THE ANCIENT SCIENCE OF HONEST PROPHESY

Archaeologist BRADY KIESLING explains how Greeks dealt with bribed gods using perhaps the world's first double-blind experiment.

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TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, the Athenians, with their wealth, power, vanity, and religious zeal, were difficult neighbors for Megara, a small city-state of Greek farmers. Athens had seized from Megara a prime tract of farmland between Eleusis and Megara. The tract was too far from Athens for private citizens to farm it safely, so to entrap as well as to impoverish and annoy the Megarians, the Athenians gifted the land to their two goddesses, Demeter and Persephone (also known as Kore), who presided over the sacred Mysteries at Eleusis. Athens declared the tract to be orgas, land left to grow wild as the exclusive property of the goddesses. Upon hearing the news, Megara killed the messenger: a heinous sin akin to assassinating diplomats today, and this act put both Athens and the gods against them.

By the year 352 BCE, however, Athens was regretting its generosity to the goddesses. Megara was by then diplomatically irrelevant, so why leave good farmland to deer and rabbits simply to spite the neighbors? Quietly, Athenian farmers encroached on the sacred land, but soon more pious Athenians became outraged and intervened. Megara’s chronic plight was a reminder that a city ignores its contracts with the gods at its peril.

Like most theological debates, a solution to this one could not be legitimized without force majeure, e.g. an outside despot with an army, or else a