In this book, Michael Lipka aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic approach to Greek oracular texts. A wide array of literary and epigraphic evidence, spread over a millennium (from approximately the fifth century BCE to fifth century CE) and from Egypt to Asia Minor and Italy, are brought into consideration. His approach seeks to highlight their “conceptual and formal unity and patternization, as well as their meaningful diversity” (1). The endeavor is worthwhile. As Lipka notes, the studies of first resort on oracular texts have tended to collect and analyze those attributed to the most prominent oracular sanctuaries in discrete volumes. This habit has limited broader comparative work that might be done and somewhat sidelined the oracles of less prominent provenance, like the collections of Musaeus and Bacis. For this reason, Lipka’s study of Greek oracular texts is a welcome attempt at a broader view. However, while some of his findings are useful, aspects of his approach seem imprecise or applied inconsistently to the evidence.
In Lipka’s approach, there are two chief distinctions to be made in dealing with oracular texts. The first is between “prose oracles” (Type A) and “poetically amplified responses” (Type B). The second distinction between “institutional” and “non-institutional” oracles he makes with greater caution—the difference here concerns whether the ancient sources attribute an oracle, for example, to an oracular sanctuary like Didyma or to a chresmologue or oracle collection. He then analyzes oracular texts according to their attributions (e.g., Delphic or Dodonaean) as he notes finer variations and commonalities in form, phraseology, and use in contexts. The stated point of the book is to illustrate the utility of this approach as a method of analysis for all Greek oracular texts. However, Lipka also takes a diachronic view that he uses to speculate in the end about how these differences in oracular texts developed.
Lipka begins the body of his work with treatments of the form and language of oracular pronouncements. In chapter one, he usefully details the variety of meters found in Type B responses. Here, he concludes that there is no strong evidence prior to the Hellenistic period for the poetic amplification of non-Delphic oracles and that oracular verse becomes common elsewhere and more complicated in form thereafter. Lipka then compares oracular pronouncements with respect to their prominent verbal formulas (e.g., “But whenever…”), themes (e.g., reproachful address), and motifs (e.g., animal imagery) in chapter two. Apart from the relatively “inconspicuous form” of Type A responses, he observes that post-Hellenistic Type B responses appear to have adopted their phraseology from and developed it beyond Delphic responses of earlier periods. Next, there are two chapters on historical concerns. The earlier covers the evidence for oral transmission and textual recording and archiving of oracular texts. The latter focuses on what may be known about the priests and priestesses as well as legendary and historical seers to whom oracles are attributed in the sources. In chapter five, Lipka explains the different narrative uses to which Herodotus and Thucydides put oracles according to their interests in oracular meaning and human psychology, respectively. The next part of the book examines special sets of oracles—the so-called theological oracles (chapter six), the lot and alphabet oracles from Asia Minor (chapter seven), and the Sibylline Books used in Rome (chapter eight)—on questions about their origins, transmission, and historical use. The last chapter examines the appearance of oracles in Latin literature. On this point, Lipka argues that the poetically amplified responses conformed to Greek models and, therefore, did not exist in Italy independently from Greek tradition. An epilogue closes the main body of the book by presenting a brief diachronic account of developments to the forms, utilities, and documentation of oracular texts. Lipka rounds out the volume with a seventy-page appendix that provides a Greek text and facing English translation for thirty oracular texts that are important to his discussion and less available to readers without access to research libraries.
The juxtaposition of evidence so far ranging in time and place is thought-provoking. His diachronic analysis of this evidence allows him to see the transmission of oracular texts as more fluid than has been appreciated. While some recent scholars have tended to view the transmission of oracular texts within the theoretical model of oral tradition, Lipka thinks of them as passing between oral and textual traditions without clear linear paths. This model provides a more realistic view of transmission and calls for more case-specific explanations for how individual oracles came to be recorded differently. Some of Lipka’s specific examples of transmission illustrate how an approach like his could be employed with benefit. One such case involves what Lipka calls a “floating set piece” of three hexameter lines that was given with expansions, omissions, and substitutions in Lactantius, an inscription from Oenoanda, and the Tübingen Theosophy, depending on the religious commitments of its recorders.
There are, however, some serious issues with Lipka’s work. There is a growing sense in recent scholarship that oracles are profitably studied apart from the disputes about their authenticity and historicity.[1] Lipka aligns himself with this position when he refers to such disputes as a “futile academic exercise,” and he aims to “avoid the notion of ‘authentic / historical’” (4–5) in view of their formal and thematic unity and equivalent divine status in the minds of the ancients. Thus, he would initially appear intent on studying Greek oracular texts not so much as they bear upon historical practices but as they reflect a certain mentality. But his occasional movements into diachronic analysis and sustained discussions of mantic mechanisms and oracular authorship raise issues closely tied to authenticity and historicity. His “poetically amplified responses” and correlation of these with “intentional history” would appear to take for granted that verse is inauthentic/unhistorical as an original form.[2] Therefore, it is not surprising that Lipka does dispute the authenticity of certain verse oracle when doing so can serve a point of argument (e.g., Dem. 21.52, and the Zenecetes inscription from Dodona). He gives some nuance to his views when he says that the author of verse responses from Delphi “could of course have been the Pythia” (71, see also 90) but dismisses this possibility as “uneconomical.” But his supposition that even a “travel guide” could have improvised verse oracles actually clears the way for the traditional depiction of the Pythiae. Lipka then claims that the extant Delphic hexameter and iambic oracles may be explained as resulting from lot divination along the same lines as divinatory sortition known from Asia Minor in the Roman Imperial period (discussed further at 138–9). In this case, it would seem that the verses assigned to random throws of dice would actually be considered original and authentic divine responses in the divinatory ritual. For these reasons, it is unclear to me why “poetically amplified” is the most apt way to characterize the evidence in this classification. This confusion is compounded further by Lipka’s suggestion that verse oracles might have been turned to prose in transmission (65). On all these points, a treatment of the fifth-century Cypriot ostracon bearing poetic and prose versions of the same oracle might have offered an opportunity to address and clarify the issue more directly.[3] For Lipka, the question of authenticity/historicity becomes an important and necessary one, but it seems to be at odds with his stated principles and broad framing of oracular texts.
Another issue is that Lipka’s analysis is not as fine as it could be. The distinction between prose and verse oracles seems simple enough, but what Lipka labels “prose oracles” are often indirect reports: “The god said that….” This point is clearest in his discussion of the Mnesiepes inscription (15–16, 170–4) where he finds the different types of oracles (A and B) side by side. A closer analysis reveals that Lipka is not dealing directly with different “types” of oracles but with different modes used to report oracles. To be fair, it is a valid and familiar interpretation in the field to think that indirect reports are basically direct quotations of oracles mutatis mutandis. But such a treatment ignores the fact that an indirect report may also be a better reflection of how a reporter understood something than how it was actually said. Lipka himself observes the problem in his treatment of prose paraphrases of verse oracles in Herodotus, but he does not seem to take it as a challenge to his classification. A finer analysis in terms of the modes of report, though, might have fostered a deeper appreciation of the unity of oracular texts and give some helpful nuance to his explanation for their diversity.
Lipka presents a systematic way of analyzing oracular texts in ancient sources. What is new here is not so much the categories of analysis (verse/prose, institutional/non-institutional) or the observation of phraseological similarities,[4] but the application of these categories and observations to a much broader array of evidence than is usually brought together in a book. The short length of the book (about 140 pages in the main body) requires him to look at his evidence synoptically and to refer to them abridgedly, but specialists and non-specialists will appreciate Lipka’s wide-angle view of oracular texts.
Notes
[1] E.g., Gagné, “Poétiques de la chrèsmodie,” Kernos 26 (2013); Kindt, Revisiting Delphi (2016).
[2] Lipka draws on Gehrke for “intentional history,” which effectively a group’s socially constructed view of its history. See Gehrke, “Myth, History, and Collective Identity,” in The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus.
[3] Meister, Ein Ostrakon aus dem Heiligtum des Zeus Epikoinios im kyprischen Salamis (1909). It was discussed most recently by Rosenberger (Griechische Orakel [2001], 173) and Dillon (Omens and Oracles [2017], 332–3), who hold opposite views about which are the words of the original oracle.
[4] See, e.g., Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle (1978).