Mapping the Entrails: The Practice of Greek Hepatoscopy

Abstract

This article reconstructs the practice of Greek hepatoscopy in the classical period and thereafter. Based on historical, literary, and comparative anthropological material, it argues that hepatoscopy was a binary system involving both fixed and fluid points of reference on animal livers. Attention is given to the most relevant features of the liver as they pertain to divination, in both Greek and later Roman sources, as well as to the seers who specialized in this form of divination. Finally, I contrast Greek liver divination with a contemporary African example of entrails-reading in an effort to illustrate how Greek hepatoscopy might have proceeded.