Prophecy and policy in Roman Egypt

Numerous questions put to oracles on papyri survive from Egypt. When considered as a corpus, these provide the opportunity to observe the extent to which religion entered into the Roman administration's relations with the provincial population. Divination had a long and politicized history in Rome. Observable changes in the method and function of the Egyptian oracle questions at significant points during Roman rule indicate that the traditional connection between divination and political legitimacy could and did inform Roman official behaviour regarding the religious practices of the provincial population. This conclusion is of particular interest within the context of Roman relations with Egypt. Roman presence in that province is generally considered to have had little impact upon the religious traditions of the local population prior to sometime in the third century AD, when economic difficulties finally took a drastic toll on the temples. The evidence of the oracle questions suggests on the contrary that Roman presence affected the nature and function of Egyptian divination immediately upon annexation, and again at the end of the second century AD.;Though the method of divination under consideration had a long tradition in Egypt and evidence of it survives in many languages, the Roman period questions inscribed in Greek are the primary focus of this study. Texts, translations, and bibliographic information for these are provided in the Appendix. The first chapter traces the Egyptian tradition of this type of oracular inquiry, and describes the differences perceptible in it during the Roman period. The contexts in which these changes are to be understood are described with the aid of contemporary literary evidence and archaeological finds in the subsequent four chapters, which are organized chronologically. These contexts, in turn, provide information about the important and continued role divination played in Roman definitions of legitimate authority in the first three centuries AD.