9. The Iamidae: A Mantic Family and Its Public Image

Michael A. Flower

Every student of Greek history knows that the Peloponnesian War was brought to an end when Lysander, the brilliant and ruthless Spartan admiral, captured the entire Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in 405 BC. What is less well known, perhaps familiar only to a handful of scholars with an interest in Greek divination, is that Lysander was not given the full credit for this victory. For Pausanias the travel writer tells us something that other sources leave out:

Pausanias’ opinion that it was Lysander’s seer who captured the Athenian fleet is partly confirmed by a monument which was erected at Delphi and which has been partially recovered (Pausanias 10.9.7): on the so-called Navarchs monument, Lysander dedicated a statue both of himself and of his seer Agias. [1] There was also a bronze statue of Agias in the marketplace in Sparta itself (Pausanias 3.11.5). This Agias was obviously a famous person at Sparta and perhaps throughout the whole of Greece. And yet he was the grandson of an even more famous seer, that Tisamenus of Elis who, as Herodotus says, “won” the battle of Plataea and was “commander with the Spartan kings” (Herodotus 9.33–35). In this essay I will not be as interested in what particular seers actually did or said as in recovering what it meant to be a seer and how a seer might represent himself. How did seers fashion an image for themselves? What kind of image was important? What was the relationship between image making and actual success in one’s career? And given that the rituals of divination constituted a type of public performance, how did the seer go about scripting his own role? Our ancient sources do not address these types of questions directly, and thus the answers must be inferred through a close reading of texts. Recent work on the anthropology of divination can provide both a theoretical framework and clues for how to read our sources. [2] As a case study, we will consider the most famous mantic family of the fifth century BC and the one about which we have the most information, the Iamidae, the family to which both Agias and his grandfather Tisamenus belonged. [3] Although this is a study in microhistory, I will attempt to situate my conclusions within a larger macro framework.

At the outset it will prove useful to clarify exactly what it meant to be a seer. The Greek word is mantis. A mantis (variously translated as ‘soothsayer’, ‘diviner’, ‘prophet’, or, as here, ‘seer’) was an expert in the art of divination. [4] Because Greek religious terminology is inexact, the person called a mantis dealt with a broad range of religious activities, and the term embraces a variety of prophetic types, ranging from the interpreters of signs, to ecstatic mediums, to purifiers and healers. [5] Although the Pythia, who served as the mouthpiece of the god Apollo in his oracular seat at Delphi, like other priestesses may be called a mantis, [6] I am concerned here only with the mobile mantis who usually, although perhaps not always, was male. [7] He practiced what the Greeks called a craft or skill (mantikē tekhnē); [8] and the aim of this craft was to ascertain the will and intentions of the gods in relation to human actions. Seers tended to move from city to city, attaching themselves to prominent generals and statesmen as their personal advisers; the most successful seers were what Walter Burkert has called “migrant charismatic specialists.” [9] With this combination of skill and charisma, manteis were the most authoritative experts on religious matters: they were religious specialists, or “agents of control within their religion’s symbolic universe.” [10] Their competence was exceptionally broad, encompassing all of the various forms of divination that were practiced in Archaic and Classical Greece: these included the interpretation of bird signs, dreams, portents, and entrails. Nonetheless, sacrificial divination was the principal art of the seer who assisted generals on campaign and who won battles in partnership with them. The military seer was responsible for two types of sacrificial divination that necessarily preceded an engagement: the camp-ground sacrifice called hiera and the battle-line sacrifice called sphagia. The former (hiera) was usually performed by examining the victim’s liver (the victim was usually a sheep), and the latter (sphagia) was performed by slitting the victim’s throat (often a young she-goat) while observing the animal’s movements and the flow of blood. [11]

It is essential to distinguish seers from priests since, although they performed different functions in Greek society, they are often confused. A priest (hiereus), whether male or female, was an appointed public official who obtained office by lot, election, birth, or purchase. Priests usually had no special religious training or knowledge, and their function was principally concerned with ritual. The priest’s prime responsibility as hiereus was to manage the offerings, sacrifices, and the sanctuary itself and its property, all of which were hiera (sacred). [12] The difference between priest and seer has been well expressed as follows:

Of course, both seer and priest could derive prestige from their membership in an aristocratic clan or lineage (genos), such as the Athenian families of the Eumolpidae and Ceryces who were the hereditary priests of the Eleusinian Mysteries. But unlike a priest, a seer was not merely a performer of prescribed rituals; he had to be successful in the practice of a skill or craft that depended on expertise and experience, and which might involve considerable personal danger. The priest, insofar as his authority depended on his office, had no need to possess personal charisma; for the seer, such charisma was the basis of his authority and an essential aspect of his persona. [14]

We know the names of about seventy historical seers of Archaic and Classical Greece, but for most of them we simply do not know if their fathers and grandfathers had been seers as well. The evidence that we do have, however, indicates that it was highly desirable to be able to advertise that one’s ancestors had also been seers. For instance, a stele from an Attic peribolus tomb of the classical period bears the inscription:

Although by the end of the fifth century BC it was possible to acquire books on divination, we know of only one seer who apparently was completely self-taught and had a successful career. [16] Thrasyllus, a Siphnian, was bequeathed books on divination, as well as some property, by his guest-friend the seer Polemaenetus. With those books in hand, he became an itinerant seer and acquired a large fortune. All of this is reported thirdhand some fifty years later by the speaker of Isocrates’ forensic speech Aegineticus (5–7, 45). It is important to note that the speaker’s testimony cannot be taken at face value, since his version of their relationship provides a precedent for the very type of transfer of property that he is seeking to defend. He initially says (6) that Thrasyllus was self-taught (“taking those books as his starting point, he practiced the craft”), but he later states (45) that he “learned his art from Polemaenetus.” Perhaps we can speculate that Polemaenetus actually had adopted Thrasyllus and trained him as his apprentice, in which case Thrasyllus could have represented himself to his clients as the latter’s son. Yet even if a Greek seer was able to obtain various technical handbooks through which he could acquire some basic knowledge, it is impossible that these books could have contained the elaborate and comprehensive lists of omens such as were recorded on the many hundreds of cuneiform tablets that have been discovered in Mesopotamia. [17] All seers in the Greek world by necessity had to rely on their own skill in interpretation, a skill that was validated by personal charisma rather than by book learning. [18]

The most respected and sought-after seers belonged to families that had practiced seercraft for many generations, reaching back to an eponymous ancestor who had acquired prophetic power either as the gift of a god (usually Apollo) or by some other supernatural means. The prophetic gift that endows the family did not necessarily have to belong to the mythical or legendary past. Herodotus (9.92–94) tells the story of how Zeus and Apollo, in the generation before the Persian invasions, gave to Euenius of Apollonia as a gift “the innate faculty of divination.” In the eyes of his clients, a seer’s authority and credibility depended on his belonging to an established family of seers. This, we may presume, had a double purpose. First, it was proof that the craft of divination had been acquired in apprenticeship to a master who was a member of one’s own family. Second, the seer must have represented himself as possessing an innate capacity for divination, a prophetic gift that he had inherited.

The four most distinguished clans of Greek seers were the Melampodidae, Iamidae, Clytiadae, and Telliadae. [19] Each of these clans claimed descent from legendary seers of the heroic age: Melampus, Iamus, Clytius, and Tellias respectively. Nothing is recorded about Tellias and exceedingly little about Clytius (his genealogy is given by Pausanias at 6.17.6), but the story of how Melampus learned the language of birds, when his ears were licked by snakes, apparently was told in some detail by Hesiod in his lost poems Melampodeia and Greater Ehoiai (F 261 MW). [20] Members of all these families figure prominently in the pages of Herodotus. Megistias, an Acarnanian said to be a descendant of Melampus, served and died with the Spartans at Thermopylae (7.219, 221, 228). He took his only son with him, and then sent him away before the Greeks were surrounded; it is a fair inference that the boy was serving as apprentice to his father. The Elean seer Tellias (surely one of the Telliadae), by devising a clever stratagem, helped the Phocians to defeat a Thessalian army that had invaded Phocis a few years before the invasion of Xerxes (8.27). The most renowned of the Telliadae was Hegesistratus, who served Mardonius at Plataea (9.37.1).

It is often remarked on, but difficult to explain, that with the exception of the Melampodidae, all of these families came from Elis in the northwestern Peloponnese. There was, however, something unique about the self-representation of the Iamidae that set them apart from these other mantic families. They alone claimed an immediate divine descent, since Iamus was the son of Apollo and grandson of Poseidon. The importance of belonging to one of the established families of seers seems obvious enough, but does it actually tell us who these seers were? Given that there surely was no historical seer named Iamus, is it still possible that all of the Iamidae were related in the sense that they belonged to a single clan linked by connections of blood? Genealogies are malleable entities. Even when people sincerely believe them to be accurate, they may be false. [21] The function of such claims to kinship and descent is of far greater interest to us here than their truth or falsehood (which cannot be recovered in any case).

Herodotus says that the seer Deïphonus, who was serving with the Greek fleet in 479, passed himself off as the son of the famous seer Euenius of Apollonia:

This single sentence tells us two important things: that a blood connection to a successful seer was helpful for gaining upscale employment, and that such claims were not accepted uncritically. Society was not a tacit accomplice in a sham, nor were seers merely the members of guilds, such as the Homeridae or Asclepiadae, among whom the adoption of an apprentice by his master was clothed in the language of kinship. It was fundamentally important that the seer was believed to be what he claimed to be, literally the blood descendant of another seer.

The foundation myth of the Iamidae is told by Pindar in his sixth Olympian. [22] This poem was written for Hagesias of Syracuse, an Iamid who served as seer to the tyrant Hieron and who was victorious in the mule-cart race at Olympia in 472 or 468 BC. As Pindar tells the tale (Olympian 6.57–74), Apollo bestowed upon his son Iamus “a twofold treasury of divination,” and “from that time the clan of the Iamidae has been much renowned among Hellenes.” That twofold treasury was “to hear the voice that is unknowing of lies” (most probably the voice of Apollo [23] ) and “to establish an oracle on the summit of Zeus’ altar” at Olympia. Whether an Iamid actually established the oracle is beyond historical recovery, but during the imperial period, and probably as far back as the fifth century BC, the Iamidae shared the stewardship of Zeus’ oracle with the Clytiadae, a post which they jointly held through the third century AD. [24] At least one Iamid in each generation had fixed employment at Olympia, where later sources tell us that they practiced divination atop Zeus’ altar by examining the cracks in the burnt skins of sacrificial animals. [25] In the case of these particular seers, the general distinction between seer and priest becomes blurred; for in addition to practicing divination, they were responsible for the care of the great altar of Zeus and for certain monthly sacrifices, and those were duties of a kind that usually belonged to priests, not to seers. [26] Since only one seer was chosen from each of the two families to work the oracle, other members might seek employment as itinerant diviners throughout the Greek world.

And indeed we do have evidence that members of the Iamidae were active throughout the Greek world as migrant charismatic specialists. On occasion a seer might settle in the community that he had successfully served, and there may have been branches of the Iamidae not only in Syracuse and Sparta but also in Messenia; in Croton in South Italy; and in Arcadian Stymphalus. [27] Previous scholarship on the Iamidae has been highly positivist in nature, and has concentrated on recovering who was and who was not an Iamid, where members actually settled, and what they actually did. But what our sources tell us is perhaps more useful for recovering the self-representation both of the Iamidae as a clan and of its individual members than it is for establishing historical truth. Charismatics authorize their activities and establish confidence in themselves by projecting an image, and it is that image which our sources reflect.

Pindar, for instance, describes Hagesias thus:

Now Hagesias, living in Syracuse, could not literally have been one of the seers in charge of the oracle at Olympia; what Pindar must mean is that as an Iamid he was theoretically eligible to hold that position. So much is obvious. But the last claim has been the cause of considerable modern controversy. What did Pindar mean by “joint-founder”? Should we believe the scholiasts to Pindar in their assertions that this word alludes to the fact that members of the Iamidae had followed Archias, the oikist, to Syracuse in ca. 733 BC? [28] Or did Hagesias somehow deserve the title in his own right because Syracuse had been refounded by the tyrant Gelon? Perhaps these are the wrong types of questions to ask. As a matter of fact, we cannot hope to know when Hagesias’ ancestors had migrated to Syracuse, nor even if he really was an Iamid by ties of blood and kinship. This is because we are not dealing with facts that could be authenticated, but with family tradition, or even with a tradition that was invented by Hagesias himself. And indeed we can see that Pindar is stressing what was important to Hagesias’ self-projection as a successful mantis: that he was an Olympic victor, that by hereditary right he was steward of Zeus’ oracle, and that he came from one of the oldest Syracusan families. The only established fact is his Olympic victory; the rest is merely unverifiable assertion and the projection of an image.

The Syracusan branch of the Iamidae, whatever its antiquity, seems to have come to an end with this Hagesias, who apparently was murdered after the fall of Hieron. [29] The Iamidae fared better, at least in the long term, at Croton. The Iamid Callias, whom Herodotus calls an Elean, assisted Croton in her war with Sybaris in 510 and was richly rewarded with select estates (5.44–45). Herodotus claims that his descendants still possessed that land in his own day. But this Callias must have needed to explain something that was especially awkward and embarrassing: that is, how did he end up serving the Crotoniates when he had been hired by the tyrant of Sybaris? I cannot think of a single seer who changed sides in the middle of a conflict, and one imagines that there was some unofficial code of conduct which dictated against such high-handed acts. His justification, I would suggest, is embedded in Herodotus’ narrative: One might be tempted to rationalize this explanation by conjecturing that the Crotoniates had offered Callias more money or that he calculated that Sybaris would lose the war. But Herodotus himself takes this explanation at face value, and he apparently expects his readers to do the same. Within the Greek divinatory system of knowledge and belief, in which system Callias was a specialist, unfavorable omens from sacrificial divination were a necessary and sufficient explanation for human action. We see this time and again in the works of Xenophon, particularly in the Anabasis. [30] The imperfect tense in the phrase “were not turning out favorable” indicates that Callias tried repeatedly to obtain good omens, but that the gods were unwilling to grant them. He thus represented himself as having fully discharged his duties to his original employer; the will of the gods was clear, and there was no need to perish in a doomed cause.

In the Hellenistic period, we find an Elean Iamid named Thrasybulus serving with the Mantineans against the Lacedaemonians under King Agis IV (244–241 BC). He “both foretold victory to the Mantineans and himself took part in the fighting” (Pausanias 8.10.5). He must have been a person of great wealth and influence, since he dedicated a statue of King Pyrrhus of Eprius at Olympia (Pausanias 6.14.9). If Pyrrhus was another of his employers, as seems likely enough, then the dedication of this statue was a means of advertising the success of that employment. But Thrasybulus had an even more conspicuous means for showing off his talents. Pausanias (6.2.4–5) saw a remarkable and iconographically unique statue of Thrasybulus himself at Olympia: a gecko was crawling toward his right shoulder and a dog was lying beside him, cut in two with its liver exposed. The divinatory significance of both animals is uncertain. Pausanias thought that Thrasybulus established his own personal method of divination in which he uniquely examined the entrails of dogs; Pausanias does not discuss the lizard, but it is a reasonable inference that Thrasybulus claimed to understand the language of animals, or at least of lizards. [31] It has been suggested, however, that the description “cut in two” refers to the rite, as practiced in Macedonia and Boeotia, of purification of an army, whereby the troops passed between the parts of a severed dog. [32] Since some seers still performed rites of healing and purification in classical times, [33] it is not impossible that Pausanias has misinterpreted the iconography of the statue. Or it may be that Thrasybulus used the dog both for purposes of divination (and thus the depiction of the exposed liver) and for purification. What is clear is that even within an extended mantic family, individual members might represent themselves quite differently. Indeed we should expect that a seer would want to emphasize that although he belonged to a particular clan, all of whose members shared inherited and proven abilities, he nevertheless was exceptional in some way. The dog and the lizard mark Thrasybulus as different from other seers and even from other Iamidae; they are emblematic of his claim to be someone with a special access to the supernatural world.

Another statue at Olympia bears comparison with this one, even if it is of a Clytiad rather than of an Iamid. In the late fourth or early third century BC an Elean mantis by the name of Eperastus, who won at Olympia in the race in armor, emphasized his claim to belong to two mantic families. Pausanias records the inscription on his statue as follows: This may not be elegant poetry (and Clytiadae seems to be spelled Clytidae in order to fit the meter), but Eperastus has managed in a single couplet to attribute to himself the qualities of being “prophetic-tongued” and “god-like,” as well as belonging to two illustrious families of seers (since Clytius, the progenitor of the Clytiadae, was in turn a descendant of Melampus). If Eperastus was intending to attract clients (as I presume that he was), then this statue with its inscription would have served as a very effective and conspicuous advertisement of both his martial abilities and his prophetic credentials.

Before moving on, one other statue at Olympia is worth mentioning. Satyrus, the son of Lysianax, whose statue Pausanias (6.4.5) also saw at Olympia, won five victories in boxing at Nemea, two at Delphi, and two at Olympia, probably in the late fourth century BC. [34] Unfortunately, Pausanias only says that he was from the family of the Iamidae, but he does not specify if he was a mantis. [35] Even if he did not practice as a mantis, his nine panhellenic victories certainly would have added to the prestige of this family.

The Iamid mantis about whom we have the most detailed tradition concerning his life and career is Tisamenus of Elis. In fact, there is no historical Greek mantis who figures more prominently in our sources. The story of how Tisamenus became a Spartan citizen and was launched on what was arguably the most successful mantic career of all time is imbedded in Herodotus’ account of the battle of Plataea in 479 BC. [36] In mid-July of that year the largest Greek hoplite army ever to take the field met the army of Mardonius, cousin and brother-in-law of King Xerxes, in Boeotia. Herodotus moves in his narrative from the dispositions of the troops to the activities of the seers on each side, and this includes an account of how Tisamenus came to be with the Spartan army: As the text of Herodotus now stands, Tisamenus is called “a Clytiad of the family of the Iamidae.” Most scholars have claimed this to be impossible and have accordingly labeled “Clytiad” as a scholiast’s gloss, [37] but I see no reason to rule out the possibility of intermarriage between the leading mantic families: that is to say, one of his parents was an Iamid and the other a Clytiad. There was an unimpeachable mythic paradigm for prophetic power passing from mother to son, since Teiresias had a daughter named Manto, who was the mother of the seer Mopsus. And it is easy enough to imagine why someone would have wanted to represent himself as belonging to both of these families. The Clytiadae, as mentioned above, claimed to be descendants of Melampus, the most famous of all legendary seers, and a blood connection with Melampus was an obvious vehicle for mantic self-advertisement and self-promotion.

Herodotus does not explain here how an Iamid could be so stupid or Lacedaemonians so uncharacteristically intelligent. Moreover, the internal logic of the story presupposes that Tisamenus had not acted as a professional mantis before his consultation of Delphi; otherwise, he surely would have understood what kinds of “contests” the Pythia had in mind. We are thus expected to imagine something that might seem unlikely on the face of it—that the Spartans hired someone who had no previous experience in his craft and was completely untested. Nonetheless, the story of this consultation of Apollo is in keeping with how the Greeks imagined that Apollo sometimes acted. In Greek tragedy it is certainly the case that Apollo, by giving certain oracles at certain times, is able to stage-manage events so as to achieve the desired consequences. The plots of certain plays, such as Oedipus Tyrannus and Ion, hinge on Apollo’s capacity for so arranging and manipulating events. In the case of Tisamenus, if Apollo had not delivered the oracle that he did, Tisamenus might never have become a seer. Thus, when Apollo predicted that Tisamenus would win the five greatest victories, he in a sense also caused him to win those victories. Implicit in Herodotus’ story is the subtext that not just any seer trained in the craft of divination could have won those victories, but only a divinely selected Iamid in whom the prophetic gift given to Iamus by Apollo himself was particularly potent.

It is certainly possible, of course, that what Herodotus has given us is in fact a case of the effect being substituted for the cause. In other words, what may have happened is that Tisamenus was granted Spartan citizenship after the battle of Plataea as a reward for his services. At a much later date (394/3), Sthorys of Thasos was awarded Athenian citizenship for his assistance during the battle of Cnidus. [38] It is, then, easy to imagine how the oral tradition about Tisamenus might have displaced the reward. On grounds of probability, the grant should have come after the services had been rendered, not before, especially when one considers that the Spartans were notoriously parsimonious with grants of full citizenship (that is, to Spartiate status). Nevertheless, the story, as Herodotus reports it, reveals what was credible to his contemporaries: to them it was a real possibility that Apollo, through the medium of his oracle, might intervene spontaneously and unpredictably in human affairs, even if he did not do so very often. And it was also credible to them that the Spartans, who were intensely religious as a society and who had a special relationship with Delphic Apollo, [39] would have paid any price to get the best possible seer.

Setting aside the issue of historicity, let us now consider how the clan of the Iamidae represented the career of their most illustrious member in their collective memory. Herodotus does not say this, but there may have been a rather specific reason why the Spartans were so eager to hire Tisamenus on the eve of Plataea, quite apart from their generalized fear of the Persian war machine. The seer Megistias, an Acarnanian who was said to be a descendant of Melampus, as mentioned above, had perished with the Spartans at Thermopylae (Herodotus 7.219, 221, 228). His death may have created the vacancy filled by Tisamenus, in which case it was not the fear of Xerxes’ imminent invasion which impelled the Spartans, but rather their lack of an expert seer for the specific confrontation with Mardonius. Could it be that the career of Tisamenus marked a turning point in the fortunes of the Iamidae? [40] Did they now eclipse the Melampodidae and other mantic families? The work of the seers attending the oracle at Olympia must have been fairly mundane, most of it dealing with questions put by hopeful athletes, and it would appear that Olympia was seldom consulted about important matters of state or ritual. [41] Thus it was military employment outside of Elis that brought fame to the family. The destruction of Sybaris, aided and abetted by Callias, was a dramatic event to be sure; but the defeat of Mardonius at Plataea by the regent Pausanias was “the fairest victory of all those we know,” as Herodotus calls it (9.64.2). It was only now, I suggest, that the Iamidae became the most celebrated of all mantic families. Pindar’s statement that since the time of Iamus “the race of the Iamidae has been much renowned among Hellenes” (line 71) should rather be referred to Tisamenus.

If this is correct, it helps to explain something rather peculiar. Pindar’s account of Iamus in the sixth Olympian is not only the fullest source for this myth, it is the only independent source, and that is striking given that other seers (such as Melampus, Mopsus, Teiresias, and Amphiaraus) figured so prominently in early Greek poetry. [42] Nor are there any certain artistic representations of Iamus. [43] Moreover, there are at least two features of the story of Melampus that Pindar has borrowed and applied to Iamus, and the obvious explanation is that Pindar was attempting to suggest that Iamus was as great a seer as Melampus. [44] It is possible, therefore, that Pindar, in celebrating the ancestry of Hagesias, needed to make up most, perhaps virtually all, of the myth. [45] He is simultaneously establishing a mythological basis for the prominence of the Iamidae and reflecting their new status in the larger Greek world.

However that may be, there is one aspect of Pindar’s treatment that provides the key to understanding the self-representation of Tisamenus and his descendants at Sparta. As Pindar tells the story (6.28–30), Iamus, the son of Apollo, was also the grandson of Poseidon by the nymph Pitana. This type of double descent from the gods is unparalleled in Greek myth, and must have been introduced by Pindar for a specific reason. Now, Pitana was the name of one of the five Spartan villages, and anyone who became a Spartan citizen would necessarily have become domiciled in one of those villages. The inference to be made is pretty obvious. [46] Pitana must have been the village to which the Iamidae, beginning with Tisamenus and his brother Hagias, belonged; and Pindar is here providing a mythological legitimization for their membership. One does not want to make Pindar a mere cipher for Iamid self-promotion, but his reworking of the myth fits the situation of the family so nicely that he must have had a very clear idea of what suited the interests of his patrons when he gave the Iamidae a Laconian ancestry.

There is an obvious danger of circularity in using Herodotus to explain Pindar in order to explain Herodotus, but I want to suggest that the ultimate source for the story which Herodotus reports about Tisamenus, even allowing for his own remodeling of it, was Iamid family tradition. [47] Herodotus claims to have visited the Spartan village of Pitana (3.55.2), and he might have encountered there one or more members of Tisamenus’ family. If such were the case, then the right conditions would have been present for the reliability of the oral tradition about Tisamenus. The memories of a closed group, such as a particular family or a religious community, tend to be more fixed than those of larger entities. This does not mean, however, that the oral tradition would then be true, since accuracy of transmission is not related to the truth or falsity of a tradition. [48] A tradition is remembered because it serves a useful purpose for the receiving generation, and in the case of the Iamidae that purpose is obvious. The function of Apollo in Herodotus’ tale is analogous to his role in Pindar’s story of Iamus. In Pindar, Apollo endows the first Iamid as a seer, and here he does the same for Iamus’ descendant Tisamenus. Herodotus’ story not only explains why Tisamenus was so successful, but it also validates and confirms the status of his descendants, both as seers and as Spartan citizens. In the end, it is the self-representation of the Iamidae, rather than the truth or falsity of the story itself, that is most accessible to us.

There is one thing, however, that is strangely missing from Herodotus’ account of Tisamenus’ exploits, if indeed that account ultimately goes back to Iamid family tradition in a reliable chain of oral transmission. There is no mention of his martial prowess. Pindar, for instance, emphatically stresses that Hagesias was due the same praise that Adrastus had given to the seer Amphiaraus: The association of mantic and warlike abilities was fairly common, and the phrase “good both as a seer and to fight with the spear” had a long history both before and after Pindar. [49] Perhaps the story of Tisamenus’ near victory in the pentathlon was sufficient to suggest his martial valor, as well as his personal wealth and aristocratic status. Herodotus, moreover, does not as a matter of course tell us all that he knows, and it would not be surprising if a more elaborate version of Tisamenus’ exploits at Plataea circulated orally. [50]

Whatever the circumstances under which it came about, Tisamenus did serve as the seer for the Spartans at Plataea, and it is possible that his name can be restored in an inscription which records the dedication of a statue to Demeter and which was found near the likely location of the battle. [51] But just how important was his role? According to Herodotus, the Spartans wished “to make Tisamenus the leader (hēgemōna) in their wars, together with those of the Heracleidae who were kings.” Since it was the prerogative of the kings at Sparta to command the army, the Spartan offer comes as something of a surprise. Indeed, the language here suggests a position tantamount to “joint commander with their kings,” and this notion is reinforced by the verbs “would win” and “helped them to win” which Herodotus uses of Tisamenus’ activities. Yet Herodotus does not depict Tisamenus as having any active role in the actual battle, either in marshalling the troops or in the fighting. Herodotus must therefore mean that Tisamenus was the leader in the same way as was Calchas, the seer of the Greeks at Troy. Homer speaks of him as the one who “led (hēgēsato) the ships of the Achaeans into the land of Ilium through that seercraft (mantosunēn) which Phoebus Apollo had given him” (Iliad I 71–72). Like Calchas, then, Tisamenus leads the army and practices the art of divination as Apollo’s gift. So too in Euripides’ Phoenissae, the seer Teiresias claims the credit for securing Athens’ victory over Eleusis:

Turning to the fourth century, Aeschines (On the Embassy 78) says that his uncle Cleobulus, who we know from his grave epigram was a mantis, “along with Demaenetus, won the naval victory over Cheilon the Lacedaemonian admiral.” [52] One strongly suspects that seers depicted themselves not just as advisers to kings and generals, but as individuals who literally could win battles for their clients. [53]

In terms of Herodotus’ narrative the great service that Tisamenus performed at Plataea was his declaration that “the omens were favorable for the Greeks if they remained on the defensive, but not favorable if they should cross the Asopus river and begin battle.” [54] Herodotus claims that Mardonius was eager for a battle, but that he was prevented from crossing the Asopus by the unfavorable omens that were reported to him by his own Greek seer Hegesistratus of Elis. The medizing Greeks had their own seer, Hippomachus of Leucas, and he too was unable to obtain omens that were favorable for an offensive. These omens fit the tactical situation perfectly, and thus moderns have been quick to assume that the seers on each side must have engaged in a conscious manipulation of the omens when they gave their interpretations. But to explain the actions of seers in terms of “conscious manipulation,” either of their own devising or at the behest of their commanders, is far too simplistic and grossly misconstrues the function of divination in Greek society.

We cannot recover the actual psychological processes by which a seer inspected and interpreted the omens, and it is certainly the case that almost all methods of divination are open to manipulation, whether conscious or unconscious, on the part of the diviner. [55] The degree of such manipulation will of course vary from one individual to another and will be conditioned by the nature of the divinatory procedures that are employed. But we can say that the Greek seer represented himself as divining by virtue of his art and by aid of his innate prophetic gifts. When the seer sacrificed the victim and then interpreted the entrails, he was engaged in a public performance before an audience of mortals and of gods; both his immediate success and his prospects for future employment depended on how well and how convincingly he played his role as expounder of the divine will. His value to society as the practitioner of a socially useful craft in turn depended on his human audience’s faith in his ability properly to interpret the signs sent by the gods. [56] Thus the worst accusation that one could level against a seer was that he was influenced by greed to give knowingly false interpretations. Such accusations, which are fairly common in Greek literature, reveal both the high value that society placed on divination and an attendant anxiety about its proper performance. [57] That the Spartans indeed had faith in Tisamenus is demonstrated by their further employment of him and by their unique grant of citizenship.

Tisamenus went on to win four more great victories for Sparta, the last being at Tanagra in 457. As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, his grandson, Agias (II), was seer to Lysander in 405 at the battle of Aegospotami. But for reasons unknown to us, his great-grandson (or perhaps great-nephew), also named Tisamenus (II), was involved in the conspiracy of Cinadon at Sparta in 397. [58] He was executed along with Cinadon and the other conspirators after being paraded through the streets of Sparta in a dog collar, while being whipped and goaded (Xenophon Hellenica 3.3.11). It is an ironic testament to the family’s fame that “Tisamenus the mantis” is the only one of Cinadon’s fellow conspirators who is named by Xenophon. The Spartan branch of the Iamidae then disappears from the historical record. [59] Although it reemerges in inscriptions of the first century BC and second century AD, it is highly unlikely that the individuals who are named Iamus and Tisamenus in these inscriptions were actually related to the victor of Plataea. The problem is that late Hellenistic and Roman imperial times saw a renewed interest in Sparta’s past. Individuals traced their ancestry to Heracles, Perseus, the Dioscuri, both royal houses, Lycurgus, Brasidas, and many other famous personages from Sparta’s mythical and historical past. Such lineages were undoubtedly invented links with a past that was, strictly speaking, unrecoverable. [60] Given the social and political upheavals that afflicted late Classical and Hellenistic Sparta, by the time of this inscriptional evidence there can have been very few individuals who could trace their ancestry back to Spartans of the Classical period, much less to the elite of Spartan society. At Olympia, on the other hand, the family disappears after AD 265.

The mantic Iamidae nevertheless had a long and successful run: if we take our sources at face value, they were one of the most preeminent families of seers from the foundation of the Olympic games in the eighth century BC right through to the end of the third century AD. A thousand years of successful employment is a long time for a single clan, even by modern standards. This success was due not merely to the victories garnered by its members on the field of battle; it was maintained and perpetuated by the calculated self-promotion that is reflected in our various ancient sources. As we have seen, the Iamidae managed that self-promotion in terms of traditional aristocratic claims to excellence, as athletic victors, the dedicants of statues, as warriors and commanders of armies, the founders of cities, and as the direct descendants of gods and heroes.

Antiochus — Tisamenus I (victor of Plataea) — Agelochus — Agias II (Lysander’s seer at Aegospotami) — Tisamenus II (implicated in conspiracy of Cinadon in 397).