Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy by Hugh Bowden

Aug 11, 2006 Alun The Past 1 Comment Ancient History, Athens, Book, Classics, Delphi, Greece, Hugh Bowden, Review

Also pos­ted to Revise and Dis­sent.

Athens is the city that gave the world demo­cracy. While the idea has been inher­ited, the real­ity was rather dif­fer­ent to a mod­ern demo­cracy. In ancient Athens all the cit­izens voted on the laws, whereas these days people vote for people who vote for the laws. Or even vote for the per­son who will uni­lat­er­ally decide the laws for them­selves. While that might make Athens more demo­cratic, in some ways Athens was also less free. Cer­tainly all the cit­izens voted but so be a cit­izen you had to be male, quite old and the son of Athenian par­ents. If your par­ents were slaves or met­ics (res­id­ent for­eign­ers or Atheni­ans deprived of cit­izen status) then you had no vote. A lot of these dif­fer­ences are the meat and drink of usual stud­ies into ancient demo­cracy. But it wasn’t just the human world which was viewed dif­fer­ently, so was the divine. This is the sub­ject Bowden’s book Clas­sical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divin­a­tion and Demo­cracy exam­ines, the rela­tion­ship between the will of the Gods and the will of the people in ancient Athens. Spe­cific­ally he looks at the will of Apollo as it was revealed by the Delphic Oracle. The intro­duc­tion makes the case for doing this well:

What is the rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and demo­cracy? More pre­cisely, to what extent should reli­gious con­sid­er­a­tions affect the decisions taken by cit­izens in a demo­cracy? In the mod­ern world it is gen­er­ally thought that reli­gion and polit­ics occupy, or should occupy, two dif­fer­ent spheres. Reli­gion may pro­mote moral good­ness, and moral good­ness may be con­sidered desir­able in a com­munity, but the idea of giv­ing pref­er­ence to the divine will — how­ever it is estab­lished — over the will of the people — as revealed by a vote — would be seen as fun­da­ment­ally undemo­cratic. This under­stand­ing per­vades not only approaches to mod­ern demo­cra­cies, but also the study of demo­cracy in the ancient world.

For the rest of the book Bowden shows how this can­not be the case for the ancient world. In world where the Gods are thought to umbrage and exact revenge in unpleas­ant ways it’s a brave ruler to defies them.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of ima­gin­a­tion to think about the role of reli­gion in mod­ern polit­ics at the moment. Usu­ally match­ing ancient Greek reli­gion with mod­ern fun­da­ment­al­ism would make a clas­si­cist wince. The idea of fun­da­ment­al­ism is that there is a canon­ical will of the God(s) which can be known. Greek reli­gion in con­trast had no core texts, but Bowden makes a couple of very good points. One is that fun­da­ment­al­ism is about the prac­tice of reli­gion. It is pos­sible to debate the finer points of reli­gion with a fun­da­ment­al­ist, so long as you fol­low the prac­tices. If you’re a woman for instance you’d have to cover your head, stay silent and not express any opin­ions. Which is very sim­ilar to the ideal­ised pos­i­tion of women in ancient Greece. Bowden says that Greek reli­gion was also about prac­tice of reli­gion and notes Mar­garet Attwood’s fun­da­ment­al­ist Chris­tian state in A Handmaid’s Tale is sim­ilar to the ancient Greeks in their treat­ment of women. He’s not arguing that Greeks were fun­da­ment­al­ists, but that there other ways of think­ing about how reli­gion inter­acts with demo­cracy. This is all from the first couple of pages of the intro­duc­tion.

The first chapter tackles the prob­lem of how the Oracle worked. This is argu­ably the most reknowned reli­gious site in ancient Greece (some people would say Olympia). This is a prob­lem because sur­pris­ingly little inform­a­tion sur­vives about how the oracle oper­ated. That wouldn’t nor­mally be sur­pris­ing. There’s not a lot known about the Eleusin­ian Mys­ter­ies either, but the thing about the Eleusin­ian Mys­ter­ies is that they were a secret cult, so it was con­sidered impi­ous to dis­cuss it. Delphi on the other hand had no such restric­tions, so why do we know so little? The best guess I think is from Parke who said that the method of the Oracle was so well known that there was no need to spe­cific­ally doc­u­ment it.

Bowden makes a strong case that the Oracle remained polit­ic­ally neut­ral dur­ing its oper­a­tion. In his descrip­tion he makes clear that there could have been too many ran­dom­ising factors to sus­tain a spe­cific polit­ical pro­gramme and there would be little to gain from doing so. He also chal­lenges the notion that Delphi’s influ­ence peaked in the sixth cen­tury BC and from then the sanc­tu­ary entered a grace­ful decline. This, he argues, is based on a read­ing of Hero­dotus which isn’t sup­por­ted by other sources. There may be a desire to see the rise of ‘rational’ polit­ics in the clas­sical period, but there is no cor­res­pond­ing decline in reli­gious practices.

Chapter Two asks What did the Atheni­ans think of the Delphic Oracle? and chapter Three What did His­tor­i­ans and Philo­sphers say about the Delphic Oracle? Both chapters show the influ­ence of the oracle on civic life. Chapter two paints a pic­ture of a city where the Gods are as unavoid­able in civic life as other cit­izens. There are the thou­sands of images known from pot­tery, the ref­er­ences in the plays atten­ded by cit­izens as well as the many fest­ival days. This con­trasts with the more frag­ment­ary view of the Oracle in the texts of the philo­soph­ers and his­tor­i­ans. In the works of Xeno­phon and Thucy­dides Bowden notes there are very few ref­er­ence to the Oracle, cer­tain when com­pared to Hero­dotus. This leads him to con­clude that all the his­tor­ical texts should be treated with cau­tion whether they are effus­ive or silent on the Oracle.

Chapters four and five are How and why did the Atheni­ans con­sult the Delphic oracle and What did the Atheni­ans ask the Delphic oracle? This is a dif­fi­cult ques­tion. If you have people decid­ing actions what do you need the gods for? One example given is whether cer­tain lands on sac­red bound­ar­ies can be farmed. The ancient Greeks like mod­erns talk to the gods, but they also liked the Gods to talk back. He also gives a novel read­ing of the oracles to Themistocles.

With the Per­sians set to invade Athens, the Atheni­ans sent out to the oracle at Delphi for advice. The first response was to flee. The Phocae­ans had already done this leav­ing their city on the shores of Anato­lia to settle in the west­ern Medi­ter­ranean. Themistocles decided this was not an accept­able answer and asked again, to which the oracle replied that they should shel­ter behind the wooden walls. After much debate this was agreed to be a ref­er­ence to the navy. It was through crafty seaman­ship that the Athenian navy defeated the super­ior Per­sian forces.

The puzzle is why send for a second oracle? Bowden argues, with jus­ti­fic­a­tion, that this is an arte­fact of Hero­dotus, the source for the story. Herodotus’s work isn’t his­tory as an impar­tial tale of how things happened. It’s also an effort to cre­ate an epic tale, like those the Greeks were famil­iar with, with known people in the star­ring roles. Split­ting one oracle into two halves increases the dra­matic ten­sion. Bowden argues Hero­dotus got away with it because it flattered the Atheni­ans. On the other hand as well as Father of His­tory he was also known as Father of Lies.

These chapters again illus­trate the import­ance of the super­nat­ural in ancient Greece. Indeed a divi­sion between natural/supernatual is almost cer­tainly ana­chron­istic. In this situ­ation is makes sense for people to con­sult the gods for solu­tions to prob­lems they can­not answer.

The last chapter before the con­clu­sion ini­tially appears to be slightly askew from the oth­ers: Why did the Atheni­ans (and other Greek cit­ies) go to war? This is another insight into how dif­fer­ent ancient soci­ety was. To be a cit­izen was to be a sol­dier. A cit­izen was someone who would fight for his home city, and to be allowed to fight in a city’s army was to be a cit­izen. From this point of view war becomes almost a neces­sity because how else are you to fight along­side your com­rades without a war?

War for the Atheni­ans was a dan­ger­ous busi­ness. If you attacked another city they could fight back, which is not an exper­i­ence famil­iar to all mod­ern demo­cra­cies. The uncer­tainty meant that divine approval was sought on a fre­quent basis, for any sub­stan­tial action. Bowden notes that the two con­stants of life for the Athenian demo­cracy were farm­ing and war — two activ­it­ies in which chance played a large part.

The con­clu­sion neatly draws this all together. It is tempt­ing to say that a demo­cracy in a state of per­petual war guided by God(s) neatly par­al­lels one or two mod­ern examples. There are sim­il­ar­it­ies, but there are also dif­fer­ences. Bowden notes that the divine doesn’t make much of an appear­ance in the con­sti­tu­tion of mod­ern demo­cra­cies. We might ask God to save the Queen or insist that in God we trust, but these he argues are post-enlightenment addi­tions. They are not part of the roots of the demo­cracy. Athenian reli­gion in con­trast is very dif­fer­ent. Bowden argues that demo­cracy was a means for estab­lish­ing the will of the Gods.

It’s an excel­lent book and afford­able. Occa­sion­ally it can be easy to be lost in spe­cial­isms. I don’t know of any researcher in Athenian Demo­cracy who would say ritual was unim­port­ant, nor of any­one research­ing ancient ritual that would say the polit­ics of a city were irrel­ev­ant. Yet by spe­cial­ising it can be pos­sible to lose this wider view. Ancient reli­gion can be dif­fi­cult to get a grip on. In the clas­sical past it was extremely close to polit­ics in its prac­tice. This book is a fant­astic demon­stra­tion of how closely the two were inter­twined. It’s also well-written, well-referenced and well-indexed. In the lat­ter case there’s an intel­li­gible index of the ancient pas­sages he uses to make his case as well as the stand­ard index.

You can also read a review of the book at BMCR.