[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
When it comes to the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona—arguably the most important of the Panhellenic oracles after that of Apollo at Delphi—we are confronted with a paradox. Over 4,000 oracular consultations are preserved on lead tablets (lamellae), comprising, according to one author in this volume, 90 percent of all epigraphical consultations from Greece and many times more than those from Delphi; yet, because of the uncertainty surrounding the actual use of the lamellae, and because of the garbled literary accounts, we still do not know how the oracle actually worked. Theories abound. Did priestesses interpret the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves of a sacred oak tree? Were they mesmerized by the resonance of bronze cauldrons? Did they draw lots?
Despite all historical uncertainty, the present edited volume attempts to reconstruct the experience of a Greek pilgrim to Dodona, an admirable but inherently difficult task. It is the result of a meeting of scholars for the Virtual Reality Oracle project. This project aims to create an historically informed virtual experience of visiting Dodona to be used in classrooms. I have not been able to try the VR experience myself, but from its previews on Youtube it looks fun and innovative. The ten essays in this volume, however, can stand apart from the VR project as scholarly contributions in their own right.
Each essay covers a different aspect of experience as reconstructed through the literary, archaeological, and/or epigraphic record. The volume is divided into two parts: five essays under “Site and Senses” and five under “Consultation and Cognition.” In the Introduction, Esther Eidinow draws on the work of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to introduce the concept of the chronotope, “time-space”: literary (and in this case historical) representations require us to imagine a world in a particular time and in a particular space; time and space are intrinsically connected. The chronotope is supposed to be the leitmotif that unites the disparate chapters. It is only implicit, though, since the word “chronotope” is not mentioned in any chapter outside of the introduction. The concept of “unknowing” from the volume’s subtitle is likewise underdeveloped. One immediately thinks of mystical experience—in the vein of the famous medieval treatise The Cloud of Unknowing—but the use of the term here seems to be more pedestrian, describing the uncertainty of pilgrims that the oracle was supposed to resolve, along with the uncertainty of the researchers in making sense of the ambiguous evidence.
In fact, the volume does a better job of illustrating the sheer diversity of theoretical and methodological directions that scholarship on Greek religion has taken in recent years. Most essays introduce some or other new framework, often borrowed from cognitive science, phenomenology, or even environmental studies. These new frameworks aim, in essence, to fill in the gaps of the incomplete and ambiguous historical record at Dodona. Many are promising and compelling; some can feel perfunctory. The reader comes away with a host of new ideas to bring to the study of Greek religion, even if the unifying historical experience of visiting Dodona remains elusive.
In Chapter 1, Eleni Vasileiou gives a basic summary of the archaeology of Dodona. The site was probably a cult place of Zeus since the Bronze Age, and it is referred to in both the Iliad and Odyssey. Herodotus implies that it was the oldest spot for divination in Greece.[1] From the earliest days the shrine was open-air and centered around a sacred oak tree, surrounded by cauldrons. Monumental architecture was entirely absent until the 4th century BCE, when the Molossians took over Dodona, possibly using it as a meeting point for the Molossian koinon. In the 3rd century BCE, other rulers contributed to the building program, most notably Pyrrhus of Epirus (r. 297-272 BCE). Thus, the appearance of architecture such as a bouleuterion, a prytaneion, stoas, and temples corresponded with the broader state development of Epirus.
In Chapter 2, Diego Chapinal-Heras takes a phenomenological approach to capture the pilgrim’s experience of entering Dodona. Acknowledging the difficulties of such an approach, he nonetheless relies on a “transcultural subjectivity”: all human experience shares some elements in common (37). Pilgrims experienced a dramatic arrival through the valley of Tcharacovitsa as the sanctuary came into view. Their journeys from around the Greek world could have been motivated by several attractions: the oracle itself, the Naia festival, processions, and even manumission ceremonies.
Chapter 3 is the most quantitative. Hugh Bowden categorizes the 4,000 lamellae inscriptions surviving from 550 to 167 BCE into 25-year intervals. He finds a dramatic increase at the beginning of the 5th century BCE and a drop after the 4th. The survival of lamellae does not correspond to the popularity of the oracle; otherwise, there should have been more lamellae in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. Instead, Bowden points out that it does correspond with Athenian exploitation of the silver mine at Laurion, a probable source of the lead used for the tablets. In Chapter 4, Erica Angliker asks the same question but comes to a different answer, attributing the 5th century BCE peak to the Molossian takeover of the sanctuary. She takes a materialist approach to the lamellae: How did the pilgrim experience the physical properties of the lead tablets? Lead was more malleable than ostraka, and “the feelings associated with the physical control of significant objects such as the lamellae may give individuals a sense of empowerment” (88).
In Chapter 5, Katerina Kolotourou directs our attention to the soundscape of Dodona; her approach is “phenomenological and archaeomusicological” (98). In literary sources, Dodona is described as stormy and rainy, suitable a for a god with such Homeric epithets as ἐρίγδουπος, “loud-thundering.” Pilgrims would have also heard the sound of running water, indicating the presence of nymphs; the sound of the sacred oak tree, somehow a source of the oracle; and the vibrating cauldrons, which could have induced an altered state of consciousness.
In Chapter 6, Pierre Bonnechere compiles all the evidence for how the lamellae were actually used. This question is surprisingly difficult, and it is inevitable but frustrating when he concludes that we do not know the answer. The lamellae were likely written by the consultants themselves, as is evident from the myriad dialects that they used. Were the questions spoken out loud and then written down afterwards? Or were they fully written? Perhaps, Bonnechere suggests, the literary accounts are so inconsistent on the method of oracular consultation because multiple methods were used over time or at once.
In Chapter 7, Jessica Piccinini addresses a subset of those literary accounts, namely 5th-century tragedy. Did the role of Zeus Dodonaios in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides meaningfully differ from that of Apollo Pythios? She argues that unlike Apollo’s responses, those of Zeus were (most of the time) straightforward and clear. They mostly concerned household and family issues. She connects this role to what we know from the lamellae, but the relationship between literary and epigraphical oracles is a much more complicated topic than she lets on. She might have drawn on Fontenrose’s seminal study addressing this exact question for the Delphic Oracle.[2]
In Chapter 8, Esther Eidinow introduces a dizzying number of frameworks from psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. These include “small stories”, “the dissociated self”, “soothing self-talk”, and “cognitive blending.” They help her explain why some of the oracular questions on the lamellae are in third person: e.g. DVC 1313B: “Aristomachos asks whether he should sail out and work with Straton”; whereas others are in first person: e.g. DCV 30009A: “Shall I consult the physicians?” (169). Her conclusion is that the third person “enabled pilgrims to experience, simultaneously, multiple viewpoints on their lives, from multiple temporalities” (185). This may be a bit of an over-interpretation. The content of first- and third-person oracular questions does not seem to differ, and in fact some questions mix the first and the third person arbitrarily. What if it was just an arbitrary custom?
In Chapter 9, Christopher Schliephake uses the concept of “sustainability” to assess how the oracle might have made consultants more resilient to environmental shocks such as crop failure. In asking Zeus about environmental matters, consultants had to acknowledge their own ignorance and powerlessness in the face of nature. This, Schliephake concludes, made them more prepared to face the unexpected. However, one might conclude the opposite. If Zeus tells you to prepare for rain, and it does not in fact rain, wouldn’t you be less ready to face that contingency?
In Chapter 10, Michael Flower adopts an ontological perspective. He eschews theories about the functioning of the oracle in etic terms, the kinds of theories that have been the subject of most of the previous chapters. He suggests instead that we take seriously what the Greeks themselves thought they were doing. The more extreme version of the ontological perspective, Flower acknowledges, would require him to accept the existence of the Greek gods. With some reluctance, he opts instead for a milder version, to understand the oracle in purely emic terms. In light of the myriad modern theories we have read, this is a change of pace and a worthwhile exercise.
For the scholar of Greek religion, this volume offers a buffet of new approaches. The scholar may want to take up some of them and to leave others. And certainly, anyone who is working on the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona in particular will find something of benefit in this volume.
Authors and titles
Introduction: Contexts and Chronotopes (Esther Eidinow)
Part 1: Sites and Sense
- ‘At a Time When the Temple of Dodonean Zeus Had No Walls’ until the First Century BCE (Eleni Vasileiou)
- Pilgrimage to Dodona: Visibility, Movement, Motivation (Diego Chapinal-Heras)
- What Can the Lead Tell Us? (Hugh Bowden)
- Materialist Insights: The Tablets of Dodona as Objects (Erica Angliker)
- Soundscape and Religious Experience at Dodona (Katerina Kolotourou)
Part II: Consultation and Cognition
- The Lost ‘Instructions for Use’ of the Dodonaean Lamellae (Pierre Bonnechere)
- Master of Clarity: The Utterances of Zeus Dodonaios in Fifth-Century Tragedy (Jessica Piccinini)
- Selves, Self-talk and Stories in the Dodona Oracle Question Tablets (Esther Eidinow)
- The Environmental Dimension of Consultations at Dodona: Negotiating Material Practice, Performing Resilience (Christopher Schliephake)
- Consulting the Oracle at Dodona: An Ontological Perspective (Michael A. Flower)
Notes
[1] Hdt. 2.52.2.
[2] Fontenrose, Joseph. 1978. The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations with a Catalogue of Responses. University of California Press.