This volume aims to explore the tension between two aspects of divination: while it is supposed to be a divine gift founded on inspiration, it also requires human conjecture and specific skills. Divination therefore is understood as involving not only a variety of methods of knowing but also a variety of types of knowledge. This tension can be understood as an arrangement along two different axes: one axis, concerning the mode of divination, is a spectrum which runs from entirely inspired divination to entirely conjectural divination; the other axis, which concerns the type of knowledge or the objects of divination, runs from contingency to transcendence.

These two axes correspond to divisions defined since antiquity. On the one hand, ancient authors recognised the division between ‘natural’ divination, based on inspiration (as in possession, oracles, visions, or dreams), and ‘technical’ divination, based on conjecture (as in augury, astrology, extispicy, and generally the interpretation of signs).

In a recent article in the journal Kernos (2018, 31: 39–58), Julia Kindt compared ancient Greek epiphanic and oracular narratives and rightly argued that although both epiphany and divination explore analogous issues of limited human cognition at the face of the divine, recent studies of divine epiphany (Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion, Cambridge University Press 2011, and Georgia Petridou, Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture, Oxford University Press 2015) tend to keep discussions of these religious phenomena separate. This chapter is an attempt to readdress this seeming imbalance by focusing more explicitly on complex self-conscious narratives pertaining to incubation (enkoimesis, kataklisis) in Imperial Pergamum, a religious practice that could be thought as offering an interesting intersection of divine epiphany and what Kindt calls ‘inspired divination’. More specifically, this paper focuses on the dynamics and problematics of diagnostic and therapeutic divination, as delineated in Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Discourses (Hieroi Logoi, Or. 47–52 Keil), Galen’s De curandi ratione per venae sectionem (4.23 = 11.314–315 K.), and contemporary epigraphic evidence from the temples of Asclepius in Pergamum and Epidaurus.

This chapter examines the idea of the prophetically able holy man, or theios anêr, and argues that the attribution of sagehood to prophets in the Hellenistic Jewish tradition paved the way to the creation of the idealised prophet-sage of the Greek theios anêr tradition. This process radically altered the way in which Greeks – including pagans, Jews, and Christians – conceptualised the role of the prophet. The merging of the rational-dialectical epistemic claims of the sage with the revelatory epistemology of the prophet in authors like Philo established a potentially universal scope to the prophet-sage’s knowledge; while both the prophet and sage had defined epistemologies and limits in traditional Greek and Jewish thought, the new-prophet sage understood nothing less than the ‘structure of the cosmos and the activity of the elements’.

Philosophy, magic and Scripture are not capable of leading men to the knowledge of truth. According to Pseudo-Clement, truth is revealed only by the True Prophet, because he alone possesses full knowledge of it. Anyone can recognise the True Prophet, provided that they are animated by a genuine desire to know the truth and that they meet a genuine witness. The witness does not prove the truth of the doctrine that he teaches, but he puts the hearers in the presence of the One from whom he has himself received the truth. Truth – though rationally arguable – is not conceptual knowledge, but evidence derived from the encounter, mediated by authentic witnesses, between the seeker and the Prophet.

While scholarship has always underlined Philo’s debt to the preceding philosophical tradition, this chapter instead intends to shed light on his critical attitude towards some key traditional aspects of prophecy and divination endorsed by Graeco-Roman thinkers. This contribution thus explores which kinds of prophecy, inside and outside the Scriptures, are dangerous and impious according to Philo, and why. Special focus is laid on: the conceptual categories of ‘truth’, ‘authority’, and ‘appropriate time’ – crucial and widespread notions in the debates on prophecy at the turn of the millennium – and on the complex relation between contingency and transcendence in Philo’s thought.

This paper focuses on three famous hexameters allegedly uttered by Apollo in Delphi for Emperor Julian by means of the emperor’s physician Oribasius. Since the nineteenth century, this text, in which Apollo announces the destruction of his temple and the silence of the oracle, has been the subject of numerous interpretations. Some scholars regard it as a genuine oracle produced in Delphi and intended for the pagan Emperor Julian while he was in Antioch (362–3). Others argue that it is a Christian forgery and piece of anti-pagan propaganda written shortly after Julian’s death. In this chapter, I first discuss the literary context of this oracle’s quotation in the Artemii Passio, an anonymous and fictitious seventh-century hagiographical work. I argue that we cannot date the text to the fourth century, because its attribution to the lost Church History of Philostorgius appears to be spurious and is not grounded. Second, I analyse the anonymous hagiographer’s construction of this episode and compare it to similar late Byzantine pseudo-oracles about the fate of pagan temples in order to provide a new interpretation of this prophecy.

This chapter first investigates the meaning of ‘revelation’ in ancient Christianity and ancient non-Jewish and non-Christian religions, especially in ‘pagan’ Platonism of the early imperial period. ‘Revelation’ was characterised by the stress on authoritative sources of revealed knowledge (e.g., the Bible, the Chaldaean Oracles). The objective is to argue that ‘pagan’ Platonists faithful to Plato (and commenting just on Plato) cannot be simplistically opposed to Jewish or Christian Platonists faithful to the Bible (and commenting exclusively on the Bible). The chapter examines how philosophical allegoresis was applied by Stoics and Platonists – ‘pagan’, Jewish, and Christian Platonists – to their authoritative texts and revelations. This study provides an accurate examination of the conceptual and methodological intersections between the works of ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonists, and points to cases that break the binary between ‘pagan’ commentaries on ‘pagan’ authoritative texts and Christian commentaries on Scripture. It will also suggest that Amelius commented on the Prologue of John in light of his previous knowledge of Origen’s Commentary.

The chapter provides a reconsideration of a section in Martianus Capella’s Book 1, dedicated to the ‘failure of the oracles’ and culminating in a quotation of a prophylactic Apollinean oracle, attributed to Alexander of Abonouteichos. The author tries to reconstruct some possible lines of transmission of this oracle, at the same time highlighting how its allegorical framework helps to shed light on some aspects of the ongoing controversy between pagans and Christians, which took into account the thaumaturgical and therapeutic capabilities of the gods.

This paper explores the relevance of the concept of revelation in Roman augury. Although augury is often regarded, not without reason, as being preoccupied with matters of narrow import and significance, it is a craft based on the detection and interpretation of divine signs, and thus builds into its operating process the question of the extent and quality to which the gods disclose to mankind their will and their attitudes. Revelation thus proves a productive vantage point on the workings of Roman augury, and more broadly of Roman public divination.

This chapter draws attention to a little-known text attributed to John Chrysostom, which has so far not aroused the interest of specialists in ancient divination and prophecy: the prologue to the commentary on the Book of Jeremiah, which nevertheless enjoyed a certain popularity in the Byzantine world. The prologue exposes a classification of forms of prophecy that has no notable parallel in patristic literature. A significant parallel can be established instead with the Neoplatonic theory of divination, as set forth for example in Iamblichus’ Response to Porphyry (De mysteriis). This parallel concerns in particular the hierarchy of the forms of predictive knowledge, as well as the relationship between demonic and natural prophecy/divination. An English translation and a commentary of the fragment concerning the prophecy is given.