Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Preliminary Material / Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter T. Struck -- DIVINING DIVINATION / Sarah Iles Johnston -- SIGNS, COMMANDS, AND KNOWLEDGE: ANCIENT DIVINATION BETWEEN ENIGMA AND EPIPHANY / Walter Burkert -- ROLLING THE DICE FOR AN ANSWER / Fritz Graf -- CHRISTIAN DIVINATION IN LATE ROMAN GAUL: THE SORTES SANGALLENSES / William E. Klingshirn -- SORTE UNICA PRO CASIBUS PLURIBUS ENOTATA LITERARY TEXTS AND LOT INSCRIPTIONS AS SOURCES FOR ANCIENT KLEROMANCY / Cristiano Grottanelli -- DIVINATION AND LITERARY CRITICISM? / Peter T. Struck -- CHRESMOLOGUES AND MANTEIS: INDEPENDENT DIVINERS AND THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY / John Dillery -- VOICES, BOOKS, AND DREAMS: THE DIVERSIFICATION OF DIVINATION MEDIA IN LATE ANTIQUE EGYPT / David Frankfurter -- NECROMANCY GOES UNDERGROUND: THE DISGUISE OF SKULL- AND CORPSE-DIVINATION IN THE PARIS MAGICAL PAPYRI (PGM IV 1928-2144) / Christopher A. Faraone -- DELPHI AND THE DEAD / Sarah Iles Johnston -- INDEX LOCORUM / Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter T. Struck -- SUBJECT INDEX / Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter T. Struck.

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This book thoroughly revisits divination as a central phenomenon in the lives of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. It collects studies from many periods in Graeco-Roman history, from the Archaic period to the late Roman, and touches on many different areas of this rich topic, including treatments of dice oracles, sortition in both pagan and Christian contexts, the overlap between divination and other interpretive practices in antiquity, the fortunes of independent diviners, the activity of Delphi in ordering relations with the dead, the role of Egyptian cult centers in divinatory practices, and the surreptitious survival of recipes for divination by corpses. It also reflects a ranges of methodologies, drawn from anthropology, history of religions, intellectual history, literary studies, and archaeology, epigraphy, and paleography. It will be of particular interest to scholars and student of ancient Mediterranean religions.