Seer and the City: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Ideology in Ancient Greece

Margaret Foster examines the place of seers in archaic and classical Greek culture and asks why figures who were prominent in Greek religious life appear so differently in narratives of colonisation. Her study focuses on the tension between the independent authority of the seer and colonial traditions that privileged the city’s founder and his relationship with Delphi.

Through close readings of Greek literary texts, Foster traces the strategies by which seers’ religious authority could be acknowledged, redirected or suppressed within stories about civic foundations and political order. By placing divination within the institutions and ideologies of the polis, the book offers a cultural history of the seer and a broader investigation of the relationship between religion, politics and colonial identity in ancient Greece.