La divination dans les Vies romaines de Plutarque : le point de vue d’un philosophe

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This paper tries to analyse how a Greek intellectual of the Roman Empire deals with the Roman way to communicate with gods, and more precisely with Roman divination. Plutarch’s point of view is conditioned by his philosophical background (he is a middle platonist) and his political reflexion on the Roman Empire and its success; at the same time, he never forgets the necessities of biographical narration, the importance of traditions and his learned readers’ expectations. We’ll see that in the Lives also (and not only in the Moralia) we can find accounts of the philosophical discussions of the time and that, from one biography to another, his material is carefully selected and very coherently constructed, so that the augur becomes the central figure of the Roman divinatory system, and maybe of the whole religious system. His readers are led to think about two correlated things: the careful dealing with the Roman gods of Aemilius Paullus, for example, and the reasons why he suggests them such a model. We should not forget that Plutarch himself, as a priester in Delphi for long years, was very involved in the Greek ways of divination; that is why his reflexion on the Roman ways of divination is the more meaningful.