The explananda can for instance take the form of religious rituals, names of cities, remarkable shapes in the landscape, or the names of constellations.

What is aetiology? Aetiological stories usually work by explaining, in a story situated in the (far) past, how something the reader can observe in his or her contemporary world, has come into being. This may help explain why the two often occur together.Ģ Prophecy and Aetiology in Ancient Divination Secondly, following Struck, I will argue that both prophecy and aetiology are related to allegorical speech in that they both, in their different ways, proceed by providing a symbolic representation of ‘truth’. In particular I will ask: what do these narrative forms aim at, and how do they reach their goal? This involves a look at ancient divinatory practices. In order to do so, I will look into the structure of aetiology and prophecy as narrative modes, or Denkformen. I start by addressing the question why aetiology and prophecy seemingly ‘belong together’ in the ancient mind. Is it possible that precisely these structural similarities caused their frequent coupling in ancient literature? In particular I wish to address the issue of how the form and style of aetiological narratives and prophecies provoked similar interpretive responses in audiences. In this chapter, however, I would like to take a step back, away from the modern point of view and from the functional, rhetorical approach, and rather ask whether we can identify the structural characteristics that link prophecy (both actual and ex eventu) and aetiology. As a rhetorical strategy it lacks subtlety, to say the least, and we would no longer buy into it. Of course, Auden has a point: to people who no longer believe in superhuman entities such as the Olympian gods, or an overarching Providence that steers world history, it seems crudely manipulative to stage divine guarantors of present glory in fictions about the far past. Auden termed this procedure ‘hindsight as foresight’ in his poem Secondary Epic (1959), 2 in which he criticizes its use as found in Vergil’s Aeneid (in particular in the scene of the manufacturing of Aeneas’ shield in book 8 and in the prophecies of Anchises in the underworld in book 6): Later, Hellenistic poets take over this poetical device and use it for their own purposes, but a central function of such passages remains the embedding of some kind of ideological claim (possibly of an innovative kind, as Harder shows) by means of an authoritative speaker represented as prophesying with foresight out of the past. Both in the Ion (1581–1588) and in the Supplices (1191–1195) the goddess Athena enters the stage near the end and prophesies a future that is meant to forecast the present of the Athenian audience watching the tragedy. This can take the form of so-called ex eventu prophecies by a deus ex machina in tragedy, as Harder illustrates with examples from Euripidean tragedy. As Annette Harder shows in her contribution to this volume, aetiological stories are often used to anchor innovations in the present: “Sometimes we see that a new or future institution in the present is linked to an aetiological story from the past and presented as sanctioned by these events, as if it were a continuation of something that had been predicted a long time ago or had in some way been there all the time”, as she phrases it.

Prophecy loot table