Hagesias as Sunoikistēr

This chapter reveals what happens when a seer is included in a foundation and the poetic maneuvers required to effect this incorporation. I consider both the broader historical and political significance of Pindar’s description of the seer Hagesias in Olympian 6 as a sunoikistêr (cofounder) as well as how Hagesias’s double role (as both a seer and a sunoikistêr) is handled within Pindar’s poetics. By praising Hagesias in the ode as an athletic victor, seer, and sunoikistêr, Pindar marks Hagesias as a figure who enjoys enormous ritual power. Insofar as he characterizes the seer as a sunoikistêr, however, Pindar also introduces an uneasy element of competition into Hagesias’s relationship with his own patron, Hieron, the self-proclaimed oikist of Aitna.

Suppressing the Seer in Colonial Discourse

Chapter 3 interrogates the startling excision of seers from later archaic and classical colonial discourse. This chapter offers two fundamental reasons for the missing seer. First, I argue that in post-Homeric colonial narratives, the oikist, singled out by Apollo at Delphi, co-opts the religious authority enjoyed elsewhere by the seer. Second, I survey a general cultural tendency to regard the seer in the context of the city with suspicion. The stereotype of the seer as a threat to political leaders makes his incorporation in a discourse that valorizes the oikist unwelcome.

Amphiaraos, Alkmaion, and Delphi’s Oracular Monopoly

Chapter 6 demystifies Delphi’s oracular monopoly in colonial discourse. An investigation of the myth of Alkmaion, found in sources such as Thucydides, Diodorus Siculus, and Ps.-Apollodorus, discloses Delphi’s active production of colonial founders and its simultaneous suppression of the individual seer within foundation discourses. In contrast, Pindar’s Pythian 8 promotes the relationship between Amphiaraos and his son and, uniquely among our extant sources, asserts Alkmaion’s own powers of prophecy. What both the dominant mythic tradition of Alkmaion and Pythian 8 share, however, is conceiving of the seer and oikist as mutually exclusive.

Introduction

The introduction sets up the paradox of the conspicuous military seer and the absent colonial one within archaic and classical texts and proposes an ideological reason for the discrepancy. Definitions of key terms (text, culture, ideology, and colonial discourse) and method (New Historicist) are presented. The book’s objectives are then placed in relation to previous scholarship on colonization, colonial narrative, and Greek seers and divination. A subsection offers an overview of the Greek seer for those readers unfamiliar with the seer’s primary functions and role in ancient Greek culture.

Conclusion

The conclusion considers how colonial discourse’s pattern of suppressing the seer breaks down once we move temporally and spatially beyond the orbit of Delphi’s powerful oracular monopoly. Accounts of Hellenistic foundations reveal seers working in tandem with oikists. At the same time, foundation oracles from Delphi disappear after the fourth century BCE. The coincidence suggests that colonial discourse accommodates the seer when Delphi’s centripetal pull on and control over the oikist wanes. Similarly, a survey of traditions concerning the seer Amphilochos’s foundation of Mallos in Cilicia intimate that the seer, operating in the East, was viewed as out of range of Delphi’s control and could, at least for a time, enjoy the paradoxical role of oikist-seer.

Sailing to Sicily

Chapter 2 addresses the partnership between Odysseus and the seer Theoklymenos in the Odyssey. I argue that the seer and the hero operate as a coherent pair within the framework of colonization and that Theoklymenos aids Odysseus-as-oikist in effecting the metaphorical refoundation of Ithaka. Theoklymenos and Odysseus reveal that the pairing of the seer and oikist is a possible and productive construct. Yet Homer’s presentation of Theoklymenos as a doublet of Odysseus also suggests the potential for competition between the seer and oikist in post-Homeric foundation tales.

Beyond Entrails and Omens

Chapter 1 considers Herodotus’s characterization of the seer Teisamenos as a “leader of wars” and uncovers a cultural tendency to regard military seers as conduits of talismanic power. The chapter demonstrates how seers were recruited for warfare not only for their ability to interpret omens but also because they were seen to possess a talismanic power that guaranteed victory. Understanding seers in this new light allows us to identify the ways in which they intersect with other talismanic figures similarly characterized, including oikists.

The Disappearance of Melampous in Bacchylides’ Ode 11

Chapter 4 reads Bacchylides’s Ode 11 as a specific example of the ideological suppression of the seer in colonial discourse. In his rendition of the myth of the Proitids, Bacchylides deliberately omits the seer Melampous and, at the same time, casts Proitos’s arrival in Tiryns as a foundation, with Proitos himself as its oikist. The chapter concludes with a connection between this strategy within the ode and its tantalizing historical context. The ode appears to be part of the family of the victor’s larger effort to resist a virtual refoundation of their city by a seer-like figure.