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Well-established ties between poets and prophets provoke a question. If some, and perhaps many, viewed the poet as a mantic figure, might we expect that some in a poet's audience, and perhaps even many, would have approached the poem with expectations and techniques of exposition that mirrored those they used to decipher an oracle? While much of ancient literary criticism draws from rhetoric, I will here suggest that one group of ancient readers, the allegorists, found their models for reading poetry not in the law courts or the agora but at Delphi -- where they were accustomed to hearing many layers of meaning built into riddling hexametric lines. That divination is the field of inquiry with which allegorism is most closely allied is strongly suggested by a somewhat striking overlap of central conceptual categories and as well as a similarity in general approach. Of course, ancient allegorists did not uniformly subscribe to the traditional poet/prophet association, any more than rhetorical critics would have claimed the poet is somehow coextensive with the orator. It is however beyond doubt, in my view, that the structures of thought that organize divination share central feature with those that organize allegorical reading. A mapping of these points of overlap shows that divinatory thinking expanded well beyond divinatory practice.
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