By David Potter
To the sensible smooth brain, the assumption of divine prophecy is extra ludicrous than chic. but to our cultural forebears in old Greece and Rome, prophecy used to be something yet marginal; it used to be in truth the fundamental medium for recalling major previous occasions and expressing hopes for the longer term, and it provided insurance that divinities actually cared approximately mere mortals. Prophecy additionally served political ends, and it used to be usually invoked to aid or condemn an emperor's activities. In Prophets and Emperors, David Potter indicates us how prophecy labored, the way it may perhaps empower, and the way the varied population of the Roman Empire used it to make experience in their global.
it is a interesting account of prophecy as a social, spiritual, and political phenomenon. many of the structures of prophecy--including sacred books, oracles, astrological readings, interpretation of desires, the sayings of holy males and women--come into sharp aid. Potter explores using prophecy as a nieans of ancient research and political verbal exchange, and he describes it within the context of the traditional urban. ultimately, he lines the reformation of the prophetic culture less than the impact of Christianity within the fourth century.
Drawing on assorted evidence--from inscriptions and old prophetic books to Greek and Roman historians and the Bible--Potter has produced a learn that might have interaction somebody drawn to the religions of the traditional Mediterranean and within the background and politics of the Roman Empire.
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Additional info for Prophets and Emperors: Human and Divine Authority from Augustus to Theodosius
Sample text
INSPIRED ORACLES Continuity between the pagan and Christian empires was lacking in the consultation of oracles at centers where the prophet was thought to be directly inspired by a god at the moment of the consultation, or where the god appeared in a dream or influenced the behavior of some divinatory substance. In the case of "inspired" oracles, the prophet's inspiration could occur either because the prophet's mind was especially prepared to receive images placed in it by the god, or because the god took actual physical possession of the prophet and either spoke through the prophet's mouth or compelled the prophet to speak.
Had not followed these rites and he had died when he descended into the oracular chamber). At each sacrifice a priest inspected the entrails of the animals to make sure that the process could continue. 6). If the sacrifice was propitious, the consultant was taken to the river Hercyna by two thirteen-year-old boys (of citizen birth) w h o washed him and anointed him with oil. After this the priests took him to a fountain, where he was given a draught of the "water of forgetfulness" and was shown an image made by Daedalus, the architect of the Labyrinth, before being led to the oracle in the special clothes that he had donned.
51 T h e "mainstream" philosophic view of dream prediction, enunciated most clearly in Stoic thought was that in sleep the mind might travel free of the body to make contact with the divine. Artemidorus divides dreams into predictive and nonpredictive varieties (On. 1), and argues that predictive dreams result f r o m a m o v e m e n t of the mind, which is able to predict everything that will happen in the future. T h e mind does this " t h r o u g h images of its own, called elements, which are natural products" (On.