Making Sense of Chaos

Abstract

Periods of civil war were greatly disruptive to Roman society, and the populace evidently sought to make sense of these upheavals in different ways, including through narratives involving various types of divination, which were employed to predict and explain the rise and fall of individual leaders and dynasties. This chapter analyses a group of such stories which concern trees acting in peculiar ways, such as dying and miraculously recovering, or springing up in portentous locations. Arboreal portents apparently foretold the victory of Octavian in the wars of the Triumviral period, and later, Vespasian in the conflicts of 68–9 CE, as well as predicting the particular Julio-Claudian and Flavian successors who would follow them. Rather than seeing such tales as simply the product of ‘top-down’ Augustan or Flavian propaganda, it is suggested that they were the product of a wider divinatory worldview, which was built upon a tradition stretching back into the Republic, and was fundamental to the way in which many Romans sought to comprehend social and political change. Such stories could be generated for a range of reasons, and by a range of authors. They often took on a life of their own, and were altered or updated over time. Adopting such a perspective when approaching Roman divination modifies our understanding of the relationship between ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ during the late Republic, Triumviral period, and early Principate.