Dartmouth Events

Freakonomika: Oracle as Economic Indicator in Roman Egypt

David Ratzan, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU

Thursday, October 18, 2018
4:30pm – 6:00pm
Haldeman 41 (Kreindler Conference Hall)
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Clubs & Organizations, Lectures & Seminars, Spiritual & Worship

The Sortes Astrampsychi (The Lots of Astrampsychus) was an oracle book from the Roman East that worked something like an ancient Magic 8-Ball. One chose from a set menu of questions, like "Will I go abroad?" "Will my wife give birth?" and "Will I win my suit?"; picked a random number between 1 and 10; and magically--and much more impressively than the Magic 8-Ball--received a specific answer. Given the number of copies on papyrus and its survival to the medieval manuscript tradition (including being copied into Latin), it seems to have been a very popular oracle in the later Roman Empire. Most recent scholarship on oracles in the Roman world seeks to understand them psychologically as aids to coping in a highly uncertain world, even if oracles like the Sortes were ultimately nothing more than "a monstrous confidence trick." In this presentation I will argue that far from being a confidence trick, the Sortes Astrampsychi was instead a sophisticated probability machine that aggregated, translated, and communicated what we might call “consumer confidence” with respect to the typical economic problems confronting ancient individuals in the Roman world, and as such represents important evidence of the historical intersection of imperial administration, economic development, and oracular innovation in the Roman Empire.

Dr. Ratzan is currently the Head of the Library at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. His research focuses on the social history of the Greek and Roman worlds, particularly as seen through papyri. His publications include two edited volumes, Growing up Fatherless in Antiquity (with Sabine Huebner; Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Law and Transaction Costs in the Ancient Economy (with Dennis Kehoe and Uri Yiftach-Firanko; University of Michigan Press, 2015). Dr. Ratzan is also a founding member of the Ancient Ink Laboratory in the Center for Integrated Science and Engineering at Columbia University, a interdisciplinary working group investigating the chemical composition and history of ancient inks via Raman spectroscopy. 

Free and open to the public!

For more information, contact:
Carol Bean-Carmody

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.