The Greek oracle in the age of written producibility: the crisis of mantic authority by Aristophanes’ Birds (960-996)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the intruder chresmologe’s scene by Birds (960-996), by reconsidering the worth of Old Comedy as a source for historical inquiry. This interpretation focuses on the oracular practice as technology, as written production, based on religious authority. In this way, two fields, like Old Comedy and Greek divination, are analyzed together, a relation not usually developed in Classical Studies. Moreover, with the aim of showing the critical situation of the oracular institution during the Peloponnesian War, I reconstruct other perspectives about the same phenomena from other authors, like Thucydides or Demosthenes. So, it enables us to understand not only the «comic» representation of divination, but also the oracular practice as a specific technology and how it can be manipulated.