The Power of Signs. Divination, prediction, and the end of the Roman Republic

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Roman religion in the Republic has been the object of very important work in the last four decades, especially (though not exclusively) in the English-speaking scholarship. The traditional model of a late Republican religion declining under the pressure of the autocratic forces that dominated the political arena and the scepticism generated by the coming of Greek culture has been proven wrong, and more sophisticated accounts have been suggested for the understanding of religious change and pluralism in this period. It is now clear that religion in late Republican Rome and Italy was a diverse and lively phenomenon, which retained deep importance at the political level and in the social conscience of the time. This is true not just for the non-elite sectors of the Roman populace, but for the political and social elite too, which has long been regarded as mainly disenchanted and cynical. A more nuanced approach is required, one that takes into account the complexity of the picture and the variety of possible solutions. There is no monograph on Roman divination in English, and the studies available in other languages are either outdated or in many respects unsatisfactory. Most importantly, there is no comprehensive study of Roman divination setting out to analyse it in light of recent methodological developments and which tries to understand it within the wider context of the intellectual life in the late Roman Republic. The critical discussion of divination, its potential and its remit, was inextricably intertwined with the debate on the extent to which the future may be predicted and controlled. To put it with a brief formula, the understanding of 'divinatio' ('divination') was closely associated to the exploration of 'ratio' ('reason').The ancient work in which these conceptual developments are outlined most clearly is a philosophical dialogue by Cicero, the 'de divinatione' ('On divination), written between 45 and 44 BC. The first part of the book offers a full reconsideration of this work: its structure, its intended aims, and its place in the intellectual debate of the mid-first century BC. The discussion of Cicero's treatise directs the analysis in two directions: the study of practices, and the study of concepts. The second section of the book is an historical survey of the main sources of divination in Rome and Italy: augury, haruspicy, the Sibylline Books, astrology, and cleromancy. The third part is a study of the concepts of divination and prediction (with special emphasis on 'prudentia' - 'foresight' - and 'divinatio' - 'divination'), which were defined in very successful terms by Cicero and were discussed by other authors at the time. Divination and prediction were much more closely related than it has often been argued. An interesting vantage point is provided by how the concept of historical causation is combined to the reflection on divination, and with that of historical causation is combined by that of divination, and with that of the ideas of decline: attention is therefore turned to literary genres like epistolography, biography, and historiography, and the study of Sallust and Livy is an important part of this investigation. The reflection on the decline of the Republic has much to do, of course, with the political crisis of the Republican regime. Augustus set out to restore stability and order, and an end to a decline which was not just political, but also moral. The culture of the Augustan age is deeply concerned with issues of prediction and divination (Virgil's 'Aeneid' is an interesting case study). Most importantly, the emperor undertook a major redefinition of the place of divination in Roman politics and society, which put public and private divinatory practices under his control and patronage.