critical understanding of "lover’s gift regained" story motif

A story motif commonly known as “lover’s gift regained” is widely attested in Europe from the thirteenth century. That motif would be better called “man avoids paying for sex with woman.”[1] The motif transgresses entrenched gender asymmetries in sexual value and reverse commonly observed sex differences in guile. Sparkling amid the stories containing this motif is Decameron VIII.2. Using myth for good, Decameron VIII.2 ends in sexual mutuality and happiness.

Gender inequality in the socially constructed sexual value of men and women is deeply entrenched. Men paying women for sex has been prevalent historically. Women paying men for sex is much more rare. Even with intense public concern for gender equality today, women almost never take the initiative to ask men out, and, if not rejected, pay for dinner and entertainment. That gender inequality supports a society of female entitlement and female privilege.

Some men have temporarily subverted a requirement to pay a woman for sex. Consider a story written early in the thirteenth century:

A clerk rutted with a nobleman’s wife for the price of his cloak
and secretly carried away her pepper-mill.
The next day he returned, bringing back the pepper-mill, and in the husband’s presence
he said, “Give me back my cloak; I bring back your pepper-mill.”
“Give it to him,” the husband said. The wife answered, “I will give it to him,
but he will not grind again in our pepper-mill.”

{ Militis uxorem clamidis mercede subegit
Clericus, et piperis clam tulit inde molam.
Mane redit, referensque molam praesente marito,
Dixit, “mantellum redde, reporto molam.”
“Redde,” maritus ait: respondit foemina “reddam:
Amplius ad nostram non molit ille molam.” } [2]

While recognizing the fundamental gender inequality in men being cuckolded, this story shows the clerk to be superior in guile to the nobleman’s wife. The clerk implicitly created the fiction that he had left his cloak with the woman as security when borrowing her pepper-mill. That would explain his ability to request an exchange in the presence of her husband. The clerk’s fiction allowed him to avoid paying for sex with his cloak.

The nobleman’s wife, though tricked in that particular affair, re-affirmed dominant values. Her response allegorically declared that the clerk would not have sex with her again: “he will not grind again in our pepper-mill.” With the pronoun “our,” she underscored the false beliefs associated with cuckoldry. She also affirmed that her having sex with the clerk was contingent on her getting his cloak. The clerk subverted gender inequality in sexual value, but only temporarily.

mortar and pestle as means for lover's gift regained

Giovanni Boccaccio, a great humanist, took the motif “man avoids paying for sex with woman” a step forward. The first story of Decameron Day VIII features this motif. Neifile, the story-teller, was keen to promote belief that men are equal to women in guile. Her story ends with an affirmation that a clever man can have sex with a woman free of charge. That’s the standard conclusion of the motif.

The second story of Decameron Day VIII adds a mythic ending to the “man avoids paying for sex with woman” motif. In this story, the married woman Belcolore demanded five lire for sex with a priest. The priest gave Belcolore his cloak as security for that sex payment. After having sex with her, the priest sent a boy to borrow a stone mortar from Belcolore. In the evening, one of the priest’s assistants returned with the stone mortar. In the presence of Belcolore’s husband, he asked for the priest’s cloak given in security. Belcolore didn’t want to reveal that the cloak was security not for the borrowed mortar, but for payment for sex. She gave up the cloak and sent a coded message to the priest:

you’ll never pound any more sauce in her mortar again, considering how much you honored her with the one you made this time. [3]

That’s a similar ending to the thirteenth-century Latin story. Boccaccio, who knew well the give-and-take of mercantile society, had the priest send to Belcolore in response the message:

tell her if she won’t lend us her mortar, I’m not going to let her have my pestle.

Boccaccio’s story thus endorses the virtue of gender symmetry.

Boccaccio took his story beyond antagonistic gender symmetry. He added a coda:

Belcolore was furious with the Reverend Father and refused to speak to him right up to the grape harvest. Then, however, after the priest threatened to have her taken down and put into the very mouth of Great Lucifer himself, she got good and scared, and made peace with him over some new wine and roasted chestnuts. From then on, they had more than one good guzzle together, and to make up for the five lire, the priest not only had her tambourine re-covered with a new skin, but had a little bell hung on it, and then she was happy. [4]

The tambourine and the little bell figure Belcolore’s buttocks and the priest’s scrotum. In short, Belcolore and the priest enjoyed together drink and sex. The priest’s masculine sexuality gained value equal to the monetary sex-payment that Belcolore lost. That’s a wonderfully unusual fairy-tale ending.[5]

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Notes:

[1] In Thompson’s categorization, “lover’s gift regained” (man avoids paying for sex with woman) is motif K1581.Thompson (1960 ) v. 4, p. 411.

[2] Verses Concerning the Pepper-Mill {Versus de mola piperis}, Latin text from Wright (1846) vol. 1, p. 167, English translation adapted from Benson & Andersson (1971) p. 281. Id. translates subegit as “seduced.” Because “seduced” tends to carry anti-men connotations that subegit doesn’t, I’ve replace “seduced” with “rutted with” above. Id. describes the manuscript only as being at Trinity College, England.

[3] Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, Day 8, Story 2, from Italian trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 602. The subsequent two quotes are from id.

[4] Dominant ideology buttresses depreciation of men’s sexuality by claiming that reversing lack of receptivity to a man’s sexuality is a fantasy. That itself is a fantasy in service of dominant ideology.

[5] A version of the “man avoids paying for sex with woman” motif, as well as dominant sexual values projected into marriage (wife pays her husband for monetary debt by having sex with him) occur in “The Shipman’s Tale” of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Analogues associated with “The Shipman’s Tale” include Eustache d’Amiens’ “The Butcher of Abbeville {Du Bouchier d’Abevile}” (written in the thirteenth century), Giovanni Sercambi’s “Of Avarice and Lust {De Avaritia e Lussuria}” (early fifteenth century), Poggio’s “Of a peasant man who had a goose for sale {De rustico qui anserem venalem deferebat} (early fifteenth century), “The Priest and the Lady {Du Prestre et de la Dame}” (thirteenth century). Benson & Andersson (1971) provides original language texts and English translations for all these “Shipman’s Tale” analogues.

Ryner (2008) provides additional examples of “lover’s gift regained” mixed in with fashionable moral posing about “commodity fetishism” (monetary transactions, etc.). Critical energy would be much better directed at the current practice of imprisoning men for having consensual sex and being too poor to pay money to women for that sex.

[image] Mortar and pestle made by the Nisenan Maidu of California. Photo © Justin Smith / Wikimedia Commons, CC-By-SA-3.0.

References:

Benson, Larry D., and Theodore M. Andersson. 1971. The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux: texts and translations. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Rebhorn, Wayne A., trans. 2013. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron. New York : W.W. Norton & Company.

Ryner, Bradley D. 2008. “Commodity Fetishism in Richard Brome’s A Mad Couple Well Matched and its Sources.” Early Modern Literary Studies 13.3.

Thompson, Stith. 1960. Motif-index of folk-literature; a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wright, Thomas. 1846. Essays on subjects connected with the literature, popular superstitions and history of England in the Middle Ages. London: John Russell Smith and Adlard Printers.

here marthiya: women’s distinct voice for killing men

marthiya in 20th-century England

“What would you do when someone comes to kill you?” women chanted to men. “We will kill them,” men chanted in response. Then, on September 16, 2014, in a farming village in West Africa, villagers killed eight men from outside the village. The men who were killed came to the village to teach about the health risks of Ebola. The men who were killed were local officials, doctors, journalists, and a popular pastor.[1]

Early Arabic poetry directly faces women inciting men to kill other men. A well-recognized genre of early Arabic poetry is lament for the dead. Such a lament is called marthiya. Among Arabic poets born in the pre-Islamic period, the most famous writer of marthiya is the woman poet al-Khansā. In a marthiya for her brother Sakhr, killed in inter-tribal fighting, al-Khansā described him as “a spearhead whose blade illuminates the night.”[2] Men warriors, particularly those who take on the most dangerous missions, are today also figured as the tip of the spear. They are the point of impact for a weapon that women direct.

Within human social life, and within the social life of primates more generally, women determine the issues of social concern. Women provide the criteria for men’s status competition and judge outcomes. In another marthiya for Sakhr, al-Khansā wrote:

O Sakhr, you were a full moon in which one sought light
The day you died, Glory and Selflessness passed
Today, the hopeful no longer have you to hope for
Now that you’re gone, and the basin of Death is nigh [3]

The image “a full moon in which one sought light” connects through night and light to “a spearhead whose blade illuminates the night.” Glory and selflessness are central measures of Arabic manliness. The criteria of men’s status function to make men instruments. Men provide hope for others’ interests and serve as means for preserving others’ lives.

In her marthiya, al-Khansā isn’t obscure or deferential in ordering men to kill other men. She orders men to cloth themselves for fighting other men. She sets the terms of their mission:

There will be no sleep until the horses return, stern-faced,
flinging and miscarrying fillies and colts
or until you press on, while death draws nigh,
to the homes of Husayn and Ibn Sayyār
so that you wash away a shame that has enclothed you [4]

Her marthiya helps to create that shame. She determines when there will be peace:

I shall not make peace with a people with whom you made war
until the tar-smeared jar turns to white

Men are only the tip of the spear. Men are only those who kill and get killed. Women run the battles.

Social structure affects how women prompt men to kill other men. In the personal politics within early Arabic tribes, women poets urged men to kill other men in response to the killing of a man. In human groups created through a mediated public sphere (impersonal politics), men’s deaths are less socially significant. Media strongly favors reporting sensational crimes against women. The (fabricated) story of a women brutally gang-raped at a University of Virginia fraternity indicates the scope for such reporting.

An Arabic poem probably from the eighteenth century illustrates in different communicative circumstances different imagery for a woman urging men to kill other men. In that poem, a women declares that other men are abusing her:

If only al-Barrāq had an eye to see
the agony and distress I endure …
They fettered me, shackled me, and beat
my chaste area with a stick [5]

The poem ends with her call for war against those other men:

Say to the ʻAdnān, “You’ve been shown the way, tuck up
for retribution from the detested clan
Tie banners in their lands,
unsheathe your swords, and press on in the forenoon”
O Banū Taghlib, press on until victory
leave off the inertia and slumber
Beware: shame is at your heels, upon you
as long as you linger in lowliness

War throughout history has been predominately structured as men killing men. The poem includes an indirect death wish from the woman:

For I abhor your infringement
and the certainty of death is something to desire

In the mid-twentieth century, the first part of this poem had become an anti-colonial song well-known throughout the Arabic world. It was also featured in a popular film. The last couplet of the popular song more broadly invokes death:

Your tyranny disgusts me
My salvation is death [6]

That concluding couplet carries both the voice of the woman and that of her men. Her salvation is in her death or in the death of the other men. Disgust for tyranny spurs her men to welcome death in fighting for her.

Women have a distinct, powerful voice for calling men to kill other men. Gynocentrism and relatively little concern about men’s deaths fundamentally support women’s calls for men to kill other men. In highly monetized and mediated societies, such calls take variant forms such as white-feather campaigns, damseling for dollars, and social-outrage brigading. In early Arabic poetry, women poets were prominently associated with marthiya.[7] That reflects an important, general position of women in social communication. Women’s distress and weeping powerfully motivates men to kill other men.

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Notes:

[1] The killings occurred in Womey, Guinea. The account of the villagers’ words is according to Damantang Albert Camara, a government minister and spokesperson. See Brittain (2015). Id. doesn’t describe the sex of the persons killed. In news reports, that typically means that all the persons killed were men.

[2] al-Khansā, “Eyes, well up with tears,” l. 8, Diwan, 290-302, ed. Abū Suwaylim, from Arabic trans. Hammond (2010) p. 77.

[3] al-Khansā, Diwan, 256, ed. Abū Suwaylim, from Arabic trans. Hammond (2010) p. 5. The Arabic lines are pairs of lines in the above and subsequent quotes.

Gynocentric status competition among men affects men’s sexual prospects. An anecdote concerning the pre-Islamic poet ‘Alqama:

it is said that ‘Alqama was named the stallion poet because he married Umm Jundab when Imru’ al-Qays divorced her after she deemed {‘Alqama’s} poetry superior to his.

Ibn Manzur, Lisan al’arab, f-h-l, from Arabic trans id. p. 34. Being named the stallion poet was a term of masculine honor. The better poet got the woman.

[4] al-Khansā, “Eyes, well up with tears,” l. 22-24a, Diwan, 290-302, ed. Abū Suwaylim, from Arabic trans. Hammond (2010) p. 78. The subsequent quote is from id. l. 10. The order to dress for war is in l. 13:

Fasten your waist-wrappers in order that you are ready and able
and tuck them up for these days are for tucking.

Id. p. 77. A similar figure occurs in the poem “If only al-Barrāq had an eye to see”: “tuck up for retribution.” From Arabic trans. Hammond (2013) p. 224.

[5] “If only al-Barrāq had an eye to see,” ll. 1,4, from Arabic trans. id. p. 223, adapted slightly for clarity. The subsequent two quotes are ll. 14-77; l. 8, id. p. 224.

[6] “If Barrak could see,” ll. 9-10, id. p. 215. The song is ascribed to Laylā bint Lukayz. The song was included in the Egyptian films Laylā al-Badawiyya (Laylā the Bedouin), made in 1944. That film was a remake of a 1937 Egyptian film, Laylā bint al-Sahrā (Laylā daughter of the Desert). Id pp. 215-6.

[7] While early Arabic women poets were particular associated with marthiya, id. convincingly shows that they have also written in a wide variety of Arabic poetic genres from the pre-Islamic period.

Scholars have generally regarded classical Arabic women poets as writing poetry from a “masculine stance.” Id p. 105, n. 12. That’s absurd. Hammond provides a mild dissent from that prevailing view.

[image] illustration for Arnold Bennett, “The White Feather: A Sketch of English Recruiting,” Collier’s Weekly (U.S.), Oct. 10, 1914. Thanks to George Simmer at Great War Fiction. Here’s an essay by George Simmer on white feather stories.

References:

Brittain, Amy. 2015. “The fear of Ebola led to slayings — and a whole village was punished.” Washington Post, February 23, 2015.

Hammond, Marlé. 2010. Beyond elegy: classical Arabic women’s poetry in context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hammond, Marlé. 2013. “‘If only al-Barraq could see’: Violence and Voyeurism in an Early Modern Reformulation of the Pre-Islamic Call to Arms.” Pp. 215-240 in Kennedy, Hugh, ed. Warfare and Poetry in the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris.

ass for lover: failing to distinguish men’s physical masculinity

In classical literature, both Greek and Latin, women favored male asses for their large masculine member. By the Middle Ages, the status of physical masculinity had degenerated. The medieval Latin tale Asinarius figures a woman as preferring the masculine physicality of a man over that of an ass.[1] A leading medieval work of men’s sexed protest, Lamentations of Matheolus, depicts the depreciation of physical masculinity even more starkly. Masculinity was so devalued that Matheolus believed that he couldn’t confidently distinguish between a female ass and a man.

Matheolus was in bed with his wife when her male lover crept under their covers. Matheolus felt that man in their bed in the dark of night and thought he was a thief. He told his wife to hold that thief. Then he jumped out of bed and ran to get a dagger. His wife quickly switched her lover with a female ass. When Matheolus returned, he killed the body she was holding. Then in the light he saw that he had martyred his good ass Burnelle. His wife insisted that his sense of touch was mistaken and that there was never a man under their covers. In response to his wife’s declaration, Matheolus accepted and believed that he couldn’t feel the difference between a female ass and a man.[2] He had internalized the obliteration of masculinity.

Another medieval story affirms Matheolus’s difficulty in sensing the difference between an ass and a man. A merchant had to take many business trips in the traditional, burdensome gender role of men. His wife entertained a lover while her husband the merchant was away on his business. A neighbor informed him of his wife’s affair. The husband then pretended to go on a business trip. He set watch to catch his wife’s lover. Seeing her lover in front of their house, the husband approached unrecognized and claimed that she sent him to hide her lover in a chest in the house. The husband had the lover get into the chest and locked him in. Then he went to his wife’s family and declared her betrayal. He explained:

in order that you shall not say that I blame your daughter without cause, you shall both see and touch the scoundrel who has done us this dishonor, and I beg that he may be killed before he can get away. [3]

The reference to “both see and touch” connects this story to Matheolus’s account.

ass in chest

Seeing and touching don’t matter when persons can’t distinguish between an ass and a man. While the husband was informing his wife’s family of her betrayal, the wife unlocked the chest, released her lover, and replaced him with an ass. The husband brought a crowd armed with swords and hammers back to his house. He publicly accused his wife of adultery. He proposed to kill her lover and send his wife back to her family.[4] His wife denied the charge of adultery. The husband then opened the chest. Everyone saw an ass. Everyone turned on the husband for lying about his wife. If the husband hadn’t fled, his wife’s brothers would have killed him.

With mediation from town officials and strict promises from the husband, his wife’s family relented from killing him. The husband and wife were re-united:

ever after that he was all kindness and consideration, and never did a man conduct himself better to his wife than he did all his life; and thus they passed their days together.

That’s a significantly different ending from “they lived happily ever after.” Not recognizing and appreciating men’s physical masculinity eliminates happiness.

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Notes:

[1] See my post concerning Onos, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, and Asinarius.

[2] The story is from Les lamentations de Matheolus I.421-34. From the Latin critical text, Klein, Rubel & Schmitt (2014) pp. 76-77:

Tactum confutat mulier. Probo per Framericum,
Qui juxta lectum per crines cepit amicum
Uxoris de nocte sue. “Soror! ecce latronem.”
Inquit, “eum teneas! eo quesitum pugionem.”
Sed mox uxor eum dimittit abire receptum
Illi substituens asinum, quem clam per ineptum
Isse consilium mactat vir. Martyriato
Sic asino statim lumen petit ille ; parato
Lumine Burnellum stratum videt. Inde flet, isti
Dicens: “Burnelle, bona bestia, non meruisti
Hanc mortem.” Mire culpat tactum referentem
Falsa sibi somnumque suum, fatuam quoque mentem.
Ecce, redarguitur exemplo tactus in isto
Per mulierem, que capto providit Egistho.

Cf. Van Hamel (1892) pp. 30-1 (nearly the same). The context in Matheolus is five ways in which women confound men: tongue, sight, touch, falsehood, and false belief. Sight, which immediately precedes the above story about touch, involves men not being able to believe what they see (the story of Guy, his wife, and her lover Simon). The name Egistho refers to Aegisthus, who committed adultery with Clytemnestra.

The first-century writer Latin writer Phaedrus recorded a fable similar to Matheolus’s story of Framericus. In Poeta de Credere et non Credere (Phaedrus 3.10), a husband suspecting adultery mistakenly kills his son in the conjugal bed.

The fabliau De la dame qui fist entendant son mari qu’il sonjoit (from the first half of the thirteenth century) is similar to the story from Matheolus. But in the fabliau, the husband recognizes the difference between a she-ass and a man and doesn’t kill the ass. He does, however, dream of having intercourse with the she-ass. De la dame qui fist entendant son mari qu’il sonjoit is a variant (I, manuscript B) of the fabliau Les Tresces (The Tresses). The Old French texts of both that fabliau and the main variant (II) are available as #69 in Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux 6, Nooman (1991) pp. 209-58. An English translation of variant II is available in DuVal & Eichmann (1982) pp. 63-76. Cutting off a woman’s hair in the context of adultery and a substitute woman occurs in both Les Tresces and Decameron VII.8.

The protagonist in Nigel of Canterbury’s Speculum stultorum (Mirror of Fools) is an ass named Brunellus. Speculum stultorum, written in the late twelfth century, was a highly popular work. Klein, Rubel & Schmitt (2014), p. 77, notes that Burnelle may be a metathesis of Brunellus.

In translating Les lamentations de Matheolus into French about 1380, Jehan Le Fèvre changed the ass’s name from Burnelle to Brunel. Id. That change undoes a significant poetic choice and makes the story less wonderful.

Apparently alluding to Brunellus in the Speculum stultorum, Chaucer referred to “Daun Burnel the Asse” in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (VII.3312–19). Burnel could also connect to the name of the ass in the Latin Lamentations of Matheolus or in Le Fèvre’s French translation. Chaucer’s version suggests that the name of the ass may itself have become a foolish game.

Brunellus, ass in Speculum stultorum

[3] Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles, story 61, from French trans. Douglas (1899). The underlying French for “you shall both see and touch the scoundrel who has done us this dishonor” is je vous monstreray à l’oeil et au doy le ribauld qui ce deshonneur nous a fait. CNN-1876 pp. 275-6. Recent English translations obscure the reference to seeing (to the eye / à l’oeil ) and touching (by the finger / au doy). For example, “I will show you the debauched fellow who is dishonoring us.” Diner (1990) p. 232. Rather than relying merely on individual deception, cuckoldry is now institutionalized in official procedures for establishing paternity.

Antoine de la Sale was probably the author of Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles. It is thought to have been first published as a printed book about 1460. It was subsequently republished many times. The subsequent quote is also from the English translation of Douglas (1899).

[4] For the illicit sex, the planned punishment of the man is characteristically more severe than the punishment of the women. Historians who claim that women were more severely punished for illicit sex than were men lack appreciation for reality. Today few even recognize that violence against men is much more severe and common than violence against women.

[images] (1) Cuckolded and Duped, illustration for story 61 in Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Léon Lebèque, illustrator. From Douglas (1899). (2) Brunellus, in the Speculum Stultorum, illumination from British Library Additional MS 38665, f.114v (manuscript written around 1420s).

References:

CNN-1876. Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles. Texte revu avec beaucoup de soin sur les meilleures éditions et accompagné de notes explicatives. 1876. Paris: Libr. Garnier.

DuVal, John, and Raymond Eichmann. 1982. Cuckolds, clerics, & countrymen: medieval French fabliaux. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.

Klein, Thomas, Thomas Rubel, and Alfred Schmitt, eds. 2014. Matheolus. Lamentationes Matheoluli. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann.

Diner, Judith Bruskin, trans. 1990. Antoine de la Sale. The one hundred new tales = Les cent nouvelles nouvelles. New York: Garland.

Douglas, Robert B., trans. 1899. Antoine de la Sale. One hundred merrie and delightsome stories: right pleasaunte to relate in all goodly companie by joyance and jollity : les cent nouvelles nouvelles. Paris: Charles Carrington.

Noomen, Willem. 1991. Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux 6. Assen, Pays-Bas: Van Gorcum.

Van Hamel, Anton Gerard, ed. 1892. Mathéolus, Jean Le Fèvre. Les lamentations de Mathéolus et le livre de leesce de Jehan Le Fèvre, de Ressons: poèmes français du XIVe siècle. Paris: Bouillon.

oracles of Astrampsychus: understanding fate in everyday life

astragaloi (ancient dice)

Gods were omnipresent in everyday life in the ancient Mediterranean world. So too were practices of divination.[1] One tool of up-market professional fortune-tellers was a book-interpreted sortition (drawing of lots) known as the oracles of Astrampsychus. The client chose among 92 questions. Then he chose by lot a number between 1 and 10. The professional fortune-teller looked up in the Astrampsychus book the oracle corresponding to the question and the lot outcome. The oracles were arranged in the book so that the possible outcomes for a given question were widely distributed and not easily collectable. The oracles of Astrampsychus thus provided authoritative, standard, obscure answers specific to 92 different questions.

The oracles of Astrampsychus address questions that a politically and economical active, upward-striving man would commonly have in everyday life in the ancient Mediterranean world. Unlike the formulas in the Greek Demotic Magical Papyri of Egypt, a major concern of the oracles of Astrampsychus is business:

  • Will I have a share in the business?
  • Is it to my advantage to enter into an agreement?
  • Will I be able to borrow money?
  • Will I pay back what I owe?
  • Will I take a profit from the undertaking? [2]

The oracle questions make clear that women as well as men owned property:

  • Will I inherit from my mother?
  • Will I inherit from my wife?

Everyday life as seen through the oracles involved considerable concern about public positions and public institutions. The oracles address questions of obtaining the positions of agoranomos (marketplace official), oikonomos (municipal middle-manager), and decemvir (local magistrate). Accusation, prosecution, litigation, detention, and appeal are also matters of concern. So too are being held in servitude and being sold as a slave. Servitude, slavery, and detention could happen to any man merely through economic misfortune.

The oracles of Astrampsychus indicate men’s vulnerability in intimate relations. Men consulted the oracles about girlfriends, wives, and babies:

  • Will I be estranged from my girlfriend?
  • Will I marry and will it be to my advantage?
  • Is my wife having a baby?
  • Will my wife stay with me?
  • Will I be caught as an adulterer presently?

The oracle answers include many unfavorable to the client. Among attainable answers to the question “Will my wife stay with me?” nine out of ten indicate that she will leave. Three answers reveal that the wife is leaving because she’s committing adultery.

In sharp contrast to the text-based oracles of Astrampsychus, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses describes an oracular technique of oral interpretation. To make money, a roving band of devotees of a Syrian goddess created a single answer oracle. They inscribed on all lots for sortition the same words:

For this the team of oxen plows the furrowed earth, so fertile fields of grain will sprout in times to come. [3]

In choosing a lot, the oracle client inevitably got that answer. The goddess’s priests then interpreted that answer according to the client’s circumstances and interests:

if some would make inquiry as they were, say, arranging a marriage, the priests would say that the situation is directly addressed by the response: they are to be joined — the team — in marriage for the procreation of children — the grain. Should someone put the question about when to snap up some goods, they would say that the mention of the oxen was right on the money, as was the team, as were the fields that flourish in sprouting grain; if someone were anxious about setting out on some journey and wanted to secure the auspices of the gods, they would say that oxen, when joined in teams and gotten ready, are the most submissive of all four-footed creatures, and that profit is portended from the seeds in the field; were someone to take the field in war, or take to the hills to chase down some gang of robbers, and inquire whether the outcome would be productive or not, the priests would argue that victory comes in the train of this powerful pronouncement. Why? Because they would force their enemies’ necks to wear the yoke, and would receive from their raids a most rich and profitable prize.

All these prognostications are favorable to the client.[4] The priests earned much money by providing oracles from the Syrian goddess. Apuleius’s oracle satire implicitly ridicules practices of divination such as the oracles of Astrampyschus.

While divination was widely practiced and commonly taken seriously, ridicule of divination wasn’t just a matter of Apuleius’s outrageous creativity. Divination was ridiculed in jokes popular enough to be included in a compilation of jokes made in the fourth or fifth century. Among those jokes:

  • A rude astrologer cast a sick boy’s horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When she said, “Come tomorrow and I’ll pay you,” he objected: “But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?”
  • A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: “Everyone is fine, especially your father.” When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: “You have no clue who your real father is.” [5]

The oracle at Delphi, which had great authority in elite culture, was a target of ridicule in the Life of Aesop. Divination, like healing from illness, was both disparaged and highly regarded across its many different contexts and practices.

Compared to fortune-telling today, the oracles of Astrampsychus subtly indicate a significantly different sense of fate in the ancient Mediterranean world. The oracles of Astrampsychus served men who were actively making choices and seeking to improve their economic and political positions.[6] Yet the oracles include questions that depict persons as puppets of external powers in ordinary life. Consider these oracle questions:

  • Will I purchase what is offered?
  • Will I open a workshop?
  • Will I move from this place?

These questions suggest the feasibility of the focal action. To the modern mind they imply a simple answer: that’s for you to decide. From an agentic perspective, those are very different questions from “Will I win the lottery?” Free will even in mundane affairs seems to have been tenuous among the clients of the oracles of Astrampsychus.

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Read more:

Scholarly resource: oracles of Astrampsychus, in English translation, organized and made available for personal scholarly study (Excel version)

Notes:

[1] For a review of divination in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian culture, see Van der Horst (2002).

[2] The oracle questions and answers are translated from Greek in Stewart & Morrell (1998). That translation is from the second version (ecdosis altera) of the oracles of Astrampsychus, with the elimination of some obvious Christian accretions. I’ve reorganized the questions and answers and made them available online to aid personal scholarly study. All subsequent quotations of the oracles are from id. Critical editions of the Greek texts of the ecdosis altera and ecdosis prior are available in Stewart (2001) and Browne (1983), respectively. Pieter W. van der Horst has provided a helpful review of Stewart (2001).

[3] Apuleius, Metamorphoses {Golden Ass} 9.8, from Latin trans. Relihan (2007) p. 182. The subsequent quote is from id.

[4] Astragaloi oracles typically had a mix of positive and negative answers. However, all but one of the oracle answers found at Dios, probably from about 200 GC, are positive. Cuvigny (2010) p. 269.

[5] Hierocles and Philagrius, Philogelos (The Laughter Lover), jokes 187A and 201, from Greek trans. Quinn (2001). The full text of Philogelos is available in English translation in Baldwin (1983).

[6] Naether (2010), p. 276, describes the typical Astrampsychus oracle client as “männlich, mittleren Alters, gut situiert, verheiratet, Mittelständler, oft auf Reisen und er hatte ein Ehrenamt inne. Damit gehörte er untrüglich zu der Schicht, die man gemeinhin als die ‘Elite’ des Römischen Reichs bezeichnet” (male, middle-aged, well-off, married, middle class, often traveled, he held an honorary position. He belonged unmistakeably to the class which is commonly called the “elite” of the Roman Empire.) From Pieter W. van der Horst’s review.

[image] Astragaloi (dice) made from bone. From the second or third century. Thanks to Diana Ringo and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Baldwin, Barry. 1983. The Philogelos, or, Laughter-lover. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben.

Browne, Gerald M. 1983. Sortes Astrampsychi {ecdosis prior}. Vol. 1. Bibliotheca Teubneriana. München & Leipzig: K.G. Saur.

Cuvigny, Hélène. 2010. “The shrine in the praesidium of Dios (Eastern Desert of Egypt): Graffiti and oracles in context.” Chiron. 40: 245-299+460-461.

Naether, Franziska. 2010. Die Sortes Astrampsychi: Problemlösungsstrategien durch Orakel im römischen Ägypten. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck

Quinn. John T. 2001. “45 Jokes from The Laughter Lover.” Online at Diotima.

Relihan, Joel C. 2007. Apuleius. The golden ass, or, A book of changes. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub.

Stewart, Randall, and Kenneth Morrell. 1998. “The Oracles of Astrampsychus.” Ch. 10 (pp. 291-324) in Hansen, William F., ed. Anthology of ancient Greek popular literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Stewart, Randall. 2001. Sortes Astrampsychi {ecdosis altera}. Vol. 2. Bibliotheca Teubneriana. München & Leipzig: K.G. Saur.

Van der Horst, Pieter W. 2002. “Sortes: Sacred Books as Instant Oracles in Late Antiquity.” Ch. 9 (pp.  159-89) in Pieter W. van der Horst, ed. Japheth in the tents of Shem: studies on Jewish Hellenism in antiquity. Leuven: Peeters.