Author: Padilla Peralta, Dan-El
Title: Ecology, epistemology, and divination in Cicero De divinatione 1.90-94
Review/Collection: "Arethusa" 51, 2018
Year edition: 2018
Pages: 237-267
Keywords: Religion - Religione - Religion
Description: [Abstract APh] Cicero, Div. 1, 90-94 foregrounds the interplay between divination and nature. The passage illustrates how Romans came to recognize that ethnic variations in divinatory practice embodied culturally contingent ways of knowing and that these different ways were rooted in ecological phenomena. By the last few decades of the Roman Republic, some practitioners of divination were thinking about the association between forms of divinatory expertise and the distinctive natural landscapes scattered over the Mediterranean. Such thinking was premised on the perception that different ecological niches prompted the development of different competencies, a belief that owed much to discourses of religious expertise in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds that adduced the features of local environments as explanations for certain kinds of ritual knowledge.
Works:
Author initials: Padilla 2018
Title: Ecology, epistemology, and divination in Cicero De divinatione 1.90-94
Review/Collection: "Arethusa" 51, 2018
Year edition: 2018
Pages: 237-267
Keywords: Religion - Religione - Religion
Description: [Abstract APh] Cicero, Div. 1, 90-94 foregrounds the interplay between divination and nature. The passage illustrates how Romans came to recognize that ethnic variations in divinatory practice embodied culturally contingent ways of knowing and that these different ways were rooted in ecological phenomena. By the last few decades of the Roman Republic, some practitioners of divination were thinking about the association between forms of divinatory expertise and the distinctive natural landscapes scattered over the Mediterranean. Such thinking was premised on the perception that different ecological niches prompted the development of different competencies, a belief that owed much to discourses of religious expertise in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds that adduced the features of local environments as explanations for certain kinds of ritual knowledge.
Works:
Author initials: Padilla 2018
