Literary Traditions about Bacis’ Oracles from Herodotus to Pausanias

Abstract

The contribution aims to analyse all the testimonies that constitute the Greek literary tradition on Bacis, one of the best-known chresmologoi mentioned in the sources, starting with the two testimonies that provide the most significant information on him and report direct quotations from his oracles: Herodotus and Pausanias. The two authors, though at a distance, offer a positive portrait of the diviner, contrasting with a more devaluative tradition, which, in the Attic context, is initiated by both Aristophanes’ invective and judgments of Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, in the wake of a more general hostility towards mantic not related to the Delphic sanctuary.