Abstract
The example of divination enriches the debate on religious polis. The classicists had long since freed the Greek political sphere, and all decision-making power, from the influence of religion. Relying on the " rationalism " of the elites, mingled with cynical atheism, and relying almost exclusively on the literary image of divination, they still too often conclude that divination - strangely widespread among a people devoted to Reason - was just one way among others, for magistrates, kings and tyrants, to deceive the gullible masses for their own benefit, or that of the dominant powers, with the dishonest or coerced assistance of priests and oracular agents (the pythia ranged, depending on the needs of the theory, from a peasant woman who stammered a few words quickly interpreted by the malevolent priests, to an easily corruptible woman). If Sparta wanted to control Delphi, it was to make the Pythia speak the Apollonian truth, but in its Spartan version. The authority of the oracles would thus be an authority of straw, devoid of any religious meaning for those who took advantage of it, in the face of Apollo reduced to a role of extra. This approach depends on a preconceived vision of the oracle and religion, as well as of political and social history in Greek lands - a vision that is resolutely modern and partly Christian. In this colloquium devoted to Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood's studies on the authority of the city in religious matters, we will take the problem back to basics, on the sources themselves, without worrying about the theses at hand, in an attempt to define where the authority of the city and that of the oracle reside, and how they interact on the chessboard. Let's start by saying that we'll be moving from the theory of the vicious circle of compromise to that of the virtuous circle of piety.
