Review of E. Eidinow, Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks
(2008) BMCR — Vol. 2008.01.14, n° 2008.01.14, p. Online (2008)
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- Authors
- Abstract
- Esther Eidinow’s Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks, a revised version of her Oxford dissertation (2003) supervised by Robert Parker, analyzes ancient Greek perceptions of risk through the archaeological evidence for the who, what, where, and why of oracle consultation at Dodona and for the use of curse tablets ( katadesmoi). E. utilizes the archaeological record to clarify what importance these practices held for their individual practitioners. For E., oracle consultation and curse writing represent flip sides of the same coin: in general, individuals used oracles to reinforce pre-determined choices, i.e. to ignore risk, and wrote curses to shield themselves from potential future harm (p. 5). Both, E. argues, were tools used by Greek men and women of various socio-economic classes to manage “aspects of the uncertainty and risk of everyday life” (p. 4). Though much research has been done on oracles, especially at Delphi, E. concentrates on the Dodonan oracle, for which the archaeological record of oracular questions is much more robust than elsewhere. And though scholars such as D. Jordan, D. Obbink, C.A. Faraone, and D. Ogden have recently written on curse writing, E. employs and reanalyzes the curse corpus through the prism of risk in places where she believes that modern analysis has tended to interpret curses anachronistically or too creatively. E.’s obvious fluency with and passion for the material makes this book both useful and enjoyable, and this book is commendable for bringing business-like clarity, academic sophistication, and novelistic empathy to this highly diverse material.
- Affiliations
Clare College Cambridge
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2008). Review of E. Eidinow, Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks. BMCR, 2008.01.14(2008.01.14), Online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100954 (Original work published 2008)