive as to demonstrate the supreme oracular
power of the gods. To this extent, the 500 or so Delphic responses cataloged are
less valuable for their historicity than for the image they present, reinforcing the
idea that the Greeks wanted to project of their principal oracle (Maurizio 1998).
One often reads in modern scholarship that the Pythia colluded with the powers
of the day: we will return to this claim.
In an oral society, bogus oracles could immediately present themselves as
authentic soon after the event, and it is not necessary to see in them the result
of interested calculation. They should rather be compared with myths that offer
infinite possibilities of adaptation to the social needs of the moment (e.g.,
Fontenrose 1978:124–8). Thucydides shows this phenomenon at work during
the plague of 430 BC: ‘‘people naturally turned to their memories, recalling
the verse that the oldest people said had been recited previously: ‘A Dorian war
will be seen to arrive, and with it the plague.’ In fact, there was disagreement.
The word that featured in the verse, it was contended, had not been loimos
[plague] butlimos[famine]. However, the view that naturally prevailed was that
the word had been ‘‘plague.’’ People thus conditioned their memories in
accordance with what happened; and if, I imagine, another Dorian war presents
Divination 149