The Seer in Ancient Greece

Michael Attyah Flower's The Seer in Ancient Greece, published by the University of California Press in 2008, is a scholarly study of the mantis, the professional Greek diviner, examining the hereditary seer families, a seer's working place within an army on campaign, and the practical relationship between seers and the commanders who retained them. Flower draws on inscriptions, historical narrative and the seer families' own recorded genealogies rather than treating divination as a purely literary or mythological topic. Its strength is that grounded, institutional approach to a role usually discussed only through isolated anecdotes. Its limit is that the evidence is concentrated in a small number of well documented seer families and campaigns, chiefly from Classical era warfare, so a claim about divination practice outside that military and aristocratic context, in ordinary household religion for instance, needs a different kind of source.