Imprudent Expertise
- sofiapbaker
- May 31, 2020
- 1 min read
Human beings have always yearned to know the future, and there have always been other human beings who claimed they could predict it. The ancient Greeks consulted the sibyls, female oracles of great age who under divine inspiration uttered verses given them by the gods of the famous shrines they served. All religions of the book have had their millenarian preachers and visionaries who thought they could discern God’s plan for the future in scripture. The Romans, a superstitious lot, would never dream of undertaking an important action without first taking the auspices from the flight of birds or seeking omens in the entrails of animals. They had an enormous vocabulary for the apparatus of prognostication. The joke at my high school’s annual classics bee was that, if you didn’t know the word in Greek, it meant “pain or suffering.” If you didn’t know the word in Latin, it meant “entrails.” We regarded this difference as a deep insight into Greco-Roman culture…