7 - Oracular Tales before Historiography

Summary

Against an earlier tendency to separate out the texts of oracles from the literary works that preserve them, recent scholarship on Herodotus has increasingly focused attention on the very tight way in which oracular responses are integrated into the narrative contexts that surround them. In order better to conceptualize such phenomena, scholars are increasingly employing the category of “oracular tales,” that is, stories in which (normally Delphic) oracles form an integral part of the narrative texture. The present contribution seeks to pursue this line of enquiry further in an attempt at determining what the use of oracular responses in metric form can tell us about the tradition of oral narrative that Herodotus’ Histories are based upon.